Mandatory retirement at 65 disappeared right when my generation needed it.
As a Gen Xer who lost his job in his mid-50s, I thought the reason was obvious. A generation that had run things for decades wasn’t making room, and somewhere along the way it had started listening to 25-year-olds on social media more than to the people who’d shown it loyalty for 20 years. Boomers talk about eroding company loyalty while quietly restructuring around whoever’s newest in the room. I figured I was watching a values problem. Older leaders choosing legacy over the people who’d followed them.
I held on to that belief for the 2 years I was unemployed. It explained everything and it asked nothing of me. Landing a new job gave me the distance I needed to examine my own conclusions. When I finally went looking for what else could be happening, what I found was mechanical, and it took me three wrong turns to get there.
First assumption: leadership is skewing younger.
This felt obvious enough not to check. Every headline about AI-native hiring, every board eager to say it’s listening to the next generation, pointed the same direction. I expected the data to confirm it.
It didn’t. The average CEO in America is now 61, a decade older than in 2000. The…
