Not long ago, I read an article titled “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.” The image that accompanied it was striking: a man standing at the top of a staircase marked with ages—30, 40, 50—before the inevitable steps downward into 60 and 70. The message was clear: enjoy your peak, because what follows is decline. At my age, I couldn’t disagree more.

Ironically, my very first published editorial piece was about Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s tragic character Willy Loman embodies what happens when someone believes their worth has an expiration date. He is consumed by the fear of being forgotten, convinced that once his best-selling years are behind him, his life no longer has meaning.

It got me thinking of three friends of mine, all north of 70. Ned Librock founded the nonprofit Catching Dreams and hasn’t come close to hitting his stride nationally. Through Catching Dreams, he works with pediatric cancer patients, making a profound impact on the mental well-being of children and their families—and his interest in his Florida condo has quietly waned as the mission has grown. Gary Coscia, founder of Largo Capital, hasn’t fully handed over the reins to his Gen X son, and for good reason—his wisdom remains indispensable. He splits time between Buffalo and Sarasota, fully in the game on both fronts. And Leo Pusateri, founder of Pusateri Training and Consulting, is a study in purposeful engagement: his four kids have each carved their own path, succession isn’t on the near horizon, and Leo wouldn’t have it any other way. He splits his time between Arizona and what he proudly calls “Beautiful Buffalo,” as engaged as ever. Or consider the many professionals in their 50s and 60s thriving in new roles. For them, this stage of life feels less like a decline and more like a beginning. As Winston Churchill once said: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

What’s sobering is that Willy Loman’s story isn’t entirely fictional anymore. A recent Wall Street Journal piece, “The Retirement Crisis No One Warns You About: Mattering,” documented how nearly a third of retirees report depressive symptoms—driven largely by feeling less valued, less needed, and less connected. These are real Willy Lomans, people who planned their finances meticulously but never planned their sense of purpose. Miller’s cautionary tale, it turns out, is playing out in retirement communities across America. Which makes the alternative vision—the one I believe in—all the more urgent.

I was recently in one of my peer groups when the contrast hit me in real time. One member was anxious, constantly checking his portfolio, consumed by what the market was doing that day. Another guy laughed and said, “The best thing about not having money is I don’t have to worry about the stock market.” It was funny—but it pointed to something real. Wealth and health are the two things we plan for obsessively. What we rarely plan for is something the WSJ piece named precisely: our mattering span.

My dad lived to age 90, and my mom—now 94—has managed to avoid the thralls of a nursing home thanks to strong health and determination. Many of us Boomers are doing our best to stay active and engaged, defying the script that says we fade into irrelevance. What the research confirms, our generation is already living: the problem was never age. It was the failure to plan for purpose.

Researcher Jennifer Breheny Wallace calls it a “mattering span”—the counterpart to financial and health planning that most of us neglect entirely. At its core, mattering means feeling Significant, Appreciated, Invested in, and Depended on. What struck me reading it was how perfectly those four qualities describe what the professionals I’ve watched reinvent themselves are actually experiencing. The retired Big Four partner I called, who joked he was “sick of golf” and “I can only go to the gym so much,” didn’t just want walking-around money. He wanted to matter again. He wanted to be depended on. That consulting gig—about 20 hours a month—gave him exactly that.

Willy Loman’s plight was a cautionary tale for Miller’s generation. But for ours, it’s an outdated narrative. I know countless men and women whose wisdom, networks, and steady judgment make them more valuable to their organizations—and to society—than ever before.

The truth is, age brings a unique currency: experience. AI may be changing everything, but companies still crave leaders who can connect dots quickly, draw from decades of problem-solving, and steady the ship when storms hit. You don’t learn that in business school, and you don’t always pick it up in your 20s or 30s.

A friend of mine recently hired a Boomer and told me, “This is exactly what we needed. Someone who’s seen the movie before.” That doesn’t sound like decline. That sounds like irreplaceable value.

Another myth is that by 50 or 60, people are winding down. In reality, many are winding up. I’ve watched friends reinvent themselves—taking on new ventures, joining boards, even starting companies. Some leave behind jobs that drained them, stepping into roles that finally align with their purpose.

Many retired friends of mine are enjoying their pensions and 401(k)s, but others are restless for new horizons. One friend told me, “My spouse and I are driving each other nuts at the kitchen table. Find me something!” The restlessness isn’t a problem—it’s a signal. It means the drive is still there. The only question is where to aim it. For my wife and me, that question led somewhere unexpected.

We’d been fortunate enough to maintain multiple properties—a primary residence in Buffalo, a lake house up north, and a place in Florida for the winters. Something had to give. Years ago we spent five weeks in Florida on an extended stay, and by the end we knew: the sunshine was real, but so was the absence of everything we’d built over a lifetime. We chose the lake house over the Florida home and kept our winters in Buffalo. It wasn’t a financial sacrifice so much as a values clarification.

