How Do You Rebuild a Life When Your Past Gets There First?

Age, injury, recovery, second chances, and the strange ways we decide what a person is still capable of becoming

When I was young, I needed more experience.

Now that I have decades of experience, I am getting old.

When exactly was I the right fucking age?

I remember being in my early twenties, fresh out of trade school, working with horses and trying to build a business. I was young, and people knew it. Older people had been doing the work longer than I had. They had seen things I had not seen yet. They knew things that could not necessarily be learned in a classroom.

And you know what?

There was some truth in that.

Experience matters.

You can go to school. You can learn a trade. You can be talented, ambitious and willing to work your ass off. But there are things that only come from doing something for ten, twenty or thirty years.

So that is what you do. You spend your life acquiring experience.

You work. You screw things up. You learn. You get better. You encounter situations you have never seen before, and eventually you have seen enough that very little surprises you anymore. Problems that once took hours to figure out can take minutes because you have already solved some version of them twenty times.

Then one day you reach the other side of that equation.

Now you are older.

Now somebody can look at all those years and wonder whether maybe you are getting too old for the work.

And I find myself thinking, what exactly was I supposed to do with all that experience everybody told me I needed?

Apparently somewhere between "you need more experience" and "maybe you're getting too old for this" there was a brief period when I was exactly the right age.

I must have been working and missed it.

Old Enough to Run the World

This is where the contradiction gets interesting.

I am not arguing that elderly people should be pushed out of government, business or positions of responsibility. In fact, that would contradict the point I am trying to make.

Look at who we trust with some of the biggest responsibilities on Earth.

Pew Research Center examined the ages of national leaders in 186 countries in 2026. The median age was 63. When Donald Trump turned 80 in June, only 16 of those 186 leaders were older than him. Cameroon President Paul Biya was 93. Saudi Arabia's King Salman was 90. About a third of the world's national leaders were in their sixties.

Think about what that means.

We are willing to entrust people in their seventies, eighties and even nineties with governments, economies, national security, military decisions and responsibilities affecting millions of human beings.

We plainly do not believe that reaching a particular birthday automatically makes somebody incompetent.

Nor should we.

In positions of power, we even have complimentary words for age. We talk about experience, wisdom, institutional knowledge, seasoned leadership and being a veteran.

Move down the social ladder, though, and some of those same years can begin to sound different. A person can be seen as harder to train, more expensive, slower, closer to retirement or perhaps not worth investing in for very long.

That makes me wonder whether society really has a problem with old people working.

Maybe sometimes it has a problem with older people who still need somebody else to hire them.

Why can forty years of experience increase your perceived value when you are already powerful, but sometimes decrease your value when you are standing on the other side of an interview table asking someone to give you a chance?

What Does Age Actually Tell Us?

I went looking for evidence because I did not want to write an essay where I simply decided I was right and then went searching for things that agreed with me.

The research is more complicated than that.

A 2021 systematic review looked at 74 peer reviewed studies comparing older and younger workers. Across findings dealing with productivity, 41 percent found no significant difference between older and younger workers. Thirty one percent favoured younger workers, while 28 percent favoured older workers. On work performance specifically, older workers performed better in 58 percent of the findings. The researchers' overall conclusion was that there was no difference in productivity between older and younger workers, although different measures produced different results.

That does not mean aging has no effect on anybody.

Of course it does.

I am not going to pretend my body at this age is exactly the same body I had at 25. That would be ridiculous.

But neither is every 25 year old equally strong, equally healthy, equally intelligent or equally capable.

That is the point.

Age tells you how long somebody has been alive. It does not tell you, by itself, whether that individual can do a particular job.

There is also evidence that age can affect whether someone even gets the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do.

Economists David Neumark, Ian Burn and Patrick Button conducted a major American field experiment involving more than 40,000 fictional job applications. They found robust evidence of hiring discrimination against older women, particularly women approaching retirement age. The evidence was considerably weaker for older men.

That distinction matters. We should not turn a specific finding into a claim that every older worker experiences the same discrimination.

But it does demonstrate something important.

Sometimes age can influence who gets through the door before anyone has actually watched that person do the work.

What Did It Cost Your Body to Become Experienced?

There is another part of this conversation that bothers me.

What did it cost somebody's body to become experienced?

We understand this perfectly well when we talk about professional athletes.

A young athlete comes into a sport with enormous physical ability. Twenty years later, that athlete may understand the game better than ever, but their body carries twenty years of playing it.

Working people are not really that different.

You do not become a thirty year truck driver, mechanic, tradesperson, construction worker, farmer, nurse or labourer without putting thirty years through your body.

Some of what happens to us is simply aging. Some of it has nothing to do with work at all.

