Leadership & Workplace Culture · Identity & Reinvention
If You've Started to Feel Invisible at Work
The missing meeting invite. The casual retirement question. A reflection on recognizing ageism at work—and remembering that experience does not make you any less capable, curious, or valuable.
If you've started to feel invisible at work, you're not imagining it.
The meeting invite that stopped coming. The project that went to someone "with more runway." The joke about whether you can figure out the new software. The question about when you're planning to retire, asked a little too casually.
It's easy to talk yourself out of what you're seeing. Maybe I'm being sensitive. Maybe it's just me.
It isn't.
In AARP's 2025 survey of workers 50 and older, 64% said they had seen or experienced age discrimination at work. More than one in five (22%) said they sometimes or always feel pushed out of their job because of their age. And age discrimination charges filed with the EEOC rose from 11,500 in fiscal year 2022 to 16,353 in fiscal year 2025.
I'm over 55, so I don't say this from the sidelines.
In my fourth book I wrote: "What served us at twenty-five may not serve us at fifty-five. That does not make the younger version of us wrong." It goes the other way too. Being fifty-five doesn't make the version of us we are now any less capable, curious, or valuable.
If you're younger and reading this, it matters to you as well. You'll be on the receiving end someday. Until then, you get to decide what kind of colleague you are when it happens to someone else.
Naming it is the first step. You're not imagining it.
Have you seen ageism show up at work? What did it look like?
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Personal reflections by Lynn Cirillo. About this writing.