When Zillow launched 20 years ago, the home-buying process happened almost entirely offline. The companys digital listings, combined with its innovative Zestimatean estimate of a homes value, based on the kind of data typically only available to real estate professionalsmarked a turning point for the housing market. Zestimates werent exact representations of value, but they put power back in the hands of prospective buyers (to sellers and agents chagrin). Their near-instant popularity was an early do your research internet moment.
Fast-forward to the present day, and Zillow, which has a $13 billion market cap and reports earnings after the market close on February 10, is once again under pressure. In partnership with First Street, a provider of climate risk data, Zillow had been publishing climate risk scores for the homes on its platform. But some homeowners have balked at their scores, and some have even sued. A home that First Street labels as high-risk for flooding, for example, can quickly drop in value.
Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman, who joined the company in 2009 and became CEO in 2024, is walking a careful line. Zillows brand is associated with data transparency and consumer empowerment, but an increasing share of its revenue is tied to real estate agents who pay for software tools that help them virtually stage homes and message with open house leads.
On the eve of the companys Q4 2025 earnings, which analysts estimate will be $650 million in revenue for the quarter, 17.4% growth, Wacksman sat down with Fast Company to talk about how Zillow is navigating the competing demands of its two-sided marketplace, the affordability crisis, and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Zestimates werent perfect in Zillows early days, but even so, they were never taken down. Yet in the case of First Streets climate risk scores, youve moved them to a separate place; people have to click through and leave the site. Walk me through the thinking there.
Jeremy Wacksman [Photo: Zillow]
When you are focused on helping the consumer, the buyer, and seller, you want to try and provide as much information as you can with the right context. That’s what the Zestimate always has been. And we show our work, right? We show what our accuracy is. It’s not an appraisal, it’s not a professional opinion, but its a great starting point. Our philosophy is: Information needs context. And its hard for it to be perfect, but more information generally, when given the right context, is better than less.
Climate is the same way. We still have climate data on our site. We’ve tweaked what we show on Zillow versus what we link out to third parties, just given some of the accuracy data on some of the [climate] data sets. Get an official appraisal and figure out what you want to do, but almost every buyer and seller appreciates that data to start that conversation.
It feels like part of the reason people are so sensitive to potentially a bad climate score or a bad Zestimate is just because of the state of the housing market. Inventory is tight, sales are sluggish, prices are high. There is this growing consensus that we need to make owning a home more affordable. Where do you see that tension over affordability show up on Zillow?
The most stark change over the last decade has been the percentage of buyers who start with an affordability question versus start by window shopping. When I first joined, everyone just wanted to window shop. Thats how you got started. You fell in love with a home, then you hired an agent, then you figured out your financing. Now thats flipped. About half as many buyers will say, I dont even want to go get excited. I want to understand, can I do this? That massive shift, I think, is the best representation of the affordability crisis.
Youre right: We are in a period where homes are incredibly unaffordable. Home prices have run up nearly 100% in some markets from pre-pandemic levels. Average rates obviously ran up, too, so your mortgage per home gets even less affordable. That’s why you’re seeing transaction volumes at 30-year lows. In a normal housing market, 5.5 million to 6 million homes will trade every year. We’re at 4 million. Relative to the last couple of years, it’s getting a little better, but if you zoom out, it is still dramatically unaffordable.
What are the leading indicators you’re watching to see if the market is on the cusp of change?
One way to track the overall picture is [to look at] what you consider an affordable home for a median-income household. With a 20% down payment, 30% of your income [going toward] a mortgage payment is affordable. At the markets worst, we were close to 40% on average, so almost nothing was affordable. Now its drifting back down. I think that’s what you watch for.
Zillow has been investing a lot in AI. One of the features that probably a lot of people have seen is virtual staging, or the use of software to add furniture and design elements to a listing. How do you go from conception to execution on something like that?
Virtual staging as a concept is not something we invented. What we invented was the ability to do it with really modest tools. We saw this technology coming; we saw 3D tours and interactive floor plans, all these things. But they were done with very high-end, very expensive cameras and media capture.
How do you get that to an average real estate agent? Thats the problem. The average real estate agent has maybe a $100 360-camera or an iPhone. So we built the technology ourselves. Thats why you now see virtual staging on 5% or 10% of listings in some markets. The agents can easily capture some media; we can generate an interactive walk-through.
Zillow is trying to go from being an ad-based business to supporting transactions directly. Do those tools generate the kind of leads that you’re interested in?
We are fortunate to have hundreds of millions of people on Zillow every month, shopping, dreaming, starting their transaction, using us as a companion. But we only help a very small share of those people actually buy, sell, or rent a home.
Virtual staging and interactive floor plans and 3D tours: Those are tools for a listing agent to go win more business. But we spend as much time on software for agents to run their business, whether that’s book their appointments, schedule showings, run their offer processes.
Sometimes, the best use cases of AI are just making that more efficient. I’ll give you an example. Agents are sending hundres of messages a day to all their clients. Well, that’s something that generative AI can help with. We’re now sending millions of what we call smart messages. That’s something that sounds very simple, but think about the productivity gain. It helps them be a better guide, which helps them convert more business, which helps Zillow convert more business.
Zillow is a partner to ChatGPT, which has been starting to encourage e-commerce through its interface. Some shopping categories are pretty simple. Its easy to imagine, for example, that someone is going to go to ChatGPT and say, What are the best pliers? But a home is a little bit different, right?
Buying a home and selling home, for sure, it’s a very different category than most verticals. The most interesting stat to me is that as technology gets more pervasive, and as data gets bigger, buyers and sellers feel even more paralyzed, and they want even more help. The percentage of people who say, I want a full-service professional to help me is higher now than it was before the internet, before the smartphone.
You could think about ChatGPT and Gemini as a source of traffic for a vertical like ours, or as a technology we can build into our experience. We think the latter is really where its going to go. The average buyer spends six to nine months shopping, sometimes longer, sometimes years on and off. In this category, you are ultimately making a set of trade-offs between what you can afford, whats available at the time, and all of your lifestyle situationsthe commute, the school, the neighborhood. You dont get to just pick from a shelf of endless supply.
Thats why you end up hiring really good people to help you figure out how to make those trade-offs and figure out how to make sure you don’t make a financial decision that will cost you, because its the biggest financial decision youll ever make in your life. When it comes to figuring out the mortgage, figuring out which house to buy, figuring out how to sell your house, we think it will be this interweaving of professionals, professional software, buyers and sellers. And now you’re going to see LLMs [large language models] weave into all that.
