Social Media Fluency is Easy to Find. Earned Wisdom Isn't.

Workplaces Keep Confusing Speed with Substance

I recently watched a few seasons of Younger on Netflix, and while it’s packaged as a light, fast-paced comedy, the premise hit home. A smart, capable woman pretends to be 26 just to get back into publishing, navigating close calls and awkward moments along the way. We’re meant to laugh at the deception. But what lingered for me wasn’t the comedy – it was the believability of this setup.

Not so much lying about your age, but the quieter message beneath it – that age is something to manage, soften, or strategically hide. Leave graduation dates off your résumé. Don’t go back too far in your work history. Avoid phrases like “25+ years of experience,” as if depth itself were a liability.

That’s where many workplaces miss the mark. They fixate on surface-level gaps (like familiarity with Hootsuite) and ignore deep structural strengths like knowing how a post will land with customers – or simply knowing when not to post. They confuse what’s easy to see with what actually carries weight. In Younger, age is treated as something to hide. In real life, it’s often the very thing doing the heavy lifting once the work gets complicated.

When Friction Is Actually a Feature

In Younger, Liza’s age causes friction, and that friction drives much of the show. She’s not instantly fluent in every new platform. She occasionally misses cultural cues that should be obvious to a 26-year-old. She has to work a bit harder to fit into an office designed around youth. Those gaps are obvious, and they’re easy to point out.

They’re also mostly irrelevant.

Social media can be learned quickly. Tools change constantly; platforms come and go. These are skills measured in days or weeks, not careers. What Liza brings instead is lived experience: knowing how to manage conflict, how to build trust with clients, how to read a room, and how to spot patterns before they become problems.

Those skills don’t show up neatly on a résumé, and they’re not acquired through tutorials or certifications. They’re earned over years, usually the hard way.

The irony is that while the show treats age as something Liza has to conceal, it repeatedly shows that her experience is what keeps messy situations from unraveling.

Ageism in the Workplace

Listen to enough job postings and you start to hear the same coded language on repeat: fast-paced, high energy, digital native, culture fit.

None of these phrases are inherently bad, but the problem is how they seem to stand in for qualities like judgment, adaptability, and decision-making under pressure. Speed and confidence can be a dangerous combination without experience, discernment, and restraint. Such qualities are quieter, harder to measure, and more valuable over time.

Organizations that overweight skills that take days to learn while discounting ones that take years to earn, are not doing themselves a favour.

A Counterexample That Gets It Right

If Younger shows what happens when experience is hidden, The Intern (starring Robert De Niro) shows what happens when it’s valued.

Robert De Niro’s character isn’t brought into the business for speed or flash. He doesn’t dominate meetings or try to prove he still “has it.” He listens, he notices, he steps in when it matters. His presence lowers the temperature, sharpens decisions, and quietly prevents small issues from becoming expensive ones.

Experience doesn’t slow down the organization. It reduces risk, and it does so without needing constant validation.

Why This Bias Sticks Around

Ageism doesn’t persist because business leaders are villains. It persists because it’s baked into how we think about and talk about work. As a culture, we equate youth with potential and experience with baggage. We confuse speed with competence and calm with complacency.

Those assumptions slip into hiring and promotion decisions almost unnoticed.

The result is that many organizations only rediscover the value of experience after they’ve paid for ignoring it: repeated mistakes, burned-out teams, strained client relationships, and constant resets when you have to rehire and retrain.

When “Culture Fit” Becomes a Smokescreen

“Culture fit” sounds reasonable, even enlightened. In practice, it often becomes a polite way of enforcing sameness – same references, same rhythms, same stage of life. As if younger employees cannot deal with a forty- or fifty-something colleague in their midst.

Experience introduces contrast. It slows conversations just enough to ask better questions. It challenges assumptions when a team of similarly aged employees slip into “groupthink”. In environments addicted to speed and novelty, that kind of perspective can feel uncomfortable, but it works.

So instead of saying, “We’re uneasy with experience,” organizations say, “They might not be a fit.”

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

The cost of undervaluing experience rarely shows up right away. It appears later, when urgency replaces importance, when the same mistakes keep resurfacing, and when momentum hides fragility.

Experienced professionals don’t eliminate risk. They help organizations choose which risks are worth taking and which are just “shiny objects”. That distinction becomes more important, not less, as complexity increases.

The Takeaway

Experience isn’t sexy, it’s structural. It’s the framework that holds when conditions change, stakes rise, and easy answers disappear. When employers place too much value on what can be learned quickly and too little on what only time can teach, they aren’t being progressive. They’re being shortsighted.

In the end, this isn’t really about age at all. It’s about what we choose to value. And whether, in our rush to look modern and move fast, we’re quietly discarding the very qualities that keep complexity from turning into chaos.

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Every message has two jobs: get noticed and get remembered. That’s where I come in – helping businesses turn everyday communication into something clear, compelling, and built to last. If you’re ready to sharpen your story, let’s talk.

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Neil Moore is a communications specialist, freelance journalist, masters athlete, and family man who believes that excellence has no expiry date.

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