I spent my thirties performing success until I realized the audience had left the theater. Now at 43, I'm discovering that irrelevance might be the most liberating thing that ever happened to me.
Last week I turned down a speaking gig because they wanted me to talk about "staying relevant." The irony wasn't lost on me—a 43-year-old man being asked to perform youth for an audience that probably stopped listening to anyone over 40 years ago. I said no, politely, then went for a walk around Marina Bay to shake off the feeling that I'd just failed some invisible test.
That's when it hit me: I've been taking these tests my whole adult life. Performance reviews that never end. Metrics for everything—growth rates, engagement scores, follower counts, net worth. Somewhere along the way, I'd internalized this idea that my value was something to be constantly proven, optimized, defended against the inevitable decay of time.
But walking past those gleaming towers, watching the tourists pose for their perfect Singapore shots, I remembered something. A conversation I'd had years ago in a tiny café in Chiang Mai, with a British expat who must have been pushing 70. He was learning Thai, badly, and laughing at his own mistakes. "The best part about being old," he said, "is that nobody expects you to be impressive anymore. Do you know how freeing that is?"
I didn't then. I do now.
There's this script we're handed somewhere in our twenties: establish yourself, build your brand, climb the ladder, accumulate proof of worth. It's exhausting, this constant audition for our own lives. And then one day—usually somewhere around 40—you notice the audience has started to leave. The algorithms favor younger faces. The industry events feel like high school reunions where you're suddenly the chaperone, not the student.
Your first instinct is panic. Double down. Work harder. Maybe if you just optimize more, produce more, achieve more, you can outrun irrelevance. I've watched so many people my age caught in this trap, desperately trying to compete with their 25-year-old selves. It's like watching someone arm wrestle their own shadow.
But what if we're fighting the wrong battle?
I spent two years in Thailand, ostensibly building a business but really having an extended conversation with myself about what matters. In the night markets of Bangkok, the mountain cafés of Pai, the beach shacks of Koh Phangan, I kept meeting two types of older expats. The first type were still performing—still talking about their glory days, their big deals, their important connections. They wore their past like armor against the present.
The second type had let all that go. They were learning to cook Thai food, badly. Taking up painting, terribly. Starting NGOs for street dogs or teaching English to local kids. They'd stopped trying to be impressive and started trying to be useful. Or happy. Or just present.
Guess which group seemed more alive?
The thing about aging that nobody tells you is that it's not actually about loss. It's about editing. When you're young, you're like a rough draft—everything's included, nothing's been cut yet. You're all potential, no form. But time, if you let it, does something remarkable. It starts removing what doesn't matter. The need to be liked by everyone. The fear of missing out. The constant comparison to others.
What's left is essence. And essence is so much more interesting than image.
I think about this when I catch myself in old patterns. When I feel that familiar anxiety about keeping up with metrics that don't actually measure anything real. When I'm tempted to inject my face with botulism to look like a weirdly smooth version of myself, or buy another thing to signal success, or craft another humble-brag about company growth.
Then I remember: I'm not auditioning anymore. The show I was performing in? It was never that good anyway.
There's a moment in your forties when you realize you know things. Not Wikipedia things or TED talk things, but lived things. You know what a broken heart actually takes to heal. You know what success costs and whether it's worth it. You know the difference between loneliness and solitude, between achievement and fulfillment, between being seen and being known.
This knowledge didn't come from optimization. It came from fucking up. From taking wrong turns. From staying too long in situations that didn't serve you and leaving too soon from ones that might have. From all the spectacular failures that Silicon Valley pretends are learning experiences but are actually just failures—until years later when they transform into wisdom.
Young people are beautiful because they don't know things yet. They have that shiny uncertainty, that willingness to believe the world might be different than it is. I'm not nostalgic for that. I wouldn't trade my knocked-around knowing for their pristine possibility. Because here's what those anti-aging ads don't tell you: there's something deeply sexy about someone who's been places. Who has stories that required years to unfold. Who can sit in silence without needing to fill it with performance.
My friend Sarah, who's 52 and just started a ceramics studio after decades in corporate law, puts it perfectly: "I spent thirty years becoming someone. Now I'm spending the rest unbecoming."
That's the real art of aging with dignity—the unbecoming. The graceful shedding of everything you accumulated that wasn't actually you. The recognition that your value was never in your productivity or your beauty or your relevance to algorithms. It was in something much simpler and much harder to measure: your presence. Your particular way of seeing. The space you create for others when you stop taking up so much space performing yourself.
I still live in Singapore, in an apartment that would have impressed the hell out of my younger self. But I live here differently now. I don't need it to mean anything about me. It's just where I wake up, make coffee, and do the work that feels true rather than impressive.
Sometimes I video call my friends who are still in Chiang Mai, still chasing the digital nomad dream, and I see myself five years ago in their faces. That hunger. That hustle. That beautiful, exhausting need to matter in ways that can be measured and posted and validated.
I don't warn them. Some things you have to learn by living through them. But I do notice how our conversations have changed. They talk about growth hacks and conversion rates. I find myself talking about the taste of good coffee, the sound of rain on windows, the way my knees hurt now when I run but I run anyway because the hurt is proof I'm still here, still moving.
Maybe that's what dignity looks like after 40. Not the desperate maintenance of youth's standards but the quiet revelation that those standards were always bullshit anyway. Not the fear of becoming invisible but the relief of it. Not the performance of value but the embodiment of it.
The other day, I was having lunch with a potential investor, some hotshot half my age who kept checking his phone and talking about disruption. Halfway through his pitch about why my company needed to "skew younger," I realized I wasn't listening. I was watching the way sunlight hit my water glass, thinking about how the same light had hit the Mekong years ago when I thought I needed to be someone else.
"You know what?" I said, interrupting his PowerPoint dreams. "I think we're good as we are."
He looked confused. People usually do when you stop playing the game they're used to.
But here's the thing about getting older: you realize there are only so many lunches left. Only so many mornings. Only so many chances to say what you mean instead of what's strategic. You can spend them performing for an audience that's already moved on to the next show. Or you can spend them being present for the life you actually have.
I chose presence. It's less impressive but infinitely more satisfying.
And if that's not aging with dignity, I don't know what is.