But some of it is the physical receipt for decades spent becoming good at what you do.

The back, knees, shoulders, hands and old injuries can all carry some of that history. Sometimes getting moving in the morning takes a little longer than it used to.

We wanted the experience.

We benefited from the work that created the experience.

Then sometimes we look at the body that produced all of it and treat the evidence of those years as a liability.

There is something backwards about that.

We value what somebody's body can produce when it is young. We value the experience they accumulate while using it. Then we can become much less interested in acknowledging what producing that experience may have cost them.

Report Your Injury

This became more real to me recently through work.

I hurt my back while working away from home. I reported it, as workers are supposed to do.

I am not going to turn this essay into a complaint about one employer because that is not what this is about. What interested me was what happened to the conversation afterward.

Questions began moving toward my history. Had I had previous back problems? Previous surgery? Other medical issues? Previous WCB claims?

Then my age entered the conversation.

Maybe I was getting up there. Maybe I was getting too old for this kind of work.

What I was thinking at the time was considerably simpler.

The fucking mattress is a piece of shit.

Maybe age had something to do with what happened. Maybe an old injury did. Maybe neither did. Those are questions that can actually be investigated.

What bothered me was how quickly a workplace event could turn into a discussion about whether the worker himself was the problem.

There is a legitimate question an employer may need answered.

Can this person safely perform this work?

That is not the same question as asking for somebody's entire medical biography.

Alberta's Human Rights Commission makes that distinction. In hiring, employers generally cannot ask candidates about past or present physical or mental conditions, diseases, medications, treatments, workers' compensation claims or sick leaves unless the information is essential to the position. Different considerations apply once someone is employed and relevant medical information is genuinely required to determine fitness for work, restrictions or accommodation.

Put that into ordinary language and it becomes pretty simple.

Knowing whether I can do the job and knowing everything that has ever been medically wrong with me are two different things.

Workers are also supposed to report workplace injuries. WCB Alberta requires employers to report qualifying injuries within 72 hours of becoming aware of them.

But that creates another question.

What happens when workers become afraid that reporting an injury today could affect whether somebody wants to employ them tomorrow?

A reporting system can tell workers to report injuries as many times as it wants. If workers believe having an injury or compensation history can make them look expensive, damaged or risky, some people are going to think twice before saying anything.

That is not good for workers.

I do not see how it can ultimately be good for employers or workplace safety either.

Then I Realized This Was Not Really Only About Age

The more I thought about all of this, the more I realized age was only where I entered the question.

Because we do something similar to people in all kinds of circumstances.

Somebody develops an addiction. Somebody becomes homeless. Somebody commits an offence. Somebody gets injured or sick. A marriage collapses. A person's finances fall apart. Someone disappears from conventional employment for several years because surviving whatever is happening in their life has effectively become their full time job.

Then something changes.

They get help. They enter recovery. They stop drinking or using drugs. They serve their sentence. They rebuild relationships. They find somewhere to live. They start working again.

They begin trying to become someone different from the person they were during the worst period of their life.

And society tells them something we have all heard.

Get back on your feet.

Okay.

What does that actually require?

Usually it requires work, housing, income, transportation, identification, references, credit and some degree of stability.

And then, at almost every doorway to those things, we ask for evidence from the period before they became stable.

What is this gap in your resume? Why is your credit bad? Where were you living? Why did you leave this job? Do you have a criminal record? What happened during these years? Have you had previous injuries?

The person standing there may be thinking:

That was my life then. This is my life now.

But our systems are extremely good at remembering then.

What Does a Second Chance Actually Mean?

I have rebuilt my own life from things I do not always talk about.

I know what it means to have parts of your past that do not produce a beautiful resume or a perfect paper trail.

I am not perfect. I have not done everything right since then either.

That is partly why this question matters to me.

What exactly is a second chance?

We use words like recovery, rehabilitation and rebuilding all the time.

But those words have to mean more than telling somebody to change.

There has to be some point where the change itself counts for something.

Addiction is a good example because Canadian law recognizes the complexity. Under the federal Canadian Human Rights Act, disability expressly includes previous or existing dependence on alcohol or drugs. Alberta human rights law also recognizes addiction as a disability in appropriate circumstances.

But the law is not as simple as saying addiction protects somebody from every consequence.

The Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Stewart v. Elk Valley Coal Corp., 2017 SCC 30, shows how complicated this can become.

Ian Stewart worked as a loader operator at an Alberta coal mine. The workplace had a policy requiring workers to disclose dependence or addiction before a drug related incident occurred. Workers who disclosed beforehand would be offered treatment. Stewart was involved in an accident, tested positive for cocaine and was fired under the policy.

