Staying Relevant

If you're reading this, the chances are you're a man of a certain age. You do things you never used to, like checking the weather forecast or watching rolling news. You can wake up without needing an alarm, and your back goes out more than you do. If you've got children or grandchildren, they'll tell you, directly or indirectly, that you're out of touch, set in your ways, and your views are as outdated as the reliable old lawnmower you lovingly maintain. Many such things can be brushed off with a wave of the hand or can even become a bonding issue. After all, what teenager seriously wants their dad to dress like them or overshare in front of their friends?

At least some of this comes down to relevance. The question of how to remain relevant as you age is, at its core, a question about how to remain alive to the world rather than merely in it.

What relevance is about

Relevance is one of those words that sounds straightforward until you try to define it with any precision, at which point it turns out to contain several different things that are worth separating.

There is professional relevance — the sense that your skills, knowledge and experience are valued in the workplace or professional community. This is the form most men think of first, probably because professional identity has been the dominant frame of reference for most of their adult lives, and because the professional threats to relevance — technological change, generational shift, the gradual obsolescence of specific expertise — are the most visible.

There is social relevance — the sense of being connected to, and engaged with, the world of other people in ways that matter. Of having a perspective that people are interested in, of contributing something to conversations beyond the historical record of how things used to be done, of being part of the social present rather than an archive of the social past.

There is cultural relevance — the extent to which you are engaged with, rather than merely bewildered by, the cultural landscape of the current moment. This is the dimension that produces the most jokes about middle-aged men, and also the one that is most commonly misunderstood. Cultural relevance does not require enthusiasm for everything new. It requires a functioning curiosity about the world as it currently is, rather than the world as it was.

And there is, underneath all of these, something more fundamental: personal relevance — the sense that your existence is connected to something that matters, that you are contributing something worth contributing, that the days are moving toward something rather than simply passing. This is the dimension that the other forms of relevance tend to gesture toward without quite reaching, and it is the one that persists when the professional and social and cultural versions have been retired or revised.

The biology of engagement

Before addressing the practical question of how relevance is maintained, it's worth noting what the research says about what happens — neurologically and physiologically — when engagement with the world is maintained or withdrawn in later life.

The brain is not a fixed organ that declines uniformly with age. It is a plastic structure that responds to the demands placed upon it — building new neural connections in response to new learning, maintaining existing ones through use, and losing them through disuse in the process called synaptic pruning. The use it or lose it principle, which sounds like a motivational poster, is in this context an accurate description of neural maintenance.

This is an argument for engagement as a health variable — one that is as significant, in the research, as exercise, sleep and diet, and considerably less consistently acted on.

Staying relevant is not about keeping up with the young. It is about remaining genuinely engaged with a world that will keep moving regardless. The health benefits are a side effect of the engagement, not its purpose — but they are real, and they are substantial.

The traps men fall into

Before discussing what works, let's take a moment to identify what doesn't — the strategies that men most commonly employ in response to the relevance question that tend to make it worse rather than better.

The fortress strategy

The most common response to the threat of irrelevance is the construction of a fortress — a defensible position from which the man can assert his continued relevance without actually having to demonstrate it. The fortress is built from expertise, from experience, from the accumulated authority of having been around longer than most people in the room.

The problem with the fortress is that it is static. The man inside it is defending ground rather than occupying new territory, and the world outside it is not particularly interested in siege warfare. The expertise is real. The experience is genuine. But deployed defensively — as a reason why new ideas are less good than old ones, why the current generation doesn't understand things the way they used to be understood, why things were better when they were different — it produces not the respect it is seeking but the polite tolerance of people who have already moved on.

The performance of youth

The opposite trap: the attempt to remain relevant by performing youth — by adopting the cultural markers, the language, the enthusiasms and the reference points of people twenty-five years younger, in ways that convince nobody and that tend to produce a specific kind of embarrassment that the man himself can often sense but cannot quite bring himself to stop.

This is the cultural version of the sports car — the attempt to manage ageing anxiety through the performance of its opposite rather than through the acceptance and transcendence of it. It doesn't work because relevance is not a function of appearing young. It is a function of being genuinely engaged with the present, which is a different thing entirely and does not require a particular aesthetic or vocabulary to achieve.

The 57-year-old who is genuinely curious about what the 30-year-old is thinking is relevant in a way that the 57-year-old who is pretending to be 35 is not. Curiosity is ageless. Performance is not.

The retreat into the past

The third trap is the retreat — the gradual withdrawal from engagement with new ideas, new technology, new cultural forms, new ways of working and thinking, because the established ones are sufficient and the learning curve of the new is no longer worth the effort.

