Forced X Under X
I turned forty-six this year, which is the age at which you stop accidentally qualifying for things and start failing eligibility criteria with intention.
It is not half as bad as I imagined it would be at twenty-three. Besides, most of my friends are in the same boat, and a boat full of people going nowhere is technically a cruise.
Thirty was the one that stung. H. H. Munro, who wrote as Saki, decided that to have reached thirty is to have failed in life, which was easy for him to say and easier still for Cobain, Barrett and the Doors guy, all of whom burned out well before the deadline. I had no such arrangement. I turned thirty on a Tuesday and went to work.
Forty was gentler, largely because of G. B. Shaw, who held that every man over forty is a scoundrel. This is a much better offer. Failure is lonely. Scoundrelhood is a category. It feels good to be in the company of failed scoundrels.
Forty-six, though, means I am no longer eligible for Forbes 30 Under 30, which I never seriously aimed for but nonetheless feel entitled to be mildly resentful about, mostly because rejection stings more when it arrives retroactively and without your participation.
I also missed 40 Under 40, which feels more personal, not because I deserved it, but because forty briefly gives you the illusion that life might still notice you if you stand very straight.
There is, technically, 50 Under 50, but that would require me to build something extraordinary in the next four years, and I am currently struggling to build a consistent gym habit. 60 Under 60 does not exist yet, but given how aggressively Forbes has franchised the concept, I assume it is already in a slide deck somewhere. The ambition is not there. The drive, if it ever existed, now drives nowhere in particular.
So I started thinking about which Forbes list could still accommodate me.
The Inverted List
Every celebratory ranking implies its inverse. If there is a best, there must also be a worst.
A Forbes Worst 40 Over 40 would be genuinely interesting. It would include people with spectacularly negative net worths, and a disproportionate number of former 30 Under 30 alumni who later appeared in court transcripts.
There is a surprisingly efficient pipeline from “promising young founder” to “federal defendant.” The list writes itself.
I lack the ambition for this as well. Not rich enough for Forbes. Not criminal enough for Anti-Forbes. The perfectly tepid middle.
The Real Problem Is Units
The problem with Forbes X Under X is not age. It is the unit.
The X does double duty: list size and age ceiling. To make a list of X people you have to be one of the X richest. To make it under X, you have to be under X in whatever unit they happen to be counting.
Nobody ever says which unit. This is the loophole.
Suppose you are roughly the 400-millionth richest person on Earth. That fixes X at 400 million. All that remains is to be under 400 million of something.
In years, I am forty-six. I clear 400 million by a margin so wide it stops being an achievement and starts being a rounding error.
In minutes, I am about 24.2 million. Still under, but at least the two numbers are now in speaking distance.
In seconds, I am about 1.45 billion, and 400 Million Under 400 Million Seconds rejects me with the politeness of a Gurgaon nightclub.
So minutes it is. 400 Million Under 400 Million Minutes.
Coarser units always let you in. Finer units are always more impressive. Years would admit almost everyone, which is precisely why nobody prints it. The dignity is in the narrow escape.
Not A Forbes List
At this point I should stop calling it one.
Forbes picks the number and dares you to fit under it. I picked the number, then went looking for a unit that would let me fit under it, which is the same activity performed in the opposite direction and with considerably less dignity.
That is not a Forbes list. That is a Forced list.
Two Levers
For those unsatisfied with the list they landed on, I recommend the following:
- Change the unit. Go as fine as you can while still coming in under.
- Invoke Einstein. From a fast-moving reference frame, you can become whatever HR needs by Friday.
These levers stack. Physics is generous.
I qualify in minutes. I do not qualify in seconds, and seconds is where the respect is. The distance between 1.45 billion and 400 million is a factor of 3.63, which is not a gap you close with discipline.
But if you travel fast enough, your personal clock slows down. To arrive at 400 million seconds old while the rest of the world spends forty-six years, you would need to travel at roughly 96 percent of the speed of light. This is about 179,000 miles per second, which is still slower than light, though faster than most people reaching for the bill after saying, “Let’s split equally.”
None of this is necessary. I already have a list. This is purely for the upgrade, which is the most honest thing about it.
A man may not have made it in life, but he can still hurry.
The Calculator
I built a small Forced X Under X calculator.
You enter your age and approximate net worth. It estimates your global wealth rank, walks down through years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds, and stops at the last unit where you are still under. Then it tells you how fast you would have to travel to reach the next unit down, in case you have ambitions.
At the end it prints a badge with your list on it, which you may share widely and without shame, because nobody is going to check the unit.
If you are too young, too old, too poor, or Elon Musk, it stops calculating and starts judging. This is only fair. Forbes also judges people; it merely uses better typography.
It will not improve your finances.
It may improve your mood.
In Closing
The Forbes X Under X obsession turns age into a deadline and wealth into a scoreboard. It makes 31-year-olds feel late and 25-year-old fraudsters feel brilliant.
The real joke is not that I will never make Forbes 30 Under 30. It is that everyone qualifies for a list of some kind, if you are flexible about units and reference frames. It just will not be a Forbes one.
Me? I will take Forced 400 Million Under 400 Million Minutes. Not elegant, but mathematically sound, and unlike several alumni of the original list, it will not land me in prison.
Seconds, if I ever find a fast enough car.