Part of what made the decision easy was the arrival of our fifth and sixth grandchildren, both rooted in Buffalo. But it went beyond family. It was the entire web of relationships—friends, colleagues, neighbors, community—that we’d spent decades weaving. The WSJ article and Froma Harrop’s thoughtful response in the Buffalo News both touched on something I now understand viscerally: retirees who relocate often discover they’ve left behind not just a zip code but an entire identity—the mechanic who knew your car, the neighbors who knew your name, the small familiar ties that quietly make a place feel like yours. I’ll grant an exception: I have roughly fifty friends who’ve relocated to Sarasota and built exactly that kind of fabric with each other. They’ve got the community covered. They just need to find a good mechanic.

Harrop’s column offered a deceptively simple remedy for those who feel unseen: see others first. Not just the people who advance your interests, but the cashier at the grocery store, the mail carrier, the person who delivers your pizza. In a culture that has grown relentlessly impersonal, she argues, genuinely acknowledging another person’s humanity is both radical and reciprocal. If you want to be seen, start by seeing.

That resonated deeply. Our social fabric in Buffalo isn’t just built of grand friendships and professional networks. It’s also made of small, recurring human moments—the kind you can’t pack in a moving box. Warm weather has its obvious appeal. But there’s something to be said for the warmth of a wood-burning fire, the quiet of a lake in winter, and a community that has known you for decades.

Sports often give us the clearest examples of what’s possible later in life. Take Pete Carroll, the longtime NFL head coach. At over 70 years old, Carroll is still patrolling the sidelines with the same energy and enthusiasm as coaches half his age. A recent headline captured it perfectly: “Not Ready to Retire.” Carroll hasn’t slowed down—he’s still building teams, adapting to new strategies, and motivating players in one of the most competitive environments imaginable. If professional decline were inevitable, he wouldn’t still be thriving at the highest level of football. His story proves the point: the 70s don’t have to be a winding down. For many, they can be the most impactful decade yet.

We should retire the staircase metaphor with its grim march upward and inevitable stumble down. A better image might be a series of plateaus, each offering a broader view as we climb higher. Or perhaps a bridge, stretching further than we imagined, built on the foundation of the years that came before—and anchored, crucially, in the community and the people we love.

Willy Loman’s story ends in despair because he saw no worth in himself beyond his peak years. But life offers us another ending. The researchers behind the “mattering” work found that lifestyle planning—not financial planning—was the strongest predictor of retirement satisfaction. Purpose, connection, being depended on: these are the real assets of a life well lived. And unlike a stock portfolio, they grow most reliably when you invest in others.

So to that headline—“Your professional decline is coming sooner than you think”—I would counter with this: Your professional renaissance is closer than you realize. And the roots that make it possible? They’ve been growing right where you planted them all along.

Only in Hindsight

This essay deserves its own chapter after my Volcker essay. It’s Black History Month, and my close friend Don Jones recently spoke in Tulsa to a convention crowd reflecting on moments that reshaped American history, including events from more than 100 years ago. He spoke about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — the destruction of what had been known as “Black Wall Street,” where more than a thousand homes and businesses were burned and thousands were left homeless overnight. More than a century later, leaders like Don continue to return to this story not only for its relevance, but for the hard questions it raises about courage, responsibility, and civic virtue in today’s landscape. This essay, like others, only makes sense later.

For many Americans, Tulsa is a story discovered long after the fact — another reminder that history often hides in plain sight until a later generation is ready to confront it. Unlike economic crises measured in interest rates or unemployment, Tulsa represents a different kind of Black Swan — one that challenged the country’s moral foundation rather than its financial system.

Talking to Don and understanding his reflections made me realize something: every era carries events that only reveal their full meaning decades later. Volcker’s fight against inflation reshaped the economy. COVID reshaped how we live and work. And Tulsa reminds us that history isn’t only about markets and policy — it’s about justice, memory, and the unfinished work of understanding who we are. Watching Don, an African American leader and admirer of Frederick Douglass, stand in Tulsa and name what happened on Black Wall Street, I realized I was seeing civic virtue in real time — the same kind of moral courage Douglass showed when he forced the nation to confront truths it wanted to ignore about slavery and freedom in his dealings with Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet during the Civil War era.

WWI had recently ended, and yet, after the shock of destruction and murder in Tulsa, just like after that brutal war, the country returned to work. Tulsa mourned. The nation kept going. Not because anyone fully understood what had happened, but because life demanded it.

Again, history repeats itself. It rhymes. Looking back across decades — Tulsa, Volcker’s inflation fight, COVID, the savings and loan crisis, the dot-com bust, 9/11, and the Great Recession — a pattern emerges. Every generation faces its own defining disruption. While we’re living through it, we rarely see the full picture. We feel the anxiety, the fear, the uncertainty. Meaning comes later.

