I was born during America’s Bicentennial.
Although I don’t remember the fireworks or the parades, I grew up in the long shadow of that celebration. The Bicentennial wasn’t just a birthday party for the country; it was a declaration of faith in the future. The message was everywhere, even if no one said it aloud. America was moving forward. Every generation would have more opportunity than the one before it. Progress might be uneven, but it was inevitable.
That optimism became the backdrop of my childhood.
Study hard. Go to college. Find a career. Work harder than everyone else. Stay loyal. Save your money. Buy the house. Build a retirement account. Raise your children. By the time you reach fifty, you’ll finally be able to exhale.
I’m turning fifty in a few weeks.
Instead of feeling like I’ve arrived somewhere, I feel as though I’ve drifted out to sea with no shoreline in sight.
That isn’t where I imagined I’d be at this point in my life.
When you’re twenty-five, fifty exists almost as folklore. It’s the age where you’ve earned your confidence. Where you’ve accumulated enough wisdom to stop questioning every decision. Where the mortgage is manageable, retirement has finally begun compounding, your children are building lives of their own, and the frantic scrambling of early adulthood has settled into something resembling stability.
I wasn’t expecting perfection.
I was expecting solid ground.
I thought stability was the reward for doing everything we were told to do. And I did.
I built a career that spanned nearly three decades. I finished my degree while working full time. I earned certifications. I rebuilt my finances after devastating setbacks. I saved. I invested. I bought another home. I tried to make responsible decisions instead of exciting ones because I believed that was how you built a life that could weather uncertainty.
But uncertainty doesn’t negotiate with preparation.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had to start over.
In 2008, I lost my job. Within months I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Surgery was followed by radioactive iodine treatment. My marriage unraveled. I eventually filed for bankruptcy after watching every carefully constructed piece of my financial life collapse under the weight of circumstances I couldn’t control.
Standing in the wreckage of those years, I made myself a promise.
Never again.
Never again would I be so financially vulnerable. Never again would I assume tomorrow would take care of itself. I rebuilt my life with a determination that bordered on obsession. I finished what I hadn’t finished. I became better at my profession. I saved more aggressively. I prepared for emergencies because I had learned, firsthand, that emergencies eventually come for all of us.
I believed resilience was something you accumulated.
I believed surviving once meant you would be better equipped if life ever tested you again. Then I was laid off last year.
Not because I stopped performing. Not because I stopped caring. Not because I suddenly became less capable after twenty-five years of leading people, building organizations, coaching executives, solving impossible problems, and helping other people navigate uncertainty.
I lost my job because that is increasingly what work looks like.
Companies restructure. Budgets shrink. Investors demand efficiencies. Artificial intelligence changes priorities. Entire careers become line items on spreadsheets.
The language is always polished.
Transformation.
Optimization.
Rightsizing.
Operational efficiency.
Words carefully chosen to soften the reality that someone’s livelihood has just become expendable.
I’ve submitted well over a thousand applications.
I’ve rewritten my résumé more times than I can count. I’ve watched hiring become increasingly automated while candidates become increasingly invisible. I’ve learned that decades of experience can be interpreted as a risk instead of an asset. Somewhere along the way I stopped introducing myself by what I did because I no longer knew how to answer the question without explaining the past year of my life.
What surprises me isn’t the fear.
It’s the grief.
Not grief for youth. I have no desire to be twenty-five again.
It’s grief for certainty.
For believing that effort and outcome shared some moral relationship. For believing institutions rewarded loyalty. For believing careers generally moved forward if you worked hard enough. For believing retirement was a destination instead of something that could vanish while you were simply trying to survive.
And as I’ve wrestled with all of this, another realization has settled in beside it. I wasn’t just born during the Bicentennial.
I was born after women won the right to open a bank account without a husband’s permission. After Title IX became law. After Roe v. Wade. I grew up believing that history, however imperfectly, bent toward greater freedom. That my daughters would inherit more choices than I had, just as I had inherited more than the women who came before me.
I never imagined I would turn fifty in a country where my daughters have fewer federally protected reproductive rights than I did the day I was born.
I never imagined that sentence would be true.
Not because I believed equality had been achieved, but because I believed progress, once earned, was difficult to reverse.
I’ve learned how naïve that was.
Rights can be taken away.
Economic security can disappear.
A lifetime of work can be erased by a restructuring meeting scheduled on a Tuesday morning. The future can become smaller instead of larger.
Perhaps that’s what has unsettled me most about approaching fifty. It isn’t the gray hair or the changing face in the mirror. It’s realizing that many of the assumptions my generation quietly built our lives around were never guarantees. They were moments in history that we mistook for permanent victories.
Maybe that’s why so many people my age feel untethered.
We followed a map that no longer matches the terrain.
We were told that if we prepared, planned, sacrificed, delayed gratification, and remained adaptable, we would eventually reach a season where life became less precarious.
Instead, many of us find ourselves rebuilding careers, draining retirement accounts, caring for aging parents, supporting adult children through an economy we barely recognize, and wondering how we became old enough to remember the promises while still being young enough to live with their consequences.
People like to celebrate resilience.
They call it inspiring.
They tell us we’re proof that you can always reinvent yourself.
What they rarely acknowledge is that reinvention is often born from loss. It costs money, identity, confidence, relationships, and time. It asks you to bury versions of yourself you fully expected to grow old with.
I’m still standing.
I’m still applying.
I’m still writing.
I’m still trying to believe that there is another chapter waiting for me.
But as I approach fifty, I’ve stopped measuring success by whether I managed to avoid falling apart.
I’ve started measuring it by whether I can continue to believe in a future that looks nothing like the one I spent decades preparing for.
I was born during America’s Bicentennial, when an entire nation celebrated its past while imagining an even brighter future.
Perhaps my generation’s work is different.
Perhaps our task is not to mourn the future we were promised, but to tell the truth about the one we inherited—and to insist, despite every reason to give up, that the generations coming after us deserve something better than simply becoming experts at surviving.
Kathy Yost embodies a remarkable blend of professional acumen and personal depth. With a career spanning over twenty years as an HR executive and Talent Acquisition expert in diverse sectors in Baltimore and the District of Columbia, her expertise is both broad and deep. Kathy’s foundation in Business Administration in Human Resources Management has been the bedrock of her professional journey, influencing her roles in startups, Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, and government contracting. Find her on Instagram at @kjybecauseisaidso.
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