My aunt Anne once gave me a talk about what it’s like to get old. One symptom, she told me, is that even your most highly accomplished friends will start talking less about themselves, and more about their children. At the time, it struck me as a dubious generalization. I was then in my 20s, fresh out of law school, and very high on my own career trajectory. So were my friends. And it was hard to imagine a time when we’d drop the networking and shop talk in favour of kvelling over sons and daughters.

Turns out Anne was right. This past weekend, I attended the 25th anniversary reunion for my 1997 Yale Law School graduating class. And while most of my conversations with former classmates began with talk about jobs, we tended to move on quickly to longer (and more interesting) discussions about family life. Unlike Anne’s 1990s-era high-powered social set, moreover, we all had phones at hand so we could scroll through photos as part of our show-and-tell. To those under a certain age, I’m sure this sounds like a hopelessly dull way to spend a weekend in New Haven, Connecticut. But if you’re more than halfway through life, you’ll probably understand.

This was my second reunion trip to New Haven, following on the 20th anniversary get-together in 2017. And the passage of these last five years seems to have marked a shift in outlook for many of us. When still in our 40s, it was (just) possible to imagine our careers as exciting works in progress. But once you get into your 50s and beyond, professional life increasingly has the feel of a story mostly told. Not to mention the fact that COVID sucked the glamour out of even the most impressive résumés: For much of the last two-and-a-half years, white-collar jobs have typically all been just different flavours of Zoom.