A New Luxury Retreat Caters to Elderly Workers in Tech (Ages 30 and Up)

Guests don’t check in and out as at a traditional retreat; they submit “applications” for one-week programs and, if accepted, pay “tuition” of $5,000 to secure a room and three locally sourced meals a day.Modern Elder was started by a hotelier turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and it is aimed at workers in the digital economy — those who feel like software is speeding up while they are slowing down, no matter how old they really are. A longtime hotelier — he had founded the Joie de Vivre boutique hotel chain in 1987, and had a string of iconic properties to his name — he had taken a job at Airbnb, the San Francisco start-up fast upending the hospitality industry.His younger co-workers, with their zippy metabolisms and surplus collagen, started referring to him as “the elder.” Mr. Conley — who in his 20s started San Francisco’s best party motel and is a longtime Burning Man and local night-life fixture — was a little confused but resigned himself to the idea.“We are all elders in the making,” Mr. Conley said. In the nine Modern Elder sessions he’s hosted to date, the oldest participant was 74, the youngest was 30, and the average has been 52.“People feel irrelevant younger, especially in places like Silicon Valley,” Mr. Conley said. The median age of a worker at Facebook, LinkedIn and SpaceX is 29, according to a recent analysis by the workplace transparency site PayScale.At Modern Elder, several people introduced themselves by rounding up their ages — one woman said she was “soon to be 39,” another was “almost 42,” and a third was “pretty soon looking at 50.” Some said they chose to come south because they thought vacationing would be more serene without 20-somethings in the mix.“I wasn’t having to think, ‘Oh, this is going to be a fashion show every day,’” said Libby Wann, 38. — actually, it’s just after 8 o’clock,” Mr. Conley said. One person disclosed terminal cancer that few at home knew about.Another circle started, this one about “liminality.” Mr. Hamaoui said, “I feel like I’m just not getting it. Mr. Conley talked about reclaiming the term elder like the gay community has reclaimed queer.“The social narrative is basically, midlife is a crisis and after a crisis you have decrepitude,” Mr. Conley said. He and Mr. Conley are imagining it as an “intergenerational community,” he said one evening, leaning back on the Modern Elder veranda.