Twenty years in the future, what’s the one thing that will be really different about the search and the one thing that will be really different about the actual transaction?
This category doesnt work like any other category on your phone. You open your phone and you look at shopping and ride-hailing and travel and even wealth managementso much is digital. Real estate doesnt work that way yet. Weve made a bunch of progress, but it doesnt. Its very analog. Its very paper based. Its very asynchronous. We survey consumers every year, and the stat that always sticks out to me is that more than half of homebuyers cry during the process. I’m hopeful that in 20 years, hopefully in less than 20 years, we [can make Zillow into] more of a one-stop shop. Its smart. It’s personal. It’s just all there for you.
The boomers are all about money. Gen X is like, is it all about money? Millennials are like, where is the money? And Gen Z is like, what is money?
Thats the conclusion Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler came to on an episode of her podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler. Since the episode aired last year, a clip has since been shared widely of her breaking down how each generation relates to money. She adds, “That’s my bad stand-up about it.”
As the clip has gained traction online, on TikTok, actor Freddie Smith said that Poehler “totally nails it.” He then took it one step further and broke it down in terms of how each generation’s economy helped shape their attitude toward money.
He says that for boomers, who lived through an economic boom, accumulating wealth was easyor at least easier than it has ever been since. Baby boomers currently hold more than $85 trillion in assets, making them the richest generation by far. Therefore, they earn the title all about the money.
Millennials, meanwhile, were handed a map and told the exact steps to follow to find the financial success their parents enjoyed. Only when they got there we open up the treasure chest and there’s two f-ing coins in it, explains Smith. Now, theyre all struggling through their millennial midlife crisis trying to come to terms with all the ways theyve been sold a dream.
Then theres Gen Z. They’re going to work and they’re getting paid direct deposit on Fridays and as soon as that money hits the account, it just goes automatically to their bills. They don’t actually ‘touch’ money,” says Smith. Disillusionomics has come to define a generation thats lost faith in the traditional markers of stability. What once defined financial successa house, a family, retirementfeels increasingly out of reach for the youngest working generation.
“This is such a true representation of what we’re all screaming about right now, Smith concluded. What is going ON?”
(An explanation for Gen X doesnt appear in the video, which doesnt do much to beat the forgotten generation allegations.)
Poehlers soundbite emerged from a discussion with Parks and Recreation creator Mike Schur about shifting workplace environments, particularly in Hollywoodbut also beyond.
Schur suggests theres a historical belief in Hollywood that if something good comes out of a chaotic environment, then its taken as validation: this must be the best way to produce great work. Its similar to how the eat-sleep-work lifestyleakin to the infamous 996 schedulehas recently gained momentum among certain tech companies. So we better not try to fix the chaos, he says. When a rational person would think, let’s fix the chaos.
If the chaos is fixed, he suggests, people will still be able to produce just as good workbut without putting up with a toxic work environment as part of the deal. Schur says this attitude has improved in Hollywood in recent years. Poehler agrees, putting this down to a push from younger generations, who have just reminded us that we don’t need to put up with behavior that we were used to putting up with.
Thanks to Gen Zs penchant for work-life balance, people are just a little bit less okay with having their lives ruined at work, she says.
When Schur, 50, and Poelher, 54, were coming up in Hollywood, you put your head down and you try to survive, Schur recalls.
The generation behind us, and especially the one behind that generation, looks at chaos and goes likeoh, then no, thank you.
Its time we recognize the compelling case for “wellness governance.”
Being a leader today requires a new level of performance. One that overrides fatigue, can suppress internal signals, and absorbs constant urgency, all while rapidly context-switching. Simply said, modern leadership demands have increased, and not everyone isor wants to stayon board.
Today’s leaders face growing expectations, dynamic responsibilities, and constant pressure to perform amid deep uncertainty and an ever-accelerating business ecosystem. This is reshaping the role of leadership into something increasingly challenging to sustain, and driving CEOs like HSBCs Noel Quinn to step back and refocus on better balance between their personal and business lives.
But performance and well-being arent oppositesthey enable each other. Wellness is a fundamental pillar of sustainable business practice. It provides the foundation of our clarity, stamina, and presence, and notably cant be achieved through the avoidance of burnout alone.
So its not surprising that with new leadership demands seen to be untenable, CEO turnover is at record levels and continues to climb. Around 52% of C-suite executives feel overworked and burned out. Median tenure among the S&P 500 companies has decreased 20% from 6 years in 2013 to 4.8 years in 2022all at a time when HR heads are warning their boards of drying pipelines for high-potential future leaders. This pipeline crisis is magnified by Gen Z and millennial workers who are progressively rejecting traditional high-demand career pathways marked by high burnout rates.
The result? Loss of key existing talent, associated productivity decline and risk during key leadership transitions, and significant erosion of internal readiness around succession planning. The data supports this: By early 2025, 44% of new S&P 500 CEOs and 52% of FTSE 100 CEOs were external hires, largely cited as due to internal benches being too thin.
Easily overlooked
While conversations on wellness in the workplace are advancingand for good reasonto support everyday workers, leaders are often left out of the conversation. Executives have become an easily overlooked segment in employer wellness discussions at a time when they are the ones tasked with driving them. Said differently, and ironically, companies investing in corporate wellness initiatives elevate leaders championing workforce health but can inadvertently ignore the well-being of the champions themselves. So, where does that leave top leaders of companies? And who should be safeguarding and governing their wellness?
Leaders are not immune to the same physical, mental, social, and cognitive health stressors that impact any person. But they are highly skilled at maintaining external composure in muting or even ignoring the impact of such strain. Executive-level competence has a unique ability to mask the cost of declining leadership healthbut only until that cost mounts toward becoming unavoidable, and with potential to ripple far beyond the individual leaders.
Market response
When Apple announced that Steve Jobs was taking indefinite medical leave related to a physical health concern, its shares dopped 6%. United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz suffered a heart attack 37 days into the job, and uncertainty around his health condition contributed to short-term stock volatility and further share price drop for an already-declining stock. And when Bed Bath & Beyonds CFO died by suicide, the companys stock lost 15%.
Markets are becoming more sensitive to executive illness and death. In fact, research shows that a CEOs medical leave can have a particularly negative impact on shareholder value, especially when the leave is extended or the CEO is older. A 2016 paper analyzing CEO deaths at U.S. public companies found that between 1950 and 2009 markets seemed to react more and more strongly to such deaths, even after accounting for other factors.
