IRRELEVANCE – THE RISING NEED FOR ELDERS

FORBES
Lost Over 60 Million Jobs – Now Robots, Tech, and Artificial Intelligence Will Take Millions More
 
Relevant
1) Closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered.
 
2) Having a significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand.
 
3) Appropriate to the current time, conditions, and circumstances; of contemporary interest.
 
IRRELEVANT (Allocated to late age)
1) Disconnected and inappropriate to what is being done or considered.
 
2) Having an insignificant and ineffectual bearing on the matter at hand.
 
3) Inappropriate to current conditions and circumstances. Need help understanding contemporary interests.
 
Beyond the late aged, irrelevance is slowly creeping down the generational ladder. Boomers, Generation Xers, Millennials, Zers, and even the late Alphas will all soon feel it.
 
Irrelevance alters futures and influences whom people need to be in the world of the inconsequential. No longer will these generations have to wait for old age to be considered extraneous.
 
Disruptive technologies - the Internet, social media, video, podcasts, AI, search engines, Chatbots, DNA supply-chain tracking, blockchain, robots, and quantum computing, jet-fueled by machine-to-machine learning and unlimited data sharing.
 
This train has left the station.
 
Machines are becoming progressively more autonomous. They will only get better and faster – solving more complex problems with evidence-based solutions based on solid historical and sociodemographic data, reaching further back into the past and forecasting trends far into the future, creating more comprehensive and dynamic algorithms as they go.
 
Machines are achieving executive functionality – strategy, tactics, marketing, HR, and supply change management - without sleep and meager compensation. They are in decision-making now.

With its deep learning, artificial intelligence will soon dominate healthcare in diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient risk identification. From breast cancer to dental caries, machines will be able to detect diseases well before symptoms appear that are diagnosable by doctors. Certainly, radiologists, internists, and dentists are the first wave.

Of course, the machines at the insurance companies and the government constantly search for how to reduce the risk. Reduce risk, reduce cost. The longer you wait, the more it costs. The level of risk reduction and early, less expensive treatment with AI in medicine will be enormous. The problem is that health care doesn’t do well at prevention and very early treatment. Today, prevention and early treatment don’t pay.

A recent report from Goldman Sachs estimates that around 300 million jobs in the future could be affected by generative AI, meaning 18% of work globally could be automated—with more advanced economies heavily impacted than emerging markets.

Business Insider, Technology Edition: “A Wharton professor had AI chatbots work on business projects for 30 minutes. Bing wrote 1,757 words in under 3 minutes; ChatGPT wrote the code to build an entire website in minutes.”
 
The writing is not on the wall but on the screen.
 
Previously, you had to constantly push yourself to stay at the edge of change to remain relevant. But the speed and weight of change are continuously increasing. So the odds are you’ll get shoved off the edge.
 
Stability no longer exists. Rapid, disruptive change is now the ‘always. Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius were right about impermanence, but now it is in our face. Nothing lasts. The beginning-middle-end cycle is spinning faster and faster. You, it, or them could be made irrelevant in a flash. Witness the thousands of laid-off tech workers in 2022-2023 - from indispensable to irrelevant instantaneously.
 
Elders know a lot about being irrelevant. They’ve experienced its behaviors; marginalization, isolation, filtered listening, stereotyping, and being constantly disregarded. But elders have found new land on which their relevance has found fertile ground.
 
Therefore, elders may have vital lessons to teach as irrelevance becomes an increasingly dominant force in people’s lives.

ELDER & IRRELEVANCE
Dealing with irrelevance has long been the province of the late aged. In response, elders have developed themselves to expand their relevance in another dimension. 

In all cultures, whether traditional or nontraditional, relevance is relationship bound. To be relevant, you need to be considered relevant by others. Without their vote, you aren’t relevant.

Quickly realizing relevance is a relationship-based phenomenon, elders have developed strategies to generate relationships that offer high, continuously expanding relevance for them and others.
 
Elders recognize that their chronologically accumulated knowledge and industry skills required to stay current were no longer required to navigate their lives successfully.

Elders offload many of the characteristics and qualities they need to be relevant in a technology-driven, youth-ambitious, and chaotic world. They are no longer required to paddle the relevancy river against the upstream current strenuously. Instead, elders have headed downstream on life’s currents which require far less strain to steer.

Elders realized that staying relevant was a prison built by many hands – parents, peers, culture, and the insistent ego. And as you know, the ego is fragile and constantly needs reinforcement.

Understanding the fragility and grasping of the ego, elders build relationships where ego validation has little value.

OUR SOLUTION
Our solution is establishing groups of like-minded late-age former (or about to be former) professionals who are now intimately in touch with their fading relevance. Then, work together to uncouple them from the scientific-materialistic, ‘more is better,’ and the ‘winner take all’ determined relevancy to the matchless relevancy to oneself, for oneself.

Another kind of relevance exists at the core of our humanity, where no other is needed for validation. It’s revelation that now leads to relevance.

Our group is All-Sectarian, as opposed to Non-Sectarian. Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, and Jewish teachings contribute to our group’s walking the Camino del Sabio, the trail of elders.

If interested, you can participate in a Sangha call; one is occurring next week on April 19^th, or a future Sangha call at https://form.jotform.com/230334570253044

The week’s video says many things supporting this post’s assertions. However, we differ in some ways on how to stay relevant. Worth viewing.
https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_schaefer_how_to_be_relentlessly_relevant