Modernity's youth obsession is (still) dumb

If you worship what teenagers do it's because you are mentally at the level of a teenager

David Ogilvy was 38 years old when he founded his ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather, in 1948

"It is a weakness of youth not to recognize its own ignorance."

—Michel de Montaigne

There’s an ongoing meme I see on social that suggests the moment you turn 30, the clock on your potential ticks to 0, if you haven’t “made it” by then “it’s over,” and you have missed the metaphoric boat. This (dumb) narrative, born out of cultural anxieties and exacerbated by social media’s youth obsession, I’m sure does feel like a pressure cooker to many young folk. It’s a warped understanding of reality and like in other areas our youth are getting fully cooked by so much change around them at an accelerated rate, all happening at once.

But the idea that life peaks at 30 is not just dumb, it’s outright wrong. In reality, many of the most significant accomplishments in creative, intellectual, and entrepreneurial fields happen well after this supposedly critical age (arbitrary, made up). In fact I don’t think most people have much real craft until 10+ years of focused effort at something, which won’t even likely happen until then.

Let’s start with the business/tech world: the average age of a successful startup founder is not in their twenties, as the stereotype might suggest, but rather 42. It’s not the college dropout who is most likely to succeed, but someone with years of experience, a deep well of knowledge, and the temperament to navigate the complexities of building a business.

In art and literature many of history’s most celebrated figures produced their greatest works after turning 30. Virginia Woolf didn’t publish Mrs. Dalloway until she was 43. Alfred Hitchcock directed Psycho, arguably his most iconic film, at the age of 60. The renowned painter Paul Cézanne was in his 50s when he created the works that would later define him as the father of modern art. The list goes on—Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer at 48, and Samuel L Jackson didn’t achieve widespread fame until his mid 40s.

In lifestyle entrepreneurship, success after 30 isn’t just possible, it's often the norm. Martha Stewart launched her brand and published her first book, Entertaining, at 41. She built an empire not in her youth, but in her 40s and beyond. Even Michael Jordan kept playing in the NBA until he was 40 years old.

We could spend the rest of this post sharing examples, but I think you get the picture. The 20s are typically a period of experimentation, failure, and learning—a time to accumulate the experiences and insights that will fuel later successes. By the time someone reaches their 30s and 40s, there is a richness of experience that simply isn’t there at 25. This maturity enables a deeper, more nuanced approach to work, allowing for the creation of something truly lasting and meaningful. You will have learned to develop discipline for your craft and build a life to support it.

And yet, the myth persists. There’s an argument to be made that the pressure to achieve early provides motivation. Perhaps the looming specter of 30 pushes some to finish that novel, secure that promotion, or launch their startup. That’s great if you’d like to use it. But this urgency, while perhaps motivating, is also deeply limiting. It confines the scope of what life is, imposing an artificial deadline on growth and success. If you truly believed “it’s over” at 30, you might give up and become despondent when you’re not where you wanted to be when you get there, and spoiler alert: no one really is.

The core problem with this narrative is that it assumes life is a sprint rather than a marathon. It suggests there’s a narrow window in which you can do anything of value, and if you miss it, your dreams are dead and you should pack it in (nihilism, honestly). The reality is far more complex and, frankly, more hopeful. The work that truly matters, the work that leaves a lasting impact, often begins precisely when the world tells you it’s over. Young people today can easily live a healthy life until 80 or 90, perhaps even longer with healthcare and technological advances. But really what would be the point if you thought you had to achieve some breakthrough or the rest (majority or your life) didn’t matter?

In creative fields, people aren’t even particularly interesting until they’ve lived a bit—until they’ve accumulated enough experience to have something to say. 30 is not the final end, it’s the end of the beginning. It’s when you’ve lived through the failures, the false starts, the disappointments, and emerged with a clearer sense of what really matters. It’s when you’ve gone through phases of your life you look back on as ‘wild years’ which provide an infinite well of creativity to now draw from if you actually lived them. The hustle bros might arrive here with nothing, no real stories, because they spent this whole time behind screens. It’s the point where you start creating from a place of authenticity, driven by a deep understanding of yourself and the world around you. You shed unearned confidence for real skills to do something meaningful, beyond pleasing an audience demanding silly things like novelty and spectacle.

The desire for fast success is an even more dangerous mindset for less exciting areas like your financials. If you feel you must get to a certain number by age 30 or you’ll be “left behind” you will inevitably make poor decisions that ensure you never act prudently with finances, and so live your entire life on the brink of disaster. Whereas if you simply purchase boring index funds, by 40 or 50 you’ll be in a good place, far ahead of peers who took risks, and have a lot more optionality. There’s a great quote by Chris Rock on this (abridged): "You know what the biggest lie is? That life is short. No, life is long. Especially if you make the wrong decisions." The bias to getting somewhere fast is for sure the top reason people end up ruined.

I have “been an old” forever, since I was about 13 and my father died — I was forced to grow up before my time. Many have stories like this, typically due to some form of trauma. But I am far more comfortable in my body and life as I age, because I’ve felt (ever so slowly) my peers broadly now have higher quality interests and care about more meaningful things. Simply put: life gets better. The pressure to achieve something by a certain age is nothing more than a societal construct, one so silly only naïve children could believe it, because they worship the vapid. Success, in any meaningful sense, is not about how quickly you can achieve something but about the depth and longevity of what you create. For this, there is no expiration date.