Its clear that investor confidence is closely linked with key leader health and wellnessand it should be. Companies ranking higher in well-being yield significantly higher returns and outperform the S&P, and leadership is a key driver of this. So its no surprise that WTWs 2025 global directors and officers survey found, for the second year running, that health and safety is the No. 1 risk for directors and officers globally. Top priorities include physical health and safety in the workplace and workplace impact on mental health and well-being. Yet there is no specific mention of leadership health as a stand-alone topic of distinct risk and interest.
Leadership takes a toll on health
Interestingly, recent research out of Sweden found that not only is poor health associated with greater CEO turnover, but health itself predicts appointment to a CEO position. Which implies that not only should boards be governing wellness and health for C-suite leaders to increase overall effectiveness and lengthen executive tenure, but boards should also oversee health and wellness of high-potential, next-generation leaders as part of critical succession planning.
The leadership track is an increasingly hard sell for next-generation leaders given the latest research on CEO aging. Using a database of CEO facial images and applied machine learning to estimate CEO age, new research shows industry distress causes faster visible agingadding an average of 1.2 years to their visual appearance for a given crisis or single period of distress. And with senior leaders today navigating an era of permacrisis, stacking and simultaneous crises could amplify this effect. Further, CEs who experience periods of industry-wide distress during their tenure are found to die significantly earlier.
This research quantifies a previously little documented yet important cost associated with serving as a leaderpersonal health cost. Leadership bears very real and material health consequences, especially when exposed to increased job demands and high-stress work environments of high-profile positions. The health effect is sizable. While many are quick to criticize the perks of CEO life, research has found that reduction in longevity of CEOs is consistent even with big pay packages. This signals an important trade-off for companies and individuals alike when there is a substantial personal cost to health and life expectancy. Its no wonder newer generations may be gun-shy to take a similar path.
There is an evolving fragility to traditional social contracts that key executives have with their companies. There are real yet often unspoken limits to the complexity, demands, uncertainty, and overload that individual leaders can sustain. And there is a necessary acknowledgment of the impact on individual leaders health and wellness, as well as broader amplified effects for companies.
A lack of governance
Leaders have a tendency to select for short-term productivity and hard-charge without needed recovery in order to remain responsive under escalating pressure “in the moment.” Take Elon Musk touting the benefits of sleep deprivation to achieve 120-hour workweeks and making a Tesla factory his primary residence for nearly three years. Most leaders focus their energy on being effective, not necessarily being well. And we havent developed sufficient governance to regulate this beyond the individuals themselves, both in the best interest of the leaders and the companies they helm.
It is said to be a sign of intelligence to hold two opposing ideas at once while retaining the ability to function. This “doublethink” is equally true for balancing the health of a company (including financial health and workforce well-being) with the health of individual executives. Leaders are trained to regulate their corporate environments long before they regulate themselves, if ever at all. They often live in a state of chronic activation that is easily normalized but effectively overrides their physiology in an unsustainable way. Eventually, our bodies respond accurately to stressors and strain even if our intellect initially seeks to normalize them. And that is problematic for everyone involved.
Well-being governance isnt just about the concept of self-care for leaders. Its about ensuring sustainable capacity and leadership to tap into the right level of decision-making, creative thinking, and steady engagement needed. This is what allows leaders to use both a microscope and a telescope, in parallel, to solve discrete near-term problems while driving long-term strategic efforts.
Leaders are not without their own level of governance and oversight, which is typically provided by a companys board of directors and executive team. And while wellness initiatives for populations of employees are most effective when championed by senior management, wellness initiatives for leaders are arguably most effective where championed by the board and C-suite.
Good stewardship
Effective boards and executive teams create and preserve long-term value by acting as well-being stewards of their enterprises. This includes providing appropriate levels of well-being governance and oversight, underpinned by the fact that healthy employees make better decisions and drive superior results. Effective leaders and boards understand the connection between corporate performance and well-being, including the materiality of well-being for executive-level human capital. And corporate governance of executive wellness has evolved from an HR-led perk into a strategic board-level priority, essential for both risk management and long-term value creation.
Getting this right involves formal safeguarding of the physical and mental health of senior leaders to ensure stable decision-making and organizational resilience. Ultimately, executive wellness is a “human capital” governance issue requiring top-level oversight and strategic integration. And in a way that recognizes that leadership burnout and health crises directly impact share price and operational stability.
This necessitates having accountability via standing committees, such as governance or compensation committees, charged with reviewing wellness assessments and setting baseline health targets for leaders. It also means elevating succession planning to include proactive health governance so that leadership pipelines remain healthy and key person risks for executives health are mitigated. And given that effective governance requires leaders not only to oversee wellness but also to model it, boards can mandate resilience training and structured stress management for executives in ways that support upskilling and also help nurture a health-forward culture that filters down to the entire workforce.
Other initiatives may include:
Visible participation of executives in wellness initiatives to legitimize and destigmatize such initiatives
Use of KPIs to track effectiveness at the workforce population level and for key executives and high-potential succession talent
Review of data on absenteeism, retention, and healthcare offerings engagement as well as use of frameworks for auditing workplace health and safety at the executive level
Tying executive compensation to health and wellness goals to emphasize the importance of prioritizing health
Setting clear standards on using existing wellness initiatives and perks, as simple as ensuring leaders use a minimum proportion of their vacation days each year
A fiduciary duty
Forward-thinking organizations must now treat leadership health with the same rigor as financial reporting, ultimately recognizing wellness as a fiduciary duty. What began as private health concerns behind closed doors have transformed into a material business factor that now influences investor decisions, market valuations, and regulatory frameworks. At a time when nearly 70% of the C-suite are seriously considering quitting for a job that better supports their well-being, and 81% prioritize their health over advancing their career, we need to overcome old disconnects around performance and health. A strong focus on well-being is critical to both employee and executive retention.
Now is the time to legitimize executive well-being and make it part of the regular corporate dialogue. It should be explored with authentic curiosity and deep urgency around how top leaders are doing as a way for companies and investors to develop new antennae. This is especially important given that recent research from Spencer Stuart shows only 22% of global CEOs feel their board provides opportunities to discuss sensitive topics such as pesonal well-being.
And given CEOs shortening tenures, it is critical that boards and not just C-suite executives ensure well-being governance endures and is perpetuated. If best practice is oversight for areas most material to a business, whether to reduce risk or capture competitive advantage, it only makes sense that we ensure special wellness focus for top leaders as part of that oversight.