The tribunal concluded that his termination resulted from breaching the policy rather than his addiction itself. The Supreme Court upheld the result.

There are legitimate safety concerns in a mine. There are legitimate safety concerns in trucking too.

I understand that.

But look at the human dilemma.

The safest time to disclose a stigmatized condition may be before something happens.

Yet fear of what disclosure might do to your career can be one of the reasons somebody does not disclose it.

Tell us and we can help you.

But first trust us with information that may change how people see you.

That is not an easy calculation for a human being whose livelihood depends on the answer.

You Served Your Sentence. Now What?

Criminal records expose another part of the problem.

The law is not uniform across Canada.

In Alberta, a criminal record itself is not a protected ground under the Alberta Human Rights Act. The Alberta Human Rights Commission states that a person cannot make an Alberta human rights complaint simply because an employer refused to hire them because of a criminal record.

Federal law is different, but even there the protection is narrower than people sometimes think. The Canadian Human Rights Act protects against discrimination based on a conviction for which a pardon has been granted or a record suspension ordered.

Obviously there are jobs where someone's criminal history can be relevant.

Someone working with vulnerable people is an obvious example. There are positions involving security, money, trust and public safety where particular offences may genuinely matter.

I am not arguing that history should simply disappear.

I am asking something different.

If somebody committed an offence, was punished, served the sentence and then spent years living differently, when does the punishment actually end?

The legal sentence may have ended years ago.

The social sentence can keep going.

We say we believe in rehabilitation.

But rehabilitation cannot only mean the person changes.

Somebody on the other side eventually has to recognize that change.

There cannot be a second chance if nobody is ever willing to be the person who actually gives someone one.

The Rebuilding Trap

Homelessness and poverty make the same contradiction almost absurd.

We tell somebody who is homeless to get a job.

Of course.

But getting and keeping employment becomes considerably easier when you have somewhere safe to sleep, clean clothes, transportation, identification, a phone, internet and a predictable place from which to organize your life.

So get housing.

Housing usually requires money.

Money usually requires income.

Employment may require an address, identification, transportation and stability.

Then we tell somebody to rebuild their credit.

That also becomes easier when they have stable income and stable housing.

It starts becoming circular.

Prove that you are stable.

I need a job and somewhere to live so I can become stable.

Prove that you are already stable enough for us to give you the job and somewhere to live.

How exactly does somebody get into the circle?

This is where I think our conversations about personal responsibility sometimes become too easy.

Yes, people have responsibilities.

Yes, choices have consequences.

Yes, somebody who has made mistakes may have work to do to rebuild trust.

But responsibility cannot mean constructing a staircase and then removing the first three steps.

If we tell people to climb back up, there has to be some way to begin climbing.

Risk Is Real

None of this means risk should be ignored.

An employer has a legitimate interest in whether somebody can do a job safely. A trucking company has every right to care whether somebody can safely operate a loaded commercial vehicle down a highway. A landlord has a legitimate interest in whether rent will be paid. A lender has a legitimate interest in whether money will be repaid.

There are situations where medical restrictions matter.

There are situations where criminal history matters.

There are situations where somebody simply cannot safely perform a particular job.

Pretending otherwise would make this argument weaker, not stronger.

The question is not whether we assess risk.

The question is how we assess it.

Canadian human rights law has already wrestled with that problem. The Supreme Court's Meiorin framework requires an employer defending a discriminatory employment standard as a bona fide occupational requirement to establish that the standard is genuinely connected to the job, was adopted in good faith and is reasonably necessary, including the accommodation analysis required by human rights law.

That basic principle matters beyond the courtroom.

Assess the actual requirement. Assess the actual person. Assess the actual risk.

Do not replace the assessment with a stereotype.

There is an enormous difference between saying we evaluated this person's circumstances and they cannot safely perform this particular job, and saying people like this are probably a problem.

The first is risk assessment.

The second is judgment by category.

The Law Cannot Answer the Whole Question

Canada has equality protections, but even here I think it is important to be accurate.

People often talk about the Charter as though section 15 directly governs every employer, landlord and business in the country.

It does not.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms primarily constrains government. Private employment and housing discrimination are generally dealt with through federal, provincial and territorial human rights laws and other legislation.

Those protections also differ depending on jurisdiction and what kind of discrimination is involved.

Age may be protected. Disability may be protected. A particular criminal record may or may not receive protection depending on the jurisdiction and circumstances. A bad credit history is something else. A gap in a resume is something else again.

The law separates these things because law needs categories.

Human lives do not arrive in categories.

The same person might be older, have an old workplace injury, be in recovery, have damaged credit from years ago and have a five year hole in their resume.

