#130. Age and Capacity

She's 62. Will she understand the app?

He's 70. Does he make the grade?

She's 55. Isn't it a little late to start over?

She's 73 and wants to do what?

Across society, we take a number and quietly turn it into a prognosis.

At some point, age starts masquerading as information about what we're capable of doing next. Right now, we're watching that happen in real time.

Across democracies, questions about age and leadership are getting harder to ignore. Who is too old to lead? When should one generation make room for another? And when does a legitimate question about capacity become an assumption based on the number of birthdays someone has had?

Some of those questions are entirely legitimate. If someone can no longer understand the issues, manage the demands of the job, make sound decisions, or adapt to a rapidly changing world, we should be talking about it.

But notice what I just did there. I didn't talk about age. I talked about capacity, and that's different.

In the US, Senator Ed Markey (80) of Massachusetts faced a primary challenger 33 years his junior. His competitor, Representative Seth Moulton (47) made generational change a central argument of his campaign. Markey won.

That doesn't prove 80 isn't too old. Nor would a Moulton victory have proved that it is. It exposes the problem with the question. More dangerously, we begin asking the same question of ourselves. Maybe I'm too old to change careers. Too old to learn this. Too old to travel alone. Too old to start a business, fall in love, make art, wear the boots.

Let's ask the harder question: What are you capable of? Can you learn and adapt? Can you change your mind when the evidence changes? Can you bring experience to a problem without assuming you have all the answers? Can you do what the role requires of you—physically, intellectually, emotionally?

And the hardest question: Can you recognize when the answer to some of those questions has become no?

That's not ageism. That's discernment.

Aging in power doesn't mean insisting we remain capable of everything forever. There is no midnight alarm on our 60th, 70th, or 80th birthday announcing: Ding! Your relevance has expired.

The useful lesson buried beneath all this political noise: age is a fact. Capacity deserves examination. The two aren't interchangeable.

In or out of politics, we owe people something more thoughtful than assuming what they can or cannot do because of the year on their birth certificate.

Ask better questions. Do I want this? Can I do this? What would I need to learn?

Those answers may sometimes tell us it's time to step aside. They may also tell us it's time to step up, which raises another question entirely.

If we still have capacity, experience, voice, and power—what are we doing with them?