The financial and nonfinancial impacts are impossible to ignore. And as we move from looking at executive wellness as a personal matter to recognizing it as a fundamental pillar of sustainable business practice, its time we recognize a novel truth: Executive wellness governance really is the new corporate imperative.
At the new ad agency Ability Machine in Nashville, creatives have access to a full suite of tools ranging from podcasting and photography studios to lighting equipment and design software. They also have quiet sensory rooms, dimmable lights, and a flexible seating system. Every part of the agency, from the way it tackles projects to the physical space it works from, is designed with its staff in mind, who are all adults with intellectual disabilities.
The Ability Machine describes itself as a studio powered by neurodiverse minds that turns creativity into both purpose and a paycheck for adults with varying abilities. So far, Ability Machine has already worked with multiple local brands, as well as national names like Mercedes-Benz and Kind, on a range of creative assets from slogans to artwork for retail spaces and ad campaigns.
[Photo: courtesy the Ability Machine]
The agency is a newly formalized offshoot of the autism-focused nonprofit On the Avenue, which provides a studio space for adults with intellectual disabilities to pursue creative passions and, in some cases, find employment on a range of projects.
On the Avenue founder Tom Woodard has run the nonprofit for the past 10 years. Before that, he had a long career in advertising and brand building, primarily helping brands create signature jingles (you might remember him as the voice of the iconic Budweiser Super Bowl frogs). He says the idea for Ability Machine grew slowly over time, as he began bringing some of his creative projects to the community members at On the Avenue and asking for their input.
While there are other programs out there for adults with intellectual disabilities, Woodard says he doesnt know of any other spaces that encourage their members to pursue their own creative workand ultimately leverage those passions into paid opportunities in the ad industry.
A space to build professional skills
Ability Machine is located inside On the Avenues 6,000-square-foot warehouse space, which is already equipped with a podcast room, sound studio, multitrack recording software, and more. Its also a work environment thats been designed with accessibility as a key priority, meaning members have access to different types of seating depending on their needs, sensory rooms to mitigate overstimulation, and customizable light and sound settings.
It’s really cool because if you’ve got somebody that says, Oh, quick, we need a storyboard written, we can turn to a citizen and employ them immediately, Woodard says. There’s a familiarity of the building, of the staff, of their surroundings that someone with an intellectual disability really needs and flourishes in.
[Photo: courtesy the Ability Machine]
Days at On the Avenue are organized like a typical work day. Members arrive at 8 a.m., open the day with a group conversation, take a walk around the neighborhood, and then engage in something called assignment-based learning, which Woodard says is comparable to an individualized education program (IEP). The goal is to offer members a structured, productive environment that, for many adults with intellectual disabilities, can be difficult to find after high school ends at the age of 18.
Eighty-five percent of all folks with intellectual disabilities are underemployed or unemployed, Woodard says. That was just a bad number. It needed somebody to step up and do something.
Assignment-based learning at On the Avenue consists of projects guided by the interests of members. For example, Woodard says, one member named Riley has turned his love of college sports into a podcast called Rowdy Rileys Sports Review, where hes interviewed more than 15 NFL players and coaches. The team at On the Avenue is now looking for partners to help monetize the podcast.
[Photo: courtesy the Ability Machine]
People always ask me, ‘What’s the outcome that you’re looking for?’ Woodard says. And I go, I don’t know. It’s like when you go to collegenobody says, Hey, this is where you’re going to go work afterwards. We simply try to build those job skills, those life skills, those roommate skills for these individuals through creativity, which makes it fun.
Its through projects like Rileys podcast that the idea for Ability Machine slowly germinated. The concept took real shape, though, when Woodard brought a project he was working on through his own creative agency for a Nashville candy shop called Goo Goo to members at On the Avenue.
I remember we were doing the remodel of the Goo Goos 3rd Avenue store, Woodard says. [The Goo Goo team] came in and we were sitting around our table, and I brought a bunch of folks that were at On the Avenue to sit at the table. One guy started drawing purple goo goos, and doing different things, and it brought something out in them.
[Image: courtesy the Ability Machine]
After that meeting, members at On the Avenue helped complete the physical design of the 3rd Avenue location, as well as developing the slogan, Never Chocolate Alone, as a reference to Goo Goos bars with multiple mix-ins.
[Image: courtesy the Ability Machine]
From there, Woodard began pitching the budding creative agency to other companies, leading to more projects like a collaboration with Kind (maker of breakfast and snack bars) to create art in its New York City offices; a series of custom thank you cards and coloring books for a local Mercedes dealership; and an ad campaign for the brewery Music City Beer Co. Within the last few months, Woodard formalized this work into the official Ability Machine brand, with help from the creative and strategic partner Lewis and web development partner Ally.
[Image: courtesy the Ability Machine]
A new kind of ad agency
The Ability Machines work model is flexiblesome of its employees are full-time staffers, while others are community members at On the Avenue who can opt to contribute part-time for a project and receive an hourly wage. The system is built to ensure that members can work on schedules that make sense for them, while gaining hands-on professional experience.
Currently, the Ability Machine has several new projects in the works, but Woodard is hoping to spread the word about the agencys model to a broader base. Until established ad agencies are able to adjust their own office spaces to accommodate workers with intellectual disabilities, Woodard says, hiring the Ability Machine on smaller projects is a great way to support the community.
I didn’t want to build an agency just to build another agency, Woodard says. I wanted to build something with purpose.
The legend of Sisyphus goes like this: As punishment for cheating death and embarrassing the gods, he is banished to the underworld and sentenced to push a boulder up a hill. As Sisyphus nears the peak, the boulder rolls back down, and he must start over. And the episode repeats for eternity.
I risk sounding melodramatic by comparing this story to the plight of the employed in 2026. Fair enough. But consider, if you will, the cycles in which a modern worker finds herself.
She masters a new skill, and its deemed outdated. She learns a new software, and is told to use a different one. She gets a new boss, and the company is reorganized. She applies for a job, and gets no response. She lands a new job, and the job is dissolved.
The dark core of the story of Sisyphus is not that his toil is repetitive or even that its eternal. Its that the work is erased as soon as its done. The punishmentapparently the worst that the Greek gods could think ofis to accomplish nothing.
If our skills and our jobs and the fruits of our labor are simply meaningless, are we not also climbing that hill with our own boulders?
The problem of change fatigue
Change fatigue is just that: fatigue. This has been studied, quite extensively, by psychologists.
A 2024 long-term study of more than 50,000 workers in Germany found that organizational changeslike reorgs, layoffs, outsourcing, and mergersare linked to things like sleep disturbance, nervousness, tiredness, and depression, and that the more changes an individual undergoes, the more likely they are to have these symptoms. Organizational change is often implemented at the cost of employees working conditions and health, the researchers conclude.
