Month: October 2025

• My Aunt Beverly is 93 and credits football for keeping her spirit young and her mind sharp.
• She has been a football fan for over 70 years, supporting the Steelers and 49ers.
• Football connects her with family and community, enhancing her mental agility.

Every Sunday, my 93-year-old great aunt wakes up early, sets up in her recliner, and turns on the pregame shows.

Aunt Beverly lives alone in Las Vegas and credits this one ritual with keeping her spirit young: her love of football.

On the phone recently, she gushed about her love of the sport: “If there’s a game in London, I’m up at 7. Then I watch until 10 at night — the whole day.”

She calls football her favorite pastime and her best anti-aging secret: “It keeps me jumping and alive,” she told me.

Aunt Beverly has been watching football for over 70 years

Beverly fell in love with football as a teenager in Brooklyn. That was more than 70 years ago.

“That’s how long I’ve loved football,” she told me, proudly.

After she married my late Uncle Herbert, her love for the game only strengthened. When her son, Peter, moved to California, she quickly became a fan of the San Francisco 49ers.

Today, she still calls both the Steelers and 49ers “my teams.”

Sunday and Monday night football are the highlights of her week

Beverly watches five football games a week, and catches recaps for the ones she misses.

During game days, Beverly keeps her phone nearby to call her son or grandson if she’s confused about a play. It helps her stay connected to her family and community.

The game also keeps her lively.

“Of course I yell!” she said over the phone. “If it’s a kid I like, I say, ‘Grandma’s watching!’ You haven’t lived until you’ve watched football with me.”

I’ve also noticed that football helps keep her mind sharp. She knows the players, she can track stats, and she loves strategy. During our chat, Beverly remembered decades of players, teams, and moments like they happened yesterday.

Between football games, she switches to game shows “to see how many questions I can answer.”

She doesn’t compete in fantasy football, but she acts as if she does.

“I like watching the pregame shows because I like to pick who I think is gonna make it,” she said. “So far, I’m doing pretty good. I’d never bet under or over on points. It’s the team and the kids who are playing. I don’t bet, but if I did, I’d know who to pick.”

Watching her love for football reminds me that passion is an anti-aging secret

What struck me during our phone call was how animated she became talking about football. She came to life by just talking about her passion.

At 93 years old, she stays active and mentally sharp by following the sport. Although she lives alone in Las Vegas, she never feels lonely because she has built a community and connects with others through the game.

I hope I can find something I love as much as Beverly does because it’s clearly keeping her young.

As our phone call ended, she gave her usual sweet, sassy sendoff.

“I’m hanging up now,” she added, “Because it’s Sunday football.”

• Quentin Nason says AI and shrinking grad schemes leave Gen Z with “a broken social contract.”
• The City executive urges young people to embrace entrepreneurship and “chase tomorrow’s jobs.”
• Nason says starting a business early builds vital skills and may be Gen Z’s best hedge on work.

As AI reshapes white-collar work and graduate schemes shrink, one City veteran says the safest hedge may be to stop waiting for callbacks — and start building something.

Quentin Nason, a 35-year finance veteran who spent two decades in investment banking and 15 years in asset management, has watched both his children and countless students hit a wall trying to break into finance.

Through City Pay It Forward, his independent, self-funded charity that teaches financial literacy in UK and US schools, the former Deutsche Bank managing director and now vice chair of the London Foundation for Banking and Finance, said he sees daily evidence of how hard it’s become for graduates to get a foot in the door.

“We have a generation, the generation coming through now, where we say, ‘Go to the best schools, study hard, get the grades, you know, take the student loans,’ right?” he told Business Insider.

“They’re now coming out, and they said I did what you wanted, I studied hard, and I did everything you told me to, and where is my job?” he said.

“That social contract feels broken.”

AI squeezes the first rung

Nason said entry-level roles in the City of London and on Wall Street are disappearing, with competition so fierce that “there’s less than a 1% probability you’ll get a job.”

He blames a perfect storm of AI-driven mass applications and shrinking graduate intakes.

“Recruiters are overwhelmed, candidates get no feedback — it’s crickets. The process is dehumanized.”

That pressure is showing up in hard data.

A Stanford University study from August found a 13% decline in employment for early-career workers between 22 and 25 years old in the most AI-exposed jobs, including software engineering and customer service.

The researchers found that by mid-2025, employment for young developers was down nearly 20% from its 2022 peak — even as older cohorts’ employment rose.

In August, PwC confirmed it will cut graduate hiring by about a third in the US over the next three years and by 200 roles in the UK, saying “the rapid pace of technological change is reshaping how we work.”

A generation on edge

For Nason, the result is a brewing crisis of expectation.

“They did what society told them to do, worked hard, went to university, took on £50,000 ($67,000) of debt, and now find themselves locked out,” he said.

He fears that frustration may soon erupt. He pointed to protests in Nepal and Peru as early signs of a youth-driven backlash.

“They mobilize fast,” he said. “The anger is bubbling up.”

Entrepreneurship as the escape hatch

Yet amid the bleak outlook, Nason sees a clear opportunity in entrepreneurship.

He said his charity now emphasizes startup thinking and financial literacy for students, shifting from traditional career coaching to what he called the “language of entrepreneurship.”

He cited Warren Buffett, who told Vanity Fair in 2011 he’d read a study finding that the age at which people started their first businesses is one of the biggest predictors of future success, though Buffett didn’t identify the study.

“To start a business and not only be good at math, reading, speaking, confidence, drive, it’s an amalgam of so many skills, and if you’re able to harness that at a young age, then you’re able to do like the 10,000-hour rule, right?” he said, referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that mastery takes 10,000 hours of practice.

“In a world where everything is changing,” he said, “that’s a very powerful combination.”

He also said he wants Gen Z to look beyond traditional finance hubs to the next wave of automation, robotics, blockchain, and drones.

“Rather than chasing yesterday’s jobs, chase tomorrow’s,” he said.

Even as AI erodes entry roles, Nason remains hopeful.

“Half the industries that will exist in the future don’t exist today, and we’ll find out in the next five years,” he said.

“The challenge is to try to find where the tide is going.”