That is not five people.

That is one human being standing in front of you asking for an opportunity.

Who Are You Now?

Maybe that is the question our systems are not particularly good at asking.

Who are you now?

A resume is good at documenting where somebody worked. A credit report is good at documenting payments. A criminal record documents offences. A workers' compensation file documents claims and injuries. A medical chart documents illness and treatment.

Those records have legitimate purposes.

But none of them, by itself, tells you who the person became afterward.

We have become incredibly good at recording what happened to people.

I am not convinced we have become equally good at recognizing transformation.

And there is another uncomfortable difference here.

People with power have pasts too.

They have failures, illnesses, bankruptcies, scandals, mistakes, divorces, career interruptions and things they would probably rather not explain.

But powerful people often have something ordinary people do not.

They have the opportunity to explain.

They have lawyers, advisers, networks, references, influence, reputation and people willing to hear the context.

An ordinary person is more likely to encounter a checkbox.

Maybe one of the privileges of power is not having a perfect past.

Maybe it is being important enough that somebody listens to the explanation.

When Does the Present Begin?

I do not think hardship automatically makes somebody wiser.

I do not think everybody changes.

I do not think every person deserves every job, every apartment or every loan.

Some risks remain real.

Some decisions have consequences that last.

Some people genuinely cannot do particular work safely.

But if we actually believe in recovery, rehabilitation, accommodation and second chances, there has to be some way for a human being eventually to demonstrate something very simple.

I am not exactly who I was then.

Otherwise those words start becoming ceremonial.

Get sober, but we will remember the addiction.

Serve the sentence, but we will remember the offence.

Recover from the injury, but we will remember the claim.

Rebuild your finances, but we will remember when they collapsed.

Gain experience, but do not get too old while acquiring it.

At some point, the person standing in front of us has to become evidence too.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

When I was young, people told me I needed experience.

They were right.

So I spent decades acquiring it.

Some of those years made me better at what I do.

Some of them beat the hell out of me.

Some parts of my life went well.

Some did not.

I have fallen. I have gotten back up. I have made mistakes. I have changed.

I am still changing.

That seems to me to be what a human life actually looks like.

Not a spotless record.

A process.

So maybe the question is not only whether somebody is too old, too injured, too complicated, too poor, too recently sober, too long out of work or too marked by something that happened years ago.

Maybe we need to ask harder questions.

What can this person do now?

What has changed?

What have they learned?

What do their actions today tell us that the file from ten years ago cannot?

Because if every system somebody needs to enter keeps asking them to prove they never fell in the first place, then I am not sure we can honestly say we believe in rebuilding.

We believe in spotless histories.

Those are not the same thing.

And I still want to know when I was supposed to be the right age.

But after thinking about all of this, I think there is a much bigger question.

At what point does the person standing in front of us today get to matter more than the file documenting everything that happened to them yesterday?

A Note About My Research

The experiences, opinions and questions in this essay are mine.

I also believe that if I am going to make factual claims about age discrimination, workers' compensation, human rights, addiction, criminal records or Canadian law, people should be able to check them for themselves.

I used Google and AI tools while developing this essay to help locate studies, legislation, court decisions, government information and other sources, and to help fact check claims I was considering making. Where possible, I went back to the actual research, legislation, government sources and court decisions rather than treating an AI answer or a Google search result as evidence.

AI helped me research, organize and work through the writing.

It did not live my life, have these experiences or form these opinions.

Those are mine.

Sources and Further Reading

[Pew Research Center: As Trump turns 80, who are the oldest and youngest current world leaders?](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/06/09/as-trump-turns-80-who-are-the-oldest-and-youngest-current-world-leaders/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Viviani et al.: Productivity in older versus younger workers: A systematic literature review](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/WOR-203396?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Neumark, Burn and Button: Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs?](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/701029?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Alberta Human Rights Commission: Job advertisements and applications](https://albertahumanrights.ab.ca/issues-at-work/job-advertisements-and-applications/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Alberta Human Rights Commission: Disability, illness and injury](https://albertahumanrights.ab.ca/issues-at-work/disability-illness-and-injury/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[WCB Alberta: Reporting an injury for employers](https://www.wcb.ab.ca/claims/report-an-injury/for-employers.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Supreme Court of Canada: Stewart v. Elk Valley Coal Corp., 2017 SCC 30](https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/16679/index.do?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Supreme Court of Canada: Meiorin decision](https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1724/index.do?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Alberta Human Rights Commission: Criminal record guidance](https://albertahumanrights.ab.ca/frequently-asked-questions/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Government of Canada: Canadian Human Rights Act](https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/H-6/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

[Government of Canada: Constitution Acts, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms](https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)