Dutch academics studied the effects of repeated changes in a big European bank (they wouldnt say which one) and found that the more change that workers experienced, the more likely they were to feel change fatigue. And the more fatigued they felt, the more likely they were to resist the next change. The more resistant employees became, the less likely it was that the companys changes would succeed.
But even those who supported the goals of the change were just as resistant as their unsupportive coworkers. The problem wasnt the change itself; it was the knowledge that another change would come along right after it, wiping out the last. The company couldnt be trusted. Says the employee to the employer: Its not me; its you.
A 2026 report from McLean & Company called change fatigue an operational nightmare. The scholars who studied the relationship between repetitive changes and employee resistance likened executives tendency to reorganize to a gambling habit.
When there is no achievementonly work
Work is becoming less repetitive. Automation and reorgs and reskilling mean that what we did yesterday, or the way we did it, is not what well do tomorrow. Software engineers dont have to write every line of code, recruiters dont have to review every application, and customer service reps no longer have to review and tag every ticketan AI agent can do all of that.
So the ennui felt in the modern workplace is not the result of tedium, but of constant change that wipes out the progress of the individual. Why climb yet another hill only to find yourself at the bottom again? There is no achievementonly work.
In 1942’s The Myth of Sisyphus, philosopher Albert Camus describes two natural responses to the meaninglessness of toil: that the suffering will either redeem or defeat. But he prescribes something else: defiance.
Camus believed that the most important part of the story is when Sisyphus descends the hill, fully aware of the useless task ahead. What is he thinking? One must imagine Sisyphus happy, he writes, not glibly. Happy, because he recognizes how absurd his situation is. Happy, because he is free from illusion.
Thats Camus definition of defiance. Defiance for the 21st century worker may be rejecting the illusion that work must be meaningful to make the worker meaningful.
The gods in the myth of Sisyphus demanded the climb. Todays gods demand the climb, but also the method, the enthusiasm, and the willingness to pretend it will last.
They should not be surprised when workers stop pretending.
When we minimize our suffering with statements like I shouldnt complainothers have it much harder than me, it can seem evolved, empathetic, even wise. In professional culture, this phrase often earns admiration. It signals gratitude, resilience, and perspective. However, beneath that polished humility lies a psychological defense mechanism that can quietly block emotional growth.
That mindset reflects a subtle form of emotional bypassing, which is the tendency to sidestep uncomfortable emotions by rationalizing them away. This ends up muting, rather than healing. It may seem like a sign of maturity. However, empathy bypassing often prevents us from engaging honestly with our own reality, particularly in high-performance environments where vulnerability already feels risky.
The psychology of bypassing
The term bypassing comes from psychologist John Welwood, who described spiritual bypassing in the 1980s as the use of spiritual or moral reasoning to avoid painful emotions. In modern workplaces, bypassing shows up less as spirituality and more as rationalization. Its the act of layering gratitude or perspective over stress until feelings become invisible.
Bypassing certainly played a part in my journey toward a catastrophic burnout as a corporate finance lawyer. When colleagues around me experienced layoffs, I buried my misery. Complaining about my situation as a high-flying young solicitor at a Magic Circle firm felt indulgent, and potentially dangerous to my career.
This kind of thinking might seem admirable, but research shows that emotional suppression increases stress responses rather than soothing them. Avoidance may feel like composure in the short term, but over time, failing to acknowledge what were feeling can amplify pressure and fatigue.
Why ‘others have it harder’ feels so right to say
Its easy to see why this phraseology feels comforting. After all, it comes with values we admiregratitude, compassion, and humility. Recognizing that others face greater obstacles fosters perspective and keeps self-pity in check, which are two vital traits for emotional intelligence. However, when this sentiment becomes habitual, it can cross an invisible line from awareness to avoidance.
Psychologist Kristin Neff notes that true self-compassion depends on acknowledging sufferingnot ranking it. When we tell ourselves our pain is less valid because others have it worse, were confusing empathy with denial. We treat compassion as a zero-sum game, where we see attending to our own emotions as somehow stealing from others. In truth, self-compassion is critical to our capacity to express compassion to those around us. By acknowledging our own pain, we improve our ability to have a genuine understanding of anothers.
When empathy becomes avoidance
Empathy bypassing is one of the most elegantand dangerousforms of denial. When we minimize our emotions, we distort the feedback loop that helps us understand our limits and boundaries. Over time, what begins as realism morphs into guilt.
A 2019 study found that people who habitually minimize their own distress report greater anxiety and reduced well-being. The protective act of keeping perspective can end up silently draining your mental health. In professional settings, this often manifests as people downplaying the level of stress theyre experiencing or leaders who feel undeserving of support. They tell themselves theyre gratefulbut that gratitude quietly erases their need for care. It causes us to isolate, creating even further harm.
Ive noticed this tendency in myself recently in light of global events. Gratitude is an invaluable psychological experience, and building it consciously improves perspective. But when it acts as a lightning rod for all our suffering, it can drastically undermine our emotional well-being.
The paradox is that when were empathy bypassing, we seem composed. In fact, the opposite is happening; were actually detached. It might look like strength, but its often suppression. And while culture might reward suppression, it actually ends up reducing both resilience and innovation, which are two qualities that workforces rely on most.
The cultural cost of constant perspective
Many organizations unintentionally reinforce this pattern through what might be called performative positivity. Gratitude campaigns, resilience bootcamps, and culture slogans about toughness can (if you dont implement them effectively) make emotional honesty feel out of bounds at work.
When others have it harder becomes an unspoken moral code, employees begin to silence legitimate concerns. Burnout turns into a badge of endurance. People start seeing expressions of vulnerability as complaints. The result is a well-intentioned culture that values gratitudebut punishes truth.
This is where psychological safety comes in. Workplaces where people feel free to express emotions and admit struggle are more collaborative and productive. When employees believe that only unshakeable optimism is acceptable, performance may rise temporarily, but authenticity declines. This leads to a slow erosion of trust disguised as high engagement.
The key to balancing gratitude and honesty
To move past self-bypassing, we need to treat empathy for others and honesty with ourselves as complementary, not contradictory. The key is integration and allowing multiple realities to exist at once. We can be grateful for having work and still find that work exhausting. We can recognize that someone else is struggling more severely and still acknowledge our frustration or disappointment. Emotional integrity lies in holding both truths without collapsing one into the other.
