[...] Youth was the gold mine CEOs could exploit, and the media hype of the 1990s kept proclaiming that not only was Silicon Valley a revolutionary new industry, it was an industry whose revolution was powered by young people. It was a time when everyone over thirty-five or forty was considered expendable. The corporations of Silicon Valley regarded workers in their late thirties and forties as "over the hill," expendable drains on profits. Loyalty and trust and the value of experience may have been appropriate for the old manufacturing way of life, but this new century was the Information Age century in which hiring and firing in obeisance to the bottom line took precedence over the other values in life.

As long as one was in one's twenties, this devaluation of becoming older was accepted as something to brag about and flaunt in the face of people in their thirties or forties who were doomed to live on a fraction of what the young men and women in the Valley were making. They had bought the belief that after thirty, creativity is lost. [...] They were entitled to their economic success because they were young [...]

Carol and Harry had bought this illusion that being young was the only value in life that mattered. But this illusion began to erode when they turned thirty. They made excuses for themselves on their thirtieth birthdays that they were not really deteriorating, going down hill in life after all. [...]