This is understandable. Learning new things is cognitively demanding, and the friction of acquiring new skills and understanding new systems increases with age in ways that are real and worth acknowledging. The temptation to declare that sufficient knowledge has been accumulated and that the remaining years can be spent deploying what is already known is genuine and human.

It is also, in the research literature, one of the clearest predictors of accelerated cognitive decline, reduced social connection, and the gradual contraction of the world to a size that is psychologically manageable but experientially impoverished. The retreat feels like rest. It functions like a withdrawal.

What really works

The strategies that support continued relevance in the second half of life are not particularly mysterious, but they are somewhat demanding — they require ongoing active investment rather than the passive maintenance that the fortress strategy implies. This is, perhaps, why they are less consistently practised than the traps described above.

Genuine curiosity as a practice

The single most reliable predictor of sustained relevance — across professional, social and cultural dimensions — is genuine curiosity about the world as it currently is. Not performed curiosity, not the simulation of interest in things that don't interest you, but the active cultivation of the questions that the present moment actually raises.

This requires a degree of intellectual humility that doesn't come easily to men who have spent decades in positions of relative expertise and authority. The willingness to not know, to ask questions that reveal ignorance, to be genuinely interested in the answer rather than waiting to provide one — these are not the natural default settings of men who have been rewarded, professionally and socially, for knowing things rather than for not knowing them.

The cultivation of curiosity as a deliberate practice — reading outside the established repertoire, engaging with ideas that challenge the settled positions, asking the younger colleague what they think rather than telling them what you know — is both a relevance strategy and, in the research on cognitive ageing, a direct investment in the neurological processes that maintain it.

The writer and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes the mentally vital older person as someone who has maintained beginner's mind — the capacity to approach familiar territory as though encountering it for the first time. This is not naivety. It is the intellectual agility that comes from refusing to let knowledge calcify into certainty.

Learning something genuinely new

Learning — specifically the acquisition of new skills and knowledge that are outside the established repertoire — is one of the most direct investments in cognitive health and continued engagement available to men in later life. Not the consumption of information in familiar domains, which produces the illusion of learning without its neurological benefits, but the effortful acquisition of something genuinely unfamiliar.

A new language. A musical instrument. A technical skill in an unfamiliar domain. The research on new learning and cognitive reserve is consistent: novelty and effort are both important. Skills that draw on established neural networks maintain them; skills that build new ones extend them.

The practical options are more accessible than at any previous point in history. The University of the Third Age provides a remarkable range of peer learning groups. Coursera, edX and FutureLearn offer university-level courses across hundreds of subjects, many free to audit. The Open University provides formal qualifications at every level for people at every stage of life.

The barrier is not access. It is the decision to invest effort in something that will make you feel, at least initially, considerably less competent than you are used to feeling, which is exactly the experience that the established expertise in the fortress was designed to avoid.

Intergenerational engagement

One of the more reliable routes to sustained relevance — and one of the more underused — is genuine engagement across generational lines. Not the mentoring relationship in which the older man dispenses wisdom to the younger, though that has its place, but the reciprocal engagement in which both parties are genuinely learning from each other.

The research on intergenerational contact and cognitive health is encouraging: sustained engagement with people significantly younger — in work, in voluntary settings, in social contexts — is associated with maintained cognitive function, reduced rates of depression, and the kind of cultural fluency that is produced by proximity rather than performance.

This requires, again, the intellectual humility of genuine interest rather than performed engagement. The older man who is genuinely curious about what the 28-year-old thinks — about technology, about culture, about the world they're navigating — is doing something neurologically and socially productive. The older man who is waiting for the 28-year-old to finish so he can explain how things actually work is doing something else.

Mentoring programmes provide structured frameworks for intergenerational engagement. SCORE in the US and The Mentoring School in the UK connect experienced professionals with those earlier in their careers. The exchange, in these contexts, is rarely as unidirectional as the formal structure implies.

Contribution over status

The shift from status-seeking to contribution-focused engagement is one of the more significant identity transitions of the second half of life, and one of the more consistently associated with positive outcomes in the research on ageing and purpose.

Status — the position in a hierarchy, the title, the recognition — is a primary motivator in professional life, and legitimately so. It provides structure, feedback and the social acknowledgement that the research on motivation identifies as genuinely important. The problem is that status is positional and competitive in ways that become increasingly difficult to maintain as professional life changes, and that the pursuit of status in contexts where it is no longer readily available tends to produce the defensive, fortress-building behaviour described above.

