The Peter Principle of Aging

Remember the Peter Principle?

It was actually a mordant axiom in the 1969 book by that name stating that: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

Authors Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull intended the book as satire, but the principle was widely accepted as a serious observation about a fundamental flaw in the way people are promoted in businesses, government and any hierarchical organization.

Paul Showers summarized it neatly in an essay that ran in the New York Times Book Review section that April, although he didn’t seem to have noticed that women were hammering away at the glass ceiling even then:

… if a man does well in one job, he is promoted to another higher up the ladder and so on till he reaches a job he can’t do well. (The names of prominent public figures crowd the mind.) Obviously, the man’s superiors will recommend no further promotions for him. He has reached his “level of incompetence,” his “final placement” or, in everyday terms, “success.” As the authors observe, “The cream rises until it sours.”

Now if you think about it, but not hard enough to add another furrow to that extensively ploughed brow, the Peter Principle becomes even more convincing when applied to aging, because unlike a corporate hierarchy, the human hierarchy has no retirement plan.

Thinking caps, everyone!

At first, aging appears to be a promotion. You are promoted from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, and eventually to Senior Adult, a prestigious position that comes with reduced expectations and a discount at the pharmacy. The job description is vague, but the principal responsibility seems to be remembering what you walked into the room to do. You will have forgotten by then, but we’ll come back to that later.

The trouble begins when you discover that you have been promoted beyond your level of competence.

At some point you notice that your eyesight, which once enabled you to read a newspaper, back when there were newspapers, has been reassigned to the task of distinguishing between the television remote and the telephone. I noticed this the first time I tried to switch from our local news to the Antiques Roadshow on PBS and wound up on the line to an irritated Chinese grocer in Wellington, New Zealand.

Your hearing, formerly considered adequate for ordinary conversation, has been promoted to a supervisory position in which it listens only to sounds that might indicate the ice maker in the refrigerator is malfunctioning.

Your knees, meanwhile, have entered middle management. They used to handle stairs, running, jumping and the occasional ill-advised attempt to retrieve something from under the bed. Now they hold meetings with 15-minute PowerPoint presentations before agreeing to stand up. If you rise from a chair without first negotiating with them, they file a formal complaint with HR.

This is the aging version of the Peter Principle: You sink to a level of incompetence, only to discover that there is a lower level.

And there is always another rung below.

You reach the stage where you can no longer remember the name of the actor in the movie you watched last night. This seems like rock bottom. But no. You then reach the stage where you remember the actor perfectly but cannot remember the movie.

Later, you remember that you watched a movie, but you cannot determine whether it was last night, three years ago or something you dreamed after eating chili. Then you remember your stomach can’t handle chili anymore. Then you repair to a bathroom.

Bother.

Eventually you are promoted to the position of Person Who Has Entered a Room Without Knowing Why. This position has enormous authority but almost no defined duties. You stand in the doorway. You survey the room. You wait for the reason to reveal itself. Nothing happens. You return to your previous location, whereupon the reason immediately becomes obvious.

You go back.

The reason vanishes behind a cloak of opacity and straight into Control’s Cone of Silence (I assume Agent 86 has the key to the Conference Room door). From here on, everything is Class A security. An internal monologue ensues inside the thinking cap.

I am deeply concerned about the Conference Room.

What?

I am deeply concerned about the Conference Room.

How’s that?

Random passerby: He’s concerned about the Conference Room.

This can continue for several minutes before realizing you don’t know why you’re in the Conference Room.

Now where were we? Oh, yes.

The cream, as Peter and Hull observed, rises until it sours. With aging, however, the cream rises, sours, separates, develops a suspicious odour and is eventually placed in the refrigerator with a note reading DO NOT THROW THIS OUT, although nobody can remember who wrote the note or what the container contains.

Possibly Limburger. Possibly Epstein File redactions.

There are also technological promotions.

At one time, you were capable of operating a telephone. You could dial a number and speak to another human being. Possibly an irritated Chinese grocer in New Zealand. Then came smartphones, which promoted you to the position of unpaid technical-support employee.

Your grandchildren can perform tasks on your phone that would have required a team of engineers when you were young. They hand it back to you and say, “There. I fixed it.”

You ask what they did.

They say, “I just changed a setting.”

This is not an explanation. It is a declaration of smug superiority.

You eventually reach the technological level at which you can operate exactly one function on your television. You know how to turn it on. Nobody knows how you acquired this knowledge, and you dare not experiment because the consequences could include losing the local news permanently.

The remote contains 47 buttons. You use four.

One of them is the wrong one, accidentally pressed by your bum as you shifted position while drifting off to sleep during Wheel of Fortune.

The human body also introduces a peculiar form of organizational restructuring. Parts that once worked independently are gradually consolidated into a single department known, for purely technical reasons, as “Ache.”

You wake up with a pain in your shoulder. You do not remember injuring your shoulder. You did not do anything more strenuous than accidentally bumping the TV remote with your bum.

Ah, but you slept. Apparently, this was enough. Your body has become an organization in which sleeping is considered a high-risk industrial activity.

To counter said aches you begin taking pills. This automatically entails another promotion.

You become the manager of a small pharmaceutical inventory. There are morning pills, evening pills, pills that must be taken with food, pills that must not be taken with grapefruit, and pills whose purpose you once knew but now regard as a matter for historians who can read the ridiculously small writing on the lightweight plastic prescription vials that come in two flavours: clear and amber.

The vials also come with child-resistant caps, which you can no longer open without cracking a brittle fingernail or two because both thumbs are arthritic and you can no longer see well enough to line up the little side tab that tells you where to break another nail.

To counter this problem, you then acquire a pill organizer with compartments labelled by days of the week. This seems efficient until you discover that the organizer itself has become another object you must remember to fill.

Soon you are managing a complicated system in which you take a pill so that you can remember to take another pill so that you can sleep well enough to remember where you put the first pill.

And yet the most humiliating promotion is perhaps the loss of physical spontaneity. When you were young, you could simply get up and go somewhere. Now “going somewhere” requires preparation.

You check the weather.

You check your phone.

You check whether you need a jacket.

You check whether there will be a bathroom.

You better use the bathroom right away, now that you think about it.

You check where you parked the car.

You check whether you have your keys.

You check whether you have your glasses.

You check whether you are wearing your glasses.

You discover that you are.

They are on your head.

You have to use the bathroom again.

You decide it’s just not worth it and stay home. Possibly in a room you recognize.

At this point you have achieved a level of incompetence that would have gotten you fired from any ordinary organization. But aging is not an ordinary organization. It never fires anybody. It simply keeps promoting them downward.

All too literally, it turns out.

First you lose the ability to remember why you entered the room, which we’ve already covered though you have forgotten this. Then you lose the ability to remember which room you entered. Eventually you lose the ability to remember what a room is, but by then you are considered experienced.

And this is where the Peter Principle finally reveals its deepest truth. Again, way too literally.

In business, reaching your level of incompetence means you stop being promoted. In old age, reaching your level of incompetence means congratulations: you have qualified for another promotion.

The title is Senior.

The responsibilities are unclear. The benefits include discounts. And to get unforgivably literary here, there are always lower rungs, as John Milton’s Lucifer discovered to his everlasting regret in Paradise Lost (for our purposes here, aka aging):

Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

Now that’s a hierarchy.