... your worth devaluates.
Think about it:
The older you get, the lower you ranking becomes. This is so by design. Ask the NRE folks, most of them are in the NI rank group.
Also, the older you get, the less employable outside EM you become. This is so due to a combination of three forces at play, also by design:
1- you are forced to become a generalist and give up your specialty because you are forced to rotate every three or so years and new assignments are chosen for you but supervisors who have no incentive to advocate for your career.
2- You are working in a declining commodity business. As such, there is no relevant innovation required and thus no hard skills to cultivate. Profits are 95% correlated to oil prices and the best the company can do with innovation is to reduce such correlation to 90%.
3- You supervisor changes every 2 years, usually by someone younger than your previous supervisor. Thus, while you age, your supervisor age remains constant. This increasing age gap between your supervisor and you will eventually hurt you because bosses tend to relate and be more attuned to the needs and concerns of those in their generation. I was once in a team where one team member (late twenties) was having a first child while another (late forties) was managing the end of life of an aging parent. The (early thirties) supervisor knew well what to do (and what to say) to the former and was completely clueless, ignorant and unemphatic to the latter.