I often say that I have lived a charmed life. I have.
I studied Chemistry in college, then went directly to graduate school, where I earned a Ph.D. I followed this up with a few years of bliss living in Santa Barbara during a post-doctoral fellowship.
Yet, after all of that education, I struggled to find a job in my field. It was disappointing but not overwhelming. I had grown up with the belief that if I wanted to have a career, all I needed to do was go to college and get a degree, and everything would be fine.
It turns out, everything was fine. I signed up for an IT boot camp that promised job placement upon successful completion. Yes, there was a time when those things existed; it is a shame they are gone.
6 months later, I was a working, professional computer programmer. It was reasonably difficult work, but that isn’t what I remember about it.
What I remember about that job, and all the IT jobs that followed, was how effortlessly I glided from one to the next. Up until recently, if I wanted a new job, all I had to do was put in a little effort, and I had one.
People ask me occasionally if I am somehow upset about the fact that a career in Chemistry didn’t work out for me. I am not. Mind you, I do miss going to work every day in a lab, doing experiments, and then going home. It was much more fun than anything I experienced in my corporate IT life.
But I can’t be upset about it. When one door closed for me, another opened. I had to choose that direction and work at it, as anyone who is not born into generational wealth must. Fortunately, I had options, opportunities.
Fast-forward to today. I am a good bit older than I was during the job-hopping days of my youth. I even dared to take a few career breaks recently, so that I could experience some of the things retirement promised, without having to wait forever and hoping I lived long enough to see it through.
Unfortunately, retirement is not feasible right now, so after a break of about a year, I started looking for work.
This is when I experienced something new. I had expected that the process would be short, a few months tops. I applied for job after job, hundreds of them. Overwhelmingly, I heard nothing. Occasionally, I would get a call from a recruiter, which would seem promising and positive, and would end with a firm promise on their part to follow up with me. They rarely did.
This process dragged on for nearly a year. By the time a rare interview came along, I was so nervous that I blew it. It was depressing.
I spoke with a friend of mine, of a similar vintage and in the same career position as me. He was having the same, strange, new, unsettling experience.
That’s when it finally dawned on me. As an educated, heterosexual, white male, I have benefited from belonging to a privileged class all my life.
Now, things are a bit different. Now I am older.
I’m not saying anything was handed to me. I was not born into wealth; I had to work hard to succeed in life. The thing I didn’t realize is that when I was working, I didn’t face the same barriers as so many others in our society. I still had to work to get up that hill, but my hill wasn’t as high as everyone else’s.
When you spend your life in the container of that privilege, it doesn’t feel like privilege. It seems normal. It is important for people who look like me to step out of it and understand reality.
I am fortunate that maybe, just maybe, I experienced some age-related bias. I knew it existed, but I needed to learn this, to see how it feels. I am more empathetic and grateful now that my hill to climb is a little harder.
I can’t fix what ails our society, and what causes so many of our backward, awful biases to persist. However, I can grow as a person, appreciate how fortunate I have been, and in some small way, share this message and hope it wakes somebody else up.