I turned 60 this week.
I have never worked as much as I do now. I have never had this much fun. And I have also felt completely overwhelmed by the speed of AI development, and frightened of becoming redundant.
All of those things can be true.
Today, a mailing-list conversation about AI and Europe brought me back to that tension. Someone shared a Hacker News discussion about suicide among middle-aged men. Among the comments are people trying to imagine a future for themselves when the work they have spent decades learning may no longer provide the same security, income or sense of purpose.
Those are people describing uncertainty and distress. The discussion does not establish that AI is causing changes in suicide rates. It does make it difficult to talk about technological progress as though the people living through it were an incidental detail.
I recognise the fear of becoming redundant. In January 2025, I was overwhelmed enough to sit down and write something for myself. A manifesto, perhaps. I no longer remember exactly what triggered it that time, but I remember the question: what do I have to offer as more of what I know how to do becomes something AI can do too?
I called it “Our time to shine”. It was published on 8 January 2025. Today I shared it again. Having just turned 60, I find myself reading it a little differently.
The central possibility still matters to me. When tools make more things possible, the experience we bring to deciding what to do with them can become more useful.
Context. Judgment. Understanding how an organisation actually works. Knowing which question needs asking. Recognising when a technically impressive answer has missed the point. Helping people trust one another enough to try something unfamiliar. These are things we can spend years learning, often through mistakes we would rather not repeat.
AI gives me new ways to put that experience to work. I can describe a problem, explore alternatives, build something, examine what happened and try again. I can bring together parts of my experience that previously remained in separate conversations, documents or half-finished ideas.
Being 60 doesn't automatically make me good at any of that. Younger colleagues have things to teach me, and experience can leave us with assumptions that badly need updating. The useful combination is experience with curiosity: enough knowledge to contribute, enough openness to discover that something has changed.
That is also why I don't want my contribution reduced to standing beside the work and dispensing wisdom. I want to be in it. Making things, getting things wrong, having my thinking challenged and helping other people discover what they can do.
In the same mailing-list conversation, I described how I go to bed having started work for my AI team to continue overnight. My mornings have become wonderfully interesting. There is something to examine, something to question, something to take further. The pleasure is real, and so is the learning.
This is one of the things I wanted to capture in the original manifesto: curiosity and joy belong in the conversation about work. So do patience, generosity, the ability to connect experiences and the willingness to help someone else find their footing. A later stage of a career can give us room to pursue work because it is meaningful and interesting. I want to use that room.
When the scale of the change becomes overwhelming, I return to Stephen Covey's Circle of Influence: put effort into what you can actually affect. For me, that means working on my own understanding, trying the tools, asking for honest feedback and finding useful things to do with other people.
There are limits to what that can answer. I don't know whether my little manifesto helps someone who is already in a downward spiral. I said that in my reply today, and I mean it. Losing work, security or a sense of belonging cannot be answered with a cheerful instruction to experiment more. My experience gives me something to share. It doesn't give me a guarantee to hand to someone else.
And a person's worth is greater than what a labour market currently rewards. Professional relevance matters. Paying the bills matters. Being needed matters. Our right to care and respect does not depend on keeping ahead of a model release.
What the manifesto gave me was a way to think about my own contribution, and a direction in which to move. I could work on remaining useful, interested and involved. I could learn with the tools instead of spending all my energy imagining what they might take away.
That remains my answer to myself at 60. Keep learning. Bring the experience. Let it be challenged. Build something worth having. Help someone else do the same.
I still think this can be our time to shine.