On the Idea of the “Young 40”

26 Jan, 2026

Last week, I tried to write a personal essay—an observational piece—on Korean “young 40s”¹. To be clear, this isn’t about everyone in their forties, but a specific subset: those in positions of power whose ambition, habits, and behaviors I’ve observed closely in my professional experience. I wrote it all out and even pressed publish, but I unpublished it not long after. The speed of my own hesitation surprised me. I wasn’t afraid of offending anyone so much as I was unsettled by how personal the piece had become.

In 2025, I worked for a forty-something woman producer who pushed me into a deep depression. As I tried to pull myself together, I fell back into my oldest coping habit: asking why. What made her so entitled, so delusional, and so strikingly lacking in self-awareness? When I looked closer, I realized I had met this person before—just in different forms.

As I connected the dots between my worst professional encounters, one similarity stood out like a sore thumb: nearly all of them were in their forties. Throughout my twenties, I had repeatedly worked under people in this demographic. They were often in positions of power, and sustained proximity allowed me, unintentionally, to observe shared mannerisms and patterns of thought.

It is easy to imagine how the piece I was writing began to slide from detached observation into personal rant. However, as I indulged in these cathartic, absolute observations, the satisfaction I felt in figuring these people out was quickly replaced by an uneasy realization: without reflection, I was watching a future version of myself.

People often ask why I spend so much mental energy thinking about these people when most brush them off like an annoying mosquito. I usually answer that they have been the bane of my working adult life. But I know my fixation goes deeper than annoyance. There is something about them that strikes a personal nerve—something uncomfortably familiar.

I have always been single-minded and ambitious. Ask anyone who knows me, and they will double—if not triple—your assumptions. As naive as it sounds, by the age of nine, I knew I wanted to be a successful writer. There was never a version of my life in which I had to compromise that dream for “reality,” because success felt inevitable. So when I left school and entered the so-called real world, only to realize how difficult it would be to make those dreams materialize, I was devastated.

In my head, I had already been living as a screenwriter for years. I held onto that delusion for so long that when reality shut me out, it felt like a personal attack on my entire being. That was when I finally understood what it meant to equate my self-worth with accomplishments—measuring my life against an imagined future instead of the one I was actually living.

At the ripe age of twenty-one, I began to feel time speeding past me faster than I could keep up (I know—I’m dramatic; I always have been). But when I finally sat with my fear of failure and my insecurity, I saw that the timeline I was racing against was a false one—drilled into me by school, productivity culture, and a narrow road map to follow if you want “success.” I needed to find my own pace. Once I did, it became easier to accept that I wasn’t a failure; I was simply a new player in a game that had just begun.

The forties appear to be an uncomfortable tipping point: the first real confrontation with mortality, paired with the pressure to have achieved something “big” before being repositioned as a source of wisdom. Add to that the loss of the automatic visibility that comes with youth—visibility granted simply by existing—and it becomes easier to understand what I’d call unfair invisibility. I can see how, after decades of work, what they have accomplished is something to be proud of and to want to show off. But when that pride collides with the first real awareness of time slipping away, the desire to assert relevance can feel urgent, sometimes desperate. For some, this may create a pull toward youth. This feels like their last chance to BE someone before becoming the wise person passing the torch and advising the young on their way to becoming something.

I suspect that this hunger for status and admiration is often less about an internal compass built over decades and more about fragile, career-dependent self-esteem. That might explain the compulsive recounting of past successes, the “back in my day” advice, and the harsh judgments directed downward—most often at younger people—when, too frequently, we confuse time spent with inherent superiority.

To return to the game metaphor, imagine life as Animal Crossing. If I started playing today, I couldn’t catch up to someone who has been playing for twenty years—not in a day, and not even in a month. Of course, they would have more resources and connections. That accumulation is natural and even admirable. But it becomes a blind spot when it’s mistaken for moral or personal evolution. Having a “better island” reflects playtime, not necessarily a better player.

Without active self-awareness, I can see how my own career-dependent self-esteem could calcify into something similar. Writing this felt less like an indictment of others and more like a warning to myself: to know where I stand, to separate worth from achievement, and to make sure that when I reach the next stage of life, I am not mistaking success for personal value, or measuring others by my own metrics of a life well lived. I want to be a grown-up like the teachers I still keep in contact with, and the mentors from previous jobs, with whom I can’t wait to catch up from time to time -- the people whose generosity, curiosity, and groundedness in life shine like a lighthouse, showing all a path worth following.

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