The High Cost of Experience

What It Feels Like to Be a Gen Xer in Today’s Job Market

There’s a strange moment in your career when you realize that experience has quietly shifted from being your greatest asset to being treated like a liability. It doesn’t come with flashing lights or a memo from HR. It arrives in subtler ways: the polite but empty interviews, the “we went in a different direction” emails, or the eerie silence that follows submitting a resume full of hard-earned skills.

I didn’t fully understand the shift until I lived it.

I’m a Gen Xer who was laid off from two well-paying jobs, both just months before I would have vested in the companies’ retirement plans. Stock, pension, 401(k) — the whole buffet of benefits that employers love to brag about and employees quietly count on for stability. I had done everything right. I showed up, worked hard, invested in my future, and believed that loyalty still mattered.

Apparently, it mattered only until it became expensive.

One employer was in the defense industry. The other was in tech. Two very different worlds, yet somehow both landed on the same math: letting me go just before vesting was cheaper than honoring the commitments they made when they hired me. And let’s not pretend this was a coincidence. These decisions were calculated, strategic, and executed with the kind of sterile efficiency that corporate leadership likes to call “business necessity.”

For them, it was about budgets. For me, it reshaped my entire sense of financial security.

And then came the next round of hard truth: navigating the job market as a Gen Xer is an adventure no one advertised. We grew up on the promise that experience was the golden ticket. Work hard, build a career, collect your expertise like badges of honor, and the professional world would always have a place for you.

Instead, it often feels like you age out of employability the moment your resume suggests you might expect a livable salary or a stable benefits package.

There’s a quiet indignity in realizing you may be seen as “too seasoned,” “too expensive,” or — my personal favorite — “not the right culture fit,” which is often corporate code for “we want someone younger, cheaper, and more malleable.” Some days, it’s hard not to feel outright unemployable, as if you’ve crossed an invisible age threshold that no one warned you about.

Gen X sits in a peculiar place. We’re the smallest generation in the workforce, sandwiched between Boomers who were allowed to age up the ladder and Millennials who have taken the reins. We were told to be loyal, adaptable, and self-reliant. We were told that resilience was the key to survival. We were told that once we reached this stage of life, our careers would be secure.

Instead, many of us are discovering that decades of experience can’t compete with a corporate spreadsheet.

And here’s the part no one likes to say out loud: age discrimination isn’t just real, it’s thriving, especially in industries where youth is marketed as innovation and wisdom is mislabeled as “resistance to change.” The irony, of course, is that Gen X has been adapting to change our entire lives. We survived dial-up internet, the collapse of entire industries, multiple economic crises, and the invention of PowerPoint. Trust me, we can handle whatever new software you adopt next.

But we can’t outmaneuver companies that decide we cost too much to keep or too much to hire.

Being laid off right before vesting wasn’t just an economic hit. It was an awakening. A reminder that loyalty is often a one-way street and that corporate promises are conditional at best. It forced me back into a job market where my experience should be an advantage, yet somehow feels like a warning label.

Still, Gen X has never been known for giving up. We grill when the oven breaks, we fix what we can, and we figure out the rest as we go. Maybe that’s why, even with all the setbacks, I’m still moving forward. Still applying. Still showing up. Still refusing to vanish quietly from a workforce that seems to think we’ve reached our expiration date.

The truth is simple: experience has value. It always has. And it’s long past time for the job market to remember that.

Until then, we keep pushing. Because if Gen X knows anything, it’s how to survive, even when the corporate world tries to write us off.