The Exit Door Architects: Why the People Leaving the World Shouldn't Design It
As we look around the world todayâacross fascist regimes, authoritarian governments, dictatorships, and even democracies that show increasingly authoritarian or warmongering tendenciesâthere is one common thread that is difficult to ignore: old men. Old men running countries. Old men airing decades-old grievances. Old men behaving as though the world still exists in the era they grew up in. Old men clinging to power and insisting the world remain their way. If there is one uncomfortable truth we need to confront, it may simply be this: the world is too often run by people who will not live in the future they are shaping. And that is a serious problem.
The Myth Older Generations Tell
There is a story most of us are told growing up. It goes something like this: older generations want to leave the world better for their children. Sometimes that is true. But too often it feels more like a comforting myth than a consistent reality. Many parentsâespecially mothersâdo seem to think in nurturing terms about the future. They want a world where children can prosper, where the next generation is safe, healthy, and secure. But when we look at power structures around the world, that same nurturing instinct often seems absent.
The political systems shaping our future are disproportionately dominated by older menâpeople whose lives were formed in a different era and whose incentives are often rooted more in preserving the past than building the future. While history is full of examples of men risking their lives to defend others, those examples are exceptions. They are not the norm of how power operates.
The Problem With Age and Power
There is a harsh reality about aging that people rarely discuss openly. As people get older, their psychology changes through a process often called "cognitive crystallization." Research suggests that while "fluid intelligence"âthe ability to solve new problems and identify patternsâpeaks in early adulthood, "crystallized intelligence" relies on accumulated knowledge. This makes older leaders more conservative in the literal sense of conserving things as they are. Change becomes uncomfortable.
Stability becomes more desirable than transformation, and risk becomes something to avoid rather than embrace. When the people making decisions for entire societies are the ones most biologically resistant to change, it creates a serious mismatch. Older leaders often try to preserve the world they rememberâlike the industrial carbon-heavy economies of the 20th centuryârather than building the digital, sustainable world that is coming. This leads to stagnation at best, and conflict at worst.
There is another fundamental problem with age and power. For the first 18 years of our lives, most people in democratic societies have virtually no say in the world they live in. Major events shape their futuresâwars, economic crises, cultural shiftsâbut they have no voice in the decisions that produce them. Many people remember moments like this from their own lives. Events such as school violence or global crises suddenly reshape daily life, and young people are forced to live with policies designed almost entirely by older people who have not experienced those environments in decades. Adults who haven't stepped inside a high school in years suddenly decide what schools should be like, yet students themselves are rarely asked. The result is a generation forced to live inside systems designed by people who no longer inhabit them.
There is a simple metaphor that captures this imbalance. Imagine checking into a hotel. Now imagine discovering that the entire guest experienceâthe rules, the design, the policiesâwas determined by people who checked out years ago. People who will never stay there again. That is how politics often works today. Those closest to the exit are frequently the ones deciding the experience for those who have not even arrived yet.
This leads to another uncomfortable truth. Older leaders often lack the strongest incentive to think long-term. Not because they are malicious, but simply because they will not be around to experience the full consequences of their decisions. A person in their seventies or eighties making policy about climate, technology, or national debt will not live through the world those decisions create.
Consider the "Sunk Cost" of ancient grievances. For a leader born in the 1940s, a border dispute from the 1970s is a fresh wound. To a teenager, it is an irrelevant ghost. Yet, the youth are drafted to fight "ghost wars" over 20th-century pride. A younger leader has a personal stake in the long-term future because they have to live in it. Someone who expects to be alive forty years from now has a very different incentive structure than someone who does not. Wanting a futureâand knowing you will experience itâis the strongest motivation to avoid destroying it.
There is also a cultural reality many people hesitate to say out loud. In modern society, many older men in power simply do not contribute to the future they regulate. They are no longer working in the modern economy, they are no longer raising children, and they often pass responsibility for family life to the next generation. What remains too often is commentary rather than contributionâsitting on the sidelines complaining about a world that has moved beyond them. This is not universally true, as many provide wisdom and mentorship. But politically, the voices that dominate public discourse often belong to those least connected to the future being debated.
Moving Beyond âOldocracyâ
None of this means older people should be silenced or stripped of rights. Wisdom and experience matter. But we should question why they dominate power so completely through seniority systems that act as bottlenecks for new ideas. If democracy means rule by the people, then it should reflect the people who will actually live in the future being created. Right now, much of the world resembles a gerontocracyârule by elders. And that imbalance has consequences, from the defunding of education to the ignoring of environmental tipping points.
Younger leaders would not solve every problem. They could still make terrible decisions or pursue power ruthlessly. But there is one difference that matters: they would have to live with the consequences. They would have to inhabit the world they create. That simple fact might be the strongest motivation humanity has to build a future worth living in.
Source: The Exit Door Architects: Why the People Leaving the World Shouldn't Design It
