Do we need to be flexible in life?

Colm O’Regan tackles adaptability in life this week.

There’s a passing phase that hits me every few months. It’s the sense that everything I do will shortly be rendered obsolete and I’m going to have to retrain or retire to a Curmudgeons Home with a load of other inflexibles.

Just me and George Hook shouting at young people going viral. (Actually he’s probably way more adaptable than me). What’s the age you start looking over your shoulder? I hope it’s not yet but I don’t know when it is and the fact that I don’t know when it is makes me look over my shoulder.

I keep hearing we need to be agile and flexible in today’s economy. It doesn’t help that at the same time my hamstrings and back muscles seem to be seizing up like a vice-grips that were lost in a ploughed field.

Startups make me anxious. Well specifically the disrupty ones. In fact the word disruption makes me nervous. You used to know where you stood with disruption. You mainly stood in the airport wondering if your flight was affected by the disruption caused by French air-traffic controllers. That kind of disruption I could handle because I knew where it was coming from and where you were going with it — which is nowhere.

Now disruption caused by startups could come from any angle. It would sweep the rug from under you, literally. I’m just waiting for an exciting unicorn called ‘shRug’ , a startup that disrupts the concept of movable floor coverings.

(A unicorn is a company that makes about €4.65 profit but everyone is so excited about it so now it’s worth €1bn. See? It’s even disrupted your idea of what a unicorn is. )

I feel all old and unflexible and obsolete these days. I do comedy to a modest number of people in a room and I have to be in the room there with them. Meanwhile younger, more imaginative people make videos with phones, seen by millions.

I write for a newspaper that still has the audacity to print copies, I write paper books and I’m sometimes on the radio. But even radio can’t last in its current form as it’s being listened to by ears. Surely that primitive method of absorbing sound will be replaced by some sort of telepathy. All around me it feels like the things I know are becoming redundant.

My unease is not startup’s fault. I’m just jealous of their desire to see change the way the world does things. I’m jealous of the speed at which they scale up. You could be talking to a friend on Tuesday who has his trousers tied up with baler-twine and by Friday he’s in Palo Alto about to “finalise something big with VC guys”.

That’s a lie. I don’t have any friends like this any more. They’ve realised I’m a probably a sinkhole for ambitious conversation. I’m jealous of their precociousness. 17 year olds who’ve invented an app that has redefined the sandwich. Wearing blazers and appearing on lists of 20 under 20 who are going own your life this time next year.

When I’m in this self-pitying, whiny mood, I turn to the internet for succour. Specifically googling “people who became super-wealthy later in life”. It is a comfort to know how many there are. Charles Darwin didn’t publish On the Origin of the Species until he was 50. I like to assume Darwin was working in data- entry or a call centre until he was 49 and then decided ‘Feckit I’ll give the oul evolution a go’. And look at him now! Denied by half of Americans.

A quick glance at these lists is enough to disrupt my chain of thought and I’m back at work again. For the next few months anyway.