Contribution — the sense that you are giving something of genuine value, regardless of whether it produces recognition — is more durable precisely because it is not dependent on the external social architecture that status requires. The man who is contributing something real — through mentoring, through voluntary work, through the transmission of genuine expertise, through the maintenance of the social connections that the article on why so many men are lonely identifies as essential — is relevant in a way that doesn't depend on anyone's validation.

My article on purpose after retirement covers this territory in more depth. The relevant point here is that the transition from status to contribution is not a demotion. It is, in the psychological literature on meaning and ageing, something closer to an upgrade — a form of engagement that tends to produce higher levels of life satisfaction, lower rates of depression, and a more stable sense of purpose than the status-based motivation that preceded it.

Staying physically present in the world

There is a dimension of relevance that is bodily rather than cognitive — the simple fact of being out in the world, in physical spaces, among other people, rather than retreating to the domestic and digital environments that late middle age makes increasingly comfortable and increasingly insufficient.

The man who still goes to things — concerts, lectures, sporting events, community gatherings, professional events — is maintaining a relationship with the world that has direct effects on cognitive health, social connection and the sense of being part of something current. The man who watches everything on a screen, attends everything virtually, and conducts his social life primarily through devices has optimised for comfort at some engagement cost.

The relevance of irrelevance

Some forms of relevance are appropriately relinquished. The man who was professionally central at 45 should not, at 65, be occupying the same central position — not because his experience and capability have disappeared, but because the natural and healthy development of organisations and communities requires generational transition, and the older man who clings to centrality past its point is doing something that is both personally costly and collectively unhelpful.

The psychological maturity that the research on successful ageing consistently identifies is not the capacity to remain relevant in all the forms that were relevant at 45. It is the capacity to identify the forms of contribution that are genuinely available and genuinely valuable at 65, and to invest in those rather than defending the positions that belonged to an earlier stage.

This requires a form of ego management that is easier to describe than to achieve. The man who was at the centre of things does not easily accept a position at the edge — even when the edge is where the genuine contribution is, and even when the centre is where the defensive performance is happening.

Erik Erikson's framework of adult development places the later stages of life under the concept of generativity — the investment in the generation that follows, in the structures and communities and knowledge that will outlast the individual self. This is, in Erikson's account, not a consolation prize for the loss of professional centrality. It is the stage at which the most genuinely significant contribution becomes possible — precisely because it is no longer about the self in the way that earlier stages required.

The technology question

Ah, the technology dimension. The most commonly cited anxiety is the most consistently mishandled. The digital divide between generations is real — in familiarity, in ease of use, in the instinctive fluency with new platforms and tools that comes from having grown up in their company. It is also, as a driver of irrelevance, significantly overstated.

Technological fluency — the ability to use the tools that the current world runs on — is acquirable at any age, with effort and without pretending that the effort is trivial. The 60-year-old who learns to use the relevant technology for his professional or social context is not a youth. He is doing something pragmatic that maintains his capacity to engage with the world on its current terms.

What is not required — and what the performance of youth trap incorrectly implies is required — is enthusiasm for every technological development, adoption of every new platform, or fluency with every cultural form that digital technology has produced. Selective engagement, based on genuine usefulness and genuine interest rather than the anxiety of being left behind, is both more sustainable and more honest.

The practical suggestion is straightforward: identify the specific technological gaps that are actually limiting your engagement with the things that matter to you, and address those specifically, rather than either wholesale adoption of everything new or wholesale resistance to it. The man who learns to use the tools his grandchildren use to communicate with him is doing something more relevant than the one who maintains the position that they should adapt to his preferred channels.

On acceptance

The pursuit of relevance, if it becomes anxious and effortful — if it is driven by the fear of irrelevance rather than the genuine interest in engagement — tends to produce performance rather than substance.

The paradox of relevance in later life is that it is most reliably achieved by people who are not primarily pursuing it. The man who is genuinely engaged with learning, genuinely contributing something of value, genuinely curious about the world as it is — he is relevant in a way that produces no anxiety about the question, because the question is answered by the living rather than the worrying.

The acceptance dimension of this is not resignation. It is the recognition that some forms of relevance are appropriately behind you, that others are ahead of you in forms you haven't yet discovered, and that the energy spent defending the former would be better invested in finding the latter.

The world does not owe you relevance. It does, however, respond to genuine engagement with a reliability that the research on ageing, cognitive health and purpose consistently confirms. Engagement is the key. Relevance follows.