Practicing a more honest form of kindness
So how can professionals engage with their struggles without slipping into self-erasure? Start by noticing how often gratitude includes a but. Instead of thinking, Im stressed, but others have it worse, try, Im stressed, and others have it worse. That small changereplacing but with andcreates space for paradox and complexity. It permits you to feel whats true without diminishing empathy for others.
Leaders can model this integration publicly. Admitting limits isnt weakness: its acknowledging psychological reality. By acknowledging your own pressures without minimizing them, you create environments where emotional honesty coexists with performance. Plenty of research showsthat self-compassion actually strengthens motivation and resilience, not erodes them. The same principle applies across teams: Acknowledging difficulty deepens accountability, because people who feel seen and valued tend to feel engaged, too.
The importance of feeling fully
Theres nothing inherently wrong with acknowledging that others have it harderbut kindness without self-inclusion becomes self-neglect. In a culture obsessed with optimism, the quiet act of acknowledging ones limits can be a radical form of strength. You dont build real resilience through comparison, you forge it through integrationthe ability to stand firmly in ones humanity, even when others suffering looms larger.
When we stop ranking pain and start recognizing it, we trade moral comfort for genuine integrity. And in doing so, we not only become kinder humanswe become more honest ones too.
As the Trump administrations crackdown on immigration continues, keeping up with Immigrations and Custom Enforcement can feel like navigating a maze. From stories of agents raiding worksites and taking children in broad daylight to reported plans for new detention centers, the daily onslaught of alarming news makes it difficult to see the full picture of ICEs actions at any given moment.
Data journalist Michael Sparks is working on a solution. Sparks is a cartographer and coding editor at the Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization producing investigative stories about human rights, labor, and environmental concerns at sea. Hes applied skills from that role to create a new investigative database, The Machinery of Mass Detention: A Record of What Has Been Lost, designed as a centralized place to get updates on ICEs movements.
The database, which is housed at icetracking.org, includes continuously updating sections that track statistics like the total number of people currently detained by the U.S., the percentage of people held in ICE facilities with no criminal record, and the number of people who have died in ICE custody in the past month and year. The information is presented in succinct sections with citations from major news outlets that are easily fact-checked.
Icetracking.org is a devastating but necessary resource to keep the public informed on the state of the administrations immigration crackdown from a macro perspective, rather than simply in constant bursts of new information.
[Screenshot: icetracking.org]
How one data journalist is keeping track of ICE
In his day job at the Outlaw Ocean Project, Sparks uses tens of thousands of government documents, news articles, and social media posts to build databases of environmental and human rights abuses at sea. Before that, he served as a product developer at The New York Times for four years, where he honed his data storytelling skills. Sparks says he felt compelled to use his skillset to hold power to account after Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE officers in January.
I knew there was another vast amount of cruelty happening all over the country, and wanted people to realize that, he says.
Sparks took a little less than three weeks from starting the site to debuting it this week. Its essentially a database composed of aggregated reports and stories from national outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CBS News, as well as local sources like Tulsa World, Houston Chronicle, and The Minnesota Star Tribune.
The tracker’s code is programmed to send Sparks a list of relevant articles from these trusted sites every 48 hours, which he then manually approves or rejects, writes up a summary, and uses to update the site.
In a memo at the bottom of the site, Sparks emphasizes the human toll behind the database: What the numbers cannot capture is the texture of individual lives disruptedthe five-year-old taken from his walk home from school, the nurse shot dead while filming a protest, the grandmother detained at a routine government appointment. These cases, documented in the sections that follow, are not abstractions. They are the human particulars of a policy that has reshaped the landscape of American civil liberties.
[Screenshot: icetracking.org]
“I want people to feel emotion and be motivated to act”
Icetracking.orgs true impact rests in the way it displays information. Sparks says he pulled inspiration from The New Yorkers UX for his design, opting for a simple color palette of white and black with pops of red for the most important information, and organizing the whole page into clear sections.
When people first open icetracking.org, they see a succinct layout of seven key statistics, including the total number of people currently detained by ICE (around 73,000); the percentage of those being held with no criminal convictions (73.6%); and the number of people who died in ICE custody in 2025 (32, with 2026 expected to be even worse). Sparks says he updates these statistics any time one of his trusted sources publishes a new estimate.
Users can then navigate to a header bar, organized by sections, for more information on each of the categories. Each subcategory similarly opens with a layout of the most significant statistics, followed by links to top artcles. For one section, titled Corporate Network: Who Profits From ICE, Sparks created a color-coded chart to track the kinds of companies that have provided funding or support to ICE, as well as the scale of their contributions. These include the detention facility contractor GEO Group, the AI technologies company Palantir, and the tactical communications service CACI International.
The corporate network felt super important, Sparks says. These are detention ‘networks.’ Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are not doing this themselves. This section deserves a lot more reporting that, in an ideal world, I could do.
So far, Sparks says, the reaction to the tool has been a mix of gratitude and horror at seeing this information presented in one place. To be honest, thats the kind of response Im looking for, he says. I want people to feel emotion and be motivated to act.
With an upcoming FIFA World Cup being staged across the nation, 2026 was supposed to be a bumper year for tourism to the United States, driven in part by hordes of arriving soccer fans.
And yet, the U.S. tourism industry is worried. While the rest of the world saw a travel bump in 2025, with global international arrivals up 4%, the U.S. saw a downturn. The number of foreign tourists who came to the United States fell by 5.4% during the yeara sharper decline than the one experienced in 2017-18, the last time, outside the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that the industry was gripped by fears of a travel slump.
Policy stances from the Trump administration on everything from immigration to tariffs, along with currency swings and stricter border controls, have seemingly proved a turnoff to travelers from other countries, especially Canadiansthe single largest source of foreign tourists for the United States. Canadian travel to the U.S. fell by close to 30% in 2025. But it is not just visitors from Canada who are choosing to avoid the United States. Travel from Australia, India, and Western Europe, among others, has also shrunk.
We are experts in tourism. And while we dont possess a crystal ball, we believe that the tourism decline of 2025 could well continue through 2026. The evidence appears clear: Washingtons ongoing policies are putting off would-be travelers. In other words, the tourism industry is in the midst of a Trump slump.
Fewer Canadians heading south
The impact of Donald Trumps policies are perhaps most pronounced when looking north of the U.S. border. According to the U.S. Travel Association, Canadian visitors generated approximately 20.4 million visits and roughly $20.5 billion in visitor spending in 2024, supporting about 140,000 American jobs.
