When No One Hires You at 50: Self-Employment, Fear, and the Power of Running

Phone Call With a Former Colleague

About four months ago, I spoke on the phone with a former colleague who had been struggling for eight months after leaving his job and failing to find a new one.

His voice was filled with a kind of exhaustion that’s hard to put into words.

From time to time I wondered how he was doing, but I kept hesitating, not knowing what to say… and four months just slipped by.

While I was still only thinking about calling, he called me first.

His voice sounded much brighter this time, and as we were catching up, he suddenly said,

“I’m thinking of opening a fried chicken place. After quitting… there isn’t really much else I can do…”

From the way he talked, I could tell he had already looked into a lot of things and was in the middle of preparing for it.

Skills That Don’t Help Much Anymore

Both he and I used to work in overseas sales. Sometimes we even went on business trips together.

Around the age of forty-five, he moved to another listed company, and I joined a small startup.

In those new companies, both of us ended up leaving around the age of fifty.

After that, I updated my resume, but there were hardly any calls. He also spent eight months job hunting with almost no results.

More than twenty years of work experience.

English skills and trade documentation.

Connections with overseas clients.

Overseas sales know-how.

All of this, together with the number “50” attached to our age, suddenly became skills that nobody seemed to need anymore.

A Resume That Gets No Interview Calls

“Find a similar job in the same field?”

When I quit my old job at forty-five and joined a startup, I already knew.

It wouldn’t be easy to move to a similar position with the same salary level I had back then.

No, even if I accepted a lower salary, it still wouldn’t be easy to find a new job doing the same kind of work.

My entire life, I thought of the company as my workplace, so I’d never really considered doing anything else.

My resume didn’t even get me interview offers, and it’s not like I had any special certifications.

My first child was about to enter university, my second was about to become a high school student, and we still had an apartment loan to pay off.

I was in a situation where I had to bring in some kind of money every month, but even when I tried to think of doing something else, I had no idea what that “something else” could be.

Pushed Into Self-Employment

I had never run a restaurant before, and I’d never really made any kind of investments either.

No matter how much I thought about it, I could only think of the work I had been doing all along.

The work I do now is selling equipment.

• You need demo units to show the equipment to customers.
• You need a space to keep those demo units.
• To secure a space, you need to think about the deposit and the monthly rent…

I thought about simply registering the business at home and then going back to my old company to use their demo room whenever I needed to.

I also thought about investing from the very beginning and setting everything up on my own. I went back and forth in my head for a long time.

In the end,

instead of investing a big amount right away, I decided I would swallow my pride and ask my former company if I could continue to use their space.

Thankfully, the director gave me permission to keep handling trade and overseas communication as I had before, while doing things that way.

Instead of using my home address, I registered my business at a shared office. The monthly fee was about 100,000 KRW.

The items I sell are purchased from my previous company and then resold under my own company name.

Whenever there was work to do, I went back to my old company and used their space to run demos.

I knew it would be very different from being there as an employee.

Friends also warned me, “It’s not easy to live like you’re running two households out of one.”

But I was too afraid to immediately rent a separate space and invest in demo equipment.

So I began my self-employment journey using my former workplace as my main base of operations.

How I Felt After Choosing Self-Employment

The reason I had always tried my best at my office job was that I believed self-employment was something I simply couldn’t do.

“I can work hard as an employee, but I’m not CEO material.”

That’s how I thought for my entire corporate life, and I never once seriously imagined owning my own business.

If there had been another realistic option, I probably would have just found another job…

But no one seemed to be looking for someone who was already fifty.

Self-employment I was pushed into!!

I had so many thoughts, but absolutely no idea where to begin.

No matter how much I pondered, no clear solution appeared.

I would think and think… and in the end, it would just end with more thinking.

The more I worried, the more it felt like both my body and mind were getting worn out.

And then, one thought came to me.

Even if I didn’t know what I was going to do yet, I decided to start by building my physical strength.

“Even if nothing works out, I’ll make up for it with time and effort. And to do that, I need to build my stamina first.”

From that moment, I started running almost every day.

When my head was full of worries, I ran.

When I felt afraid, I ran.

When I had no idea what to do next, I ran.

Running didn’t actually solve anything in a practical sense, but somehow, it felt like it pressed down my fear just a little.

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