Lifestyles Ideas Management - No Fear when old

This is a short sharing by a 57 year old woman who preferred to live a simple and less complicated life. She returned to Singapore seven years ago and accepted employment very quickly in a junior position with low pay. Life was going to be easy. No demanding or challenging work, she thought. From the first day at work, life presented a lot of challenges and demands. She was totally demoralized during the first formal meeting with the immediate superior when she spoke of older workers as being slow. Her opinion was influenced and derived from the perception that younger colleagues were faster and better at using computers. Initially she felt demoralized at being labeled “old” but after awhile she got over it and still work in the same organization. Most of her younger colleagues left the organization for better salary. While she find work a sense of value and participation, on a not so good day she do feel psychological affected by what the immediate superior think. After all, older employees are already discriminated from lesser contributions from employee although they took on the same amount of tasks as their younger counterparts. Older does not mean old, from her personal perspective, older means wiser. Younger people and organization should give due consideration to those growing older by not making life any tougher. It is indeed unfortunate that there is still a mindset that older worker are not as productive as young ones. Despite of all the talk about employing older workers, we are not acknowledging that often older worker have an added value that is often lacking in young ones. We tend to ignore that experience often counts a lot more than more qualifications. There is also a lack of differentiation between unskilled and skilled workers, skilled work tend to provide more in terms of quality. It is possible for older people who retired from work and feel unproductive and marginalized in a society like Singapore that extols excellence and productivity. As we grow older, there is a need to focus on the life beyond the physical and material, between living well and living with wealth.