The economic impact of fewer Canadian visitors in 2025 affects mostly border states that depend heavily on people driving across the border for retail, restaurants, casinos, and short-stay hotels.
The sharp drop in return trips by car to Canada is a direct indication that border economies might be facing stress. This has led elected officials and tourism professionals to woo Canadians in recent months, sometimes with Canadian-only deals.
And it isnt just border states. In Las Vegas, some hotels are now offering currency rate parity between Canadian and U.S. dollars for rooms and gambling vouchers in a bid to attract customers.
Winter-sun states, such as Florida, Arizona, and California, are facing both fewer short-stay arrivals and an emerging drop-off in Canadian snowbirds. Reports indicate a noticeable increase in Canadians listing U.S. properties in Florida and Arizona for sale and canceling seasonal plans, threatening lodging, health care spending, and property tax revenue.
Economic and safety concerns
Economic policies pursued by the Trump administration appear to be among the main reasons visitors are staying away from the United States. Multiple tariff announcementspushing tariffs to the highest levels since 1935along with tougher border-related rhetoric and an aggressive foreign policy have contributed to a negative perception of the U.S. among would-be tourists.
Many foreigners report feeling unwelcome or uncertain about travel to the U.S., and some public leaders from Canada and Europe have urged citizens to spend domestically, instead. This significantly reduced intent to travel to the U.S. in 2025.
Meanwhile, exhange rates and inflation have further affected some aspiring travelers, especially Canadians. The Canadian dollar was weakened in 2025, making U.S. trips more expensive. This disproportionately affected day-trip and shopping-driven border crossings.
Travelers are also staying away from the U.S. because of safety concerns. Several countries have posted travel advisories about the risks of traveling to the U.S., with Germany being the latest. Although most worries are related to increased border controls, recent aggressive tactics by immigration agents have added to potential visitors decisions to avoid the U.S.
A wake-up call for the U.S.
The current tourism outlook is reason for concern. Julia Simpson, president and CEO of the industry association World Travel and Tourism Council, has described the situation as a wake-up call for the U.S. government.
The worlds biggest travel and tourism economy is heading in the wrong direction, she said in May 2025. While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the U.S. government is putting up the closed sign.
According to estimates, the U.S. stood to lose about $30 billion in international tourism in 2025 as travelers chose to travel elsewhere.
The disappointing figures for U.S. tourism follow a longer trend. The share of global international travel heading to the U.S. fell from 8.4% in 1996 to 4.9% in 2024 and was expected to drop to 4.8% in 2025. Meanwhile, arrivals to other top tourism destinations, including France, Greece, Mexico and Italy, are set to increase.
The decline is also being felt by the business tourism sector, with every major global region sending fewer people to the U.S. for work.
A World Cup bump?
So what does that mean for the upcoming FIFA World Cup, with 75% of the soccer matches being hosted across the United States? Traditionally, host nations benefit from sports events, although impacts are often overestimated. After a disappointing year, the U.S. tourism sector expects the World Cup to boost visits and revenue.
But Trumps foreign policy may undermine those expectations.
A new visa integrity fee of $250 and plans for social media screening of some visitors make travel to the U.S. less attractive. And there are growing calls for a boycott of the U.S. following some of Trumps policies, including his aggressive stance about Greenland.
Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter has suggested that fans avoid going to the U.S. for the World Cup.
It remains to be seen whether fans will follow his call. Bookings for flights and hotels were up after the dates and venues of games were announced in December.
But current political rhetoric is affecting travel decisions, especially given that fans from some specific countries may not be able to get visas. The U.S. government has imposed travel bans on Senegal, Ivory Coast, Iran, and Haiti, all of which have qualified for the World Cup.
European soccer leaders have even discussed the possibility of a boycott, although such an action is unlikely to happen, given the revenue at stake for national teams and football associations.
Will the Trump slump continue?
White House policies look unlikely to drastically change in the next few months. And this causes concern for tourism professionals, although most have remained silent about the recent immigration crackdown.
To make matters worse, federal funding for Brand USA, the national destination marketing organization, was cut deeply in mid-2025, leading to staff shortages that have reduced the countrys capacity to counter negative sentiment through positive promotion.
Soccer fans tend to be passionate about following their national side. And this could offset some of the impact of the Trump travel slump.
Yet, with sky-high atch ticket prices and the international reputation of the U.S. as a tourism destination damaged, we believe it is unlikely that the tourism industry will recover in 2026. It will take a long time and good strategies to repair the serious damage done to the nations image among travelers in the rest of the world.
Frédéric Dimanche is a professor and former director (2015-2025) of the Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Kelley A. McClinchey is on the teaching faculty of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
On February 10, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would ditch its endangerment findingthe mechanism that allows the government to regulate climate pollution. It’s “the single biggest attack in U.S. history on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a recent press briefing. Here’s a brief primer on what the rule is and what the repeal might mean.
What is the endangerment finding?
In 2009, the EPA issued a ruling saying that six greenhouse gasesincluding carbon dioxide and methanewere a danger to public health and welfare, citing a mountain of scientific evidence. The EPA issues similar endangerment findings for every pollutant it regulates, from mercury to ozone. (In the case of greenhouse gases, its known as the endangerment finding because it was a landmark decision.) Once an endangerment finding is in place, the EPA is required to regulate the pollutant and propose emission standards.
What led up to it?
When the Clean Air Act passed in 1970, it tasked the EPA with regulating pollutants that threaten health or welfareincluding the climate. The agency didn’t initially regulate greenhouse gases, but in the late 1990s it acknowledged it had the authority to act. In 2003, the Bush EPA reversed course, declaring that CO2 and other greenhouse gases werent air pollutants. The Supreme Court overruled that four years later, calling greenhouse gases unambiguously pollutants and ordering the EPA to act on science and set vehicle standards.
What regulations did it help create?
In 2023, the EPA finalized a rule to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas, at oil and gas plants. In 2024, the agency created rules to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, which are responsible for around a quarter of the countrys climate pollution. The EPA also finalized clean cars standards to reduce pollution from passenger cars, light trucks, and vans, and new standards for heavy-duty trucks; transportation accounts for around 28% of U.S. emissions.
Now what?
The repeal is specifically tied to vehicle emission standards, so that’s what the administration will try to ditch next. Although the methane and power plant regulations also rely on the endangerment finding, those will take extra steps to undo. (Its worth noting, however, that the EPA has already proposed getting rid of the power plant regulations and delayed implementing the methane rule.)