Volcker’s story finally made sense to me not when interest rates were high, but when I had lived long enough to understand responsibility, restraint, and the cost of hard decisions. COVID may take years to fully understand as well. But it will shape a generation just as surely. The same holds true for “Black Wall Street.” Only in hindsight do we begin to see how these disruptions test not just our systems, but our souls. And if we are paying attention, they also reveal the quiet, stubborn virtue of people like Don, who choose to tell the truth anyway.

The real lesson isn’t economic. It’s human. Crises reveal character — in leaders, institutions, and ourselves. They remind us that stability is earned, resilience is learned, and understanding often arrives long after the moment has passed.

Every generation has its own Volcker, its own Tulsa, its own COVID — and, as Thoreau might argue, its own choice between quiet compliance and the hard work of conscience.

The question for all of us is simple: when the next Black Swan comes — and it will — what will we remember, and what will only make sense later?

The Legacy of the Bag: A Nod to Price Waterhouse, Then and Now

In the summer of 2024, at a makeshift PwC alumni golf outing, I was gifted something that instantly became one of my most prized professional possessions—a vintage Price Waterhouse audit bag, passed to me by Rico Wolney. He handed it over like a sacred relic, and without saying much, I knew exactly what it meant.

Later that year, at our annual Christmas luncheon, I brought the bag along with a silver Sharpie—and that’s when the story really took off. What began as a symbolic gesture has since taken on a life of its own.

This bag isn’t just a piece of worn leather with brass trim—it’s a living artifact from the days when Price Waterhouse stood tall among the original Big Eight accounting firms. For those keeping score, the full lineup was:

• Price Waterhouse
  
• Peat Marwick
  
• Touche Ross
  
• Deloitte
  
• Arthur Andersen
  
• Ernst & Ernst
  
• Arthur Young
  
• Coopers & Lybrand (there’s your eighth!)
  

Fast forward through decades of mergers and evolution, and we now refer to the Big Four: PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG.

My personal connection to this world goes back to Gary Stott (PW ’72, Robert Half ’79), who recruited me to be his sidekick. But my journey really began in 1982 when Jerry Reynell hired me to sell payroll and tax services. Back then, everything revolved around referrals—and the best ones came from CPA firms, law firms, bankers, and insurance agents. We were trained to sell value-added services and, more importantly, to build lasting relationships.

This audit bag—now signed by numerous PwC alumni—is a physical symbol of that era. I brought the silver Sharpie again to the 2025 outing, and it didn’t take long before the bag became a tradition. Folks added their signatures, class years, and shared audit-room war stories over beers and laughter. We even joked it’s becoming the Stanley Cup of PwC alumni—and like the Cup, we may soon need to add another tier or commission a whole new tower to preserve the legacy.

They even made me an honorary member—kind of like getting one of those honorary PhDs from a university. And I’ll take it.

Here are both sides of the bag. Each signature represents more than just a name—it’s a career, a friendship, a referral, a golf outing, a deal, or maybe a late night poring over financial statements:

This post continues the theme from one of my earlier reflections on the power of groups, which was published in The Buffalo News. Whether it’s PwC or your neighborhood golf foursome, there’s something special about alumni communities that only grows stronger over time.

To those who’ve already signed the bag: thank you for your mentorship, your referrals, your stories—and your Sharpie ink.

And to those who haven’t signed it yet, there’s always this year’s lunch… or next year’s outing.

This article from The Buffalo News recently caught my attention:

🔗 John Proctor Is the Villain delivers catharsis

It covers a new play, John Proctor Is the Villain, which reimagines Arthur Miller’s classic The Crucible through a modern lens. Set in a Georgia high school classroom, it follows a group of students as they read the play and wrestle with themes of justice, loyalty, and power through the filter of their own lives. The journalist, Michelle Goldberg, also references Aristotle’s idea of catharsis—that deep emotional release we experience through storytelling and tragedy.

That word—catharsis—hit home for me.

It brought me back to the first time I read Arthur Miller’s other masterpiece, Death of a Salesman. I was shaken by the quiet despair of Willy Loman, a man who couldn’t bounce back from life’s blows. And then I thought of my own father—who, unlike Willy, never let getting fired define him. He stayed proud. He stayed useful. He kept going.

That contrast between Miller’s tragic character and my father’s quiet resilience stirred something in me I couldn’t shake. It led me to write an article about it:

📎 Willy Loman’s Plight Is Common Among Many Today

Looking back now, I realize that moment was cathartic in the truest sense of the word. It was a chance to reflect—not just on literature, but on life.

As someone surrounded by strong women—four daughters, a daughter-in-law, and my 93-year-old mother who still gives me advice I actually listen to—I’ve come to appreciate how the stories we tell, and how we choose to interpret them, really do evolve with each generation.

Sometimes it takes a 70-year-old play and a Greek philosopher to remind us that.