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Vanishing Tribe

By Chris Colcord

Fort Wayne Reader

2018-07-05

One thing about getting older, you definitely have to decide exactly how much energy you’re willing to invest in pretending that you’re still relevant in a world that’s passing you by. It’s a tricky decision; nobody want to admit that they’ve become culturally insignificant, but you’re not quite ready to accept the cold reality of your true place in the
world, either. What battles should you fight to stay relevant? Even someone like me, who’s always been aware of his marginalized existence, even I recognize that it’s been a solid decade since I’ve been taken seriously as a reliable witness to the times. Not as a player, mind you; just as a witness. And I’ve been slouching toward oblivion ever since.

Which sounds depressing as all get out, and even morbid, like something Kafka would come up with on a bleak day (they were all bleak days,) but on the contrary: I embrace my insignificance. It’s a kick. It’s kind of freeing to know that you owe posterity nothing. All that existential thrashing about when you were young, those anguished post-grad, post-modern ruminations, it’s actually a joyous moment when you jam all that uselessness in the rear-view mirror and just let it rip. When you recognize that nobody’s paying attention to you, you have this weird, clear-eyed opportunity to be fearless about the things you should have been fearless about all along.

Sometimes, for fun, I keep track of famous people who are close to being my exact contemporaries: Kenneth Branagh. James Comey. Heather Locklear. I read their names and I compare the trajectories of our lives, thinking, Shoot! I should have run the FBI! I could have directed Thor! I ought to be in rehab now! And then I wonder if these
famous people—who have often found themselves blinded by the light of international publicity and infamy—if they, too, feel that their relevance is slipping away, every day. Probably inevitable, I’m guessing.

Two of my best friends work in the tech industry, which is one of the most ageist, condescending industries imaginable toward middle-aged workers. I’m fascinated by their struggles to remain relevant in a time when the industry prefers 22-year old, flip-flop wearing gamers to old guys with experience and knowledge. How do they stay sane? What do they do when there’s a take-over and some VP tells them, We’d like you to meet your new boss: he’s 26.

To both of them I passed along the book Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by the writer Dan Lyons, to show them that they’re not alone. Lyons—who was born the same year as me—was the Newsweek tech writer who got fired in 2012 in a cost-cutting move and found himself nearly broke and desperate for a job. With his
background in tech, he decided to try and re-invent himself, at age 51, as a “marketing fellow” for HubSpot, a hot tech start-up that had $100 million dollars in venture capital. The firm hired him in 2013, and the book chronicles his bizarre adventures at the company for the 20 months he worked there, until he was forced to resign in late 2014.

The book is funny because Lyons is funny—Lyons has written for the HBO show Silicon Valley, a critically-regarded satire of the tech industry—but Disrupted is ultimately more enraging than humorous. What he clearly intended to be a funny memoir about an old doofus trying to fit in with hip Millennials turned into a surprisingly dark tale. Lyons portrays HubSpot as the apotheosis of rancid, “tech-bro” culture —sexist, ageist, with a seemingly hip, youth-friendly environment masking a more sinister intent. Nerf gun fights, beer and cider taps, Happy Hours, shower pods that serve as hook-up spots, etc., plus a management team that seemed to take its cues from Scientology or some other cult in their operating policies. It’s a company that believes in standing desks and walking meetings and no offices, but it also has a CEO who wrote an article for LinkedIn about the importance of bringing teddy bears to company meetings. And like most cults, the company has developed its own language—nobody gets “fired” at HubSpot, but rather they “graduate” to exciting new chapters in their lives.

So, imagine a 50-year old newspaper guy, who’s been hanging with cynical, bitterly funny newspaper writers his whole career, suddenly encountering teddy bears and hearing about employees who’ve “graduated.” It’s inevitable that Lyons would not fit in with the culture surrounding him, and that he would effortlessly insult his much-younger colleagues with seeming innocuous comments. It’s hard not to take Lyons side in every silly controversy he found himself in—he’s a reliable voice and you feel the same dumbfounded outrage that he did. But it’s painful to see this guy trying to keep his
job and his dignity intact, for in spite of his profound discomfort at HubSpot, he needed the job.

And though there’s obviously some generational battles going on in Disrupted, Millennials aren’t the villains in the book — the villains are venture capitalists. Lyons lays it all out in detail, this new paradigm about tech start-ups, and it’s an eye-opener. To wit: nobody cares if the start-ups make money. Twitter doesn’t make money. What they do care about is a company’s “buzz” and whether the valuation will lead to an IPO. That’s the game. “Go public or go broke” is the mantra. Puff up the company’s valuation, get to the IPO, then cash out. Venture capitalists make killings at IPOs.
Who doesn’t? The workers, the guys who are willing to be underpaid because they work for such a hip, happening company, but will soon “graduate” to other challenges when they’re no longer needed. It’s an American worker story as old as the robber barons.

As of this writing, my friends are still thriving in their jobs, even though they stand out like unicorns. My hope is that they stay as long as they want, though I wonder if they can hear that clock ticking, like those armbands in the sci-fi movie Logan’s Run. (In Logan’s Run, the wristbands click off the remaining moments of your life, which is mandated at age 30.) I have more than a rooting interest in their fight to stay relevant; part of a vanishing tribe, we are, and I’d like to pretend that we’ll hang around together for a good, long while. Not that anyone will notice, of course.