It’s likely that the changes could eventually fail in court; since 2009, the impacts from climate change have become even more obvious, from more extreme heat waves to more destructive wildfires, storms, and rising seas. The Trump administration is recycling the Bush administration’s arguments that CO2 and other greenhouse gases aren’t air pollutants, which the Supreme Court already rejected.
What do the changes mean for business?
Some automakers, including Ford, have argued for stability in greenhouse gas regulations and supported the EPAs vehicle emission standards. Regulatory uncertainty makes it harder for companies to plan.
“Undermining the endangerment finding would create more chaos, risk, and uncertainty for businesses already grappling with rising costs, extreme weather, and market volatility,” says Sean Hackett, a senior manager for energy transition at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “We’re thinking about it within the bigger context that this rollback is just the latest in the series of actions that threaten business stability, investment, and innovation.”
The American Petroleum Institute has said that although it supports the repeal of emission standards for vehicles, it believes that the EPA has the authority to regulate climate pollution from power plants and other stationary sources. (Legal experts from the Natural Resources Defense Council argue that there isn’t a distinction, and that both types of pollution can be regulated.) API supprts methane regulations and says that the industry is working to reduce emissions.
For automakers that are already dealing with the loss of EV incentives, it’s one more factor that could push American companies further behind global competitors that are moving to electric cars.
“Repealing the finding doesn’t remove climate risk or investor expectations or global market demandswhat it does do is it removes that stable federal reference point that companies use to plan,” Hackett says. “The regulatory whiplash from removing the endangerment finding would make it harder to sequence their investments in things like engines, batteries, supply chains, and workforce training. Then that uncertainty itself becomes a material financial risk.”
We talk constantly about agein politics, in leadership, in debates about retirement and the future of work. Yet we rarely stop to ask a simple question: What is age, exactly? Most of us rely on a single number, as if people were stamped with a vintage year like bottles of wine. But age is far from a fixed or universal metric. It is multidimensional, deeply unequal, and increasingly misleading when used as a shortcut for ability, potential, or readiness.
As people live longer, change careers more often, and experience work in different conditions, understanding what age actually measures is becoming essential for companies trying to build fairer workplaces and adapt to demographic shifts. The future of work will not be shaped by older workers alone. It will be shaped by widening age gaps. And by how organizations respond.
Chronological age: The number of years since birth
This most familiar kind of age governs everything from school entry and voting rights to retirement policies and workplace norms. Yet this way of organizing human life is a relatively recent bureaucratic invention, made possible by modern administrative systems.
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Chronological age made sense in standardized industrial societies, where careers were linear, life expectancy was shorter, and work was more uniform. Today, it is a blunt instrument. As a predictor of health, performance, motivation, or longevity, it performs poorly. Two people of the same age can have radically different capacities and trajectories, shaped by education, income, working conditions, stress, and life events.
But organizations still lean heavily on this number to make decisions about hiring, promotion, development, and exit. In a world of increasingly unequal aging, this reliance is becoming not just inaccurate but unfair.
Biological age: The condition of the body and brain
Advances in medicine and epidemiology show that people age at dramatically different speeds. Some 55-year-olds have the physiological profile of someone in their forties. Others show signs typically associated with much later life.
These differences are shaped by socioeconomic conditions, education, exposure to chronic stress, environmental factors, and levels of autonomy at work. Long hours, repetitive strain, shift work, and lack of control take a biological toll over time. Thats why for some workers longer careers are perfectly sustainable while for others, worn down by decades of strain, working longer can mean never enjoying a healthy retirement.
Biological age forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: Aging is not equal, and work is one of the most powerful drivers of that inequality.
Subjective age: All about self-perception
Most adults report feeling younger than their chronological age, sometimes by a decade or more. And thats great because feeling younger is often associated with better physical health, cognitive resilience, and emotional well-being.
But the gap matters. Feeling moderately younger can be energizing. Feeling dramatically younger can slip into denial, leading people to ignore health signals or overestimate physical limits. Subjective age shapes confidence, ambition, openness to learning, how people interpret feedback, and how they imagine their future.
Interestingly, as people age their definition of what counts as old tends to move upward. Its a reminder that age is psychological and cultural, constantly renegotiated.
Professional age: The number of years in a company or a craft
How long you have been doing a particular role or craft or been working in an industry matters probably more than the birth date on your ID.
Its increasingly common to be a beginner at 50, a mid-career experimenter at 60, or a seasoned expert at 30. People retrain, pivot industries, take career breaks, and reinvent themselves in ways that would have been rare a generation ago.
Alas, many organizations still assume that chronological age and expertise rise together, which causes a mismatch between talent practices and reality. Experienced beginners are underestimated. Young experts are questioned.
The gaps between these different ages tend to grow
Gaps grow between chronological and biological age, shaped by inequality and work conditions. Between chronological and subjective age, shaped by health, mindset, and culture. Between chronological and professional age, shaped by career transitions and lifelong learning.
Workplaces built on the assumption that age neatly tracks with ability, experience, or stamina are increasingly out of sync with society. As these gaps widen, age-based policies become less sustainable and more discriminatory. And they waste enormous amounts of human capital.
Make the workplace more age-agnostic
To address these issues, we need to move toward a more age-agnostic approach. For example:1. Stop using age as a proxy for skill, adaptability, or potential. Move away from coded assumptions about being too young or too old. Base decisions on actual competencies, learning habits, motivation, and the cognitive and physical requirements of roles. Chronological age predicts little of this.
2. Redesign work for people who age differently. Introduce more flexibility in schedules and locations, invest in ergonomic improvements, rotate tasks to reduce physical strain, increase autonomy, and offer phased retirement or transitions into mentoring and knowledge-transfer roles. The goal is to reduce the biological cost of work.
3. Treat reskilling as a lifelong process. As career transitions become normal, invest in training without age limits. Support adult apprenticeships and coaching for second- and third-career moves. Fifty-year-old juniors may be among the most underutilized talent pools.
4. Actively audit for hidden age bias. Scrutinize recruiting and promotion practices for coded language (high-energy, digital native) and reluctance to train older employees. Address ageism with explicit guidelines and accountability.
5. Promote intergenerational collaboration. Build mixed-age teams where experience and fresh perspectives reinforce each other through reverse mentoring, cross-generational projects, and shared problem-solving. Age diversity is also cognitive diversity.
Age is not a single measure. It is a constellation of biological, psychological, social, and professional realities that rarely align. The companies that will thrive in an aging, unequal, multistage career world are the ones that understand these gaps, reduce the inequalities behind them, and design systems that support people across long, varied working lives.
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