It may not be your choice. At some point it becomes more and more difficult to get a job interview if you don't have more impressive sounding job titles on your resume.
What I discovered after I turned 35 was that erasing all evidence of my age from my resume made a massive difference in getting interviews. Of course, further success depended on being able to fake being young as fortunate genetics helped me to do. Just be careful about specifics in what you talked about, in a 2003 interview I slipped and mentioned PDP-11s, which prompted the interviewer to exclaim "Just how old are you?" I was hired, probably in part because the job was particularly difficult software archaeology, but my younger boss ... well, it didn't last long, or end well.
