FACT CHECK ME: Leadership Ends. Eldership Remains

Leadership is strange.

It makes you feel important.

And once you feel important, it’s hard to let it go.

But that feeling isn’t leadership.

It’s attachment.

It’s holding on to power and calling it responsibility.

Real leadership isn’t about being needed —

it’s about making yourself less necessary over time.

That’s why I hate the word “senior” in titles.

Senior implies old.

It implies stuck.

It implies someone nearing the end of the line,

guarding relevance instead of building what’s next.

Leadership was never meant to be permanent.

Strength fades.

Energy shifts.

That’s not failure — that’s nature.

So what do we do with the ones who won’t leave?

The ones with experience.

The ones who’ve seen it all.

The ones who can anticipate the bend in the road

because they’ve already crashed there.

We don’t call them “senior.”

We call them Elders.

An Elder doesn’t lead from the front.

They don’t hunt.

They don’t go to war.

They don’t give orders.

They give context.

They say, “We’ve seen this pattern before.

Pay attention here.”

Elders know it’s not their time —

and that knowledge is the source of their wisdom.

Their role isn’t to decide.

It’s to challenge.

To steady.

To hold leaders to account when ego creeps in

and memory starts getting rewritten.

Elders cook.

They care for children.

They create the conditions for the next generation to grow,

because raising leaders requires more patience,

time, and restraint

than ambition ever did.

Elders are not passive.

They are active in a different way.

And wisdom isn’t knowing everything.

Wisdom is knowing where your knowledge ends —

because the world kept moving

while you were busy building it.

And before anyone says this sounds “indigenous,”

let’s be clear:

Elder is our word too.

Not borrowed.

Not appropriated.

Remembered.

Every culture had elders

long before modern titles, résumés, and hierarchies.

Back when humans lived in small groups,

raised children together,

and understood that survival depended on roles —

not rank.

Indigenous peoples didn’t invent elders.

They were simply never allowed to forget them.

They were forced to adopt our words.

We were forced to forget our meanings.

This isn’t progress.

It’s a reset.

A return to what’s natural.

Leadership was always meant to be temporary.

Strength was always meant to fade.

Wisdom was always meant to stay.

Elders existed because societies once understood a simple truth:

experience without restraint becomes control,

and control without humility becomes rot.

So no — this isn’t nostalgia.

It’s anthropology.

We’re not moving forward into something new.

We’re peeling back layers of bureaucracy and ego

to remember how humans actually work

when they’re trying to survive,

build,

and raise the next generation.

Leadership moves forward.

Eldership stays rooted.

Confusing the two

is how institutions rot.

No one owns the future.

They only prepare it.