Ask HN: How to Cope with Ageism?

For the fourth or fifth time now, I've made it through an interview gauntlet (this time for a well-known, largely remote company) and got the dreaded "the team was looking for someone at an earlier stage in their career" euphemism in a (somewhat late) reply.

I breezed through all the technical discussions (I am not a worldwide expert in the particular niche they were hiring for, but knew all the internals, actually contributed to or dealt with issues in the internals and fulfilled all the requirements), and was interviewed by peers (around half my age), my prospective manager (closer, but easily 10-15 years younger) and moved up the chain until I came across two managers (probably 5 years younger than me) who were visibly uncomfortable with the notion that I would "downgrade" to a senior SE role after having years of management and consulting experience (including being a department head).

I needed that job. Not in the sense of being unemployed, but in the sense of being able to do something I loved again (my current role is... a challenge, in more ways than one), of being there for my kids again, and, to be quite frank, to build something useful.

How do you cope?

What else is there but trying to do consulting on my own? (I'm not in a very big market, and most of it is outsourced corporate IT, zero custom development, etc.).