The way things are looking, the royal family will want to start bulk-buying birthday cards.
When King George V sent the first telegrams to those celebrating their 100th birthday in 1917, he had to fire off only 24 messages. Last year, his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth sent 6,405 congratulatory cards to centenarians in the UK. Her own grandson and her great grandson will be signing a whole lot more, based on current projections. Those forecasts suggest that today’s 10-year-olds have a 50% chance of living to at least 103.
This rising longevity has come under the spotlight during the election campaign in a way the Conservatives would rather forget. No sooner had Theresa May raised the idea of people paying more for the costs of social care – branded a “dementia tax” – than she performed a U-turn.
The focus on the costs of an ageing society continued in a recent warning from the World Economic Forum that the retirement age in Britain and other leading developed countries would need to rise to 70 by the middle of the century to head off a pension crisis.
The WEF is right that there are huge cost implications from demographic changes taking place around the world. Indeed, the fact that a longer life is harder to fund for both the individual and state cannot remain a taboo subject, however awkward it may be to talk about who will foot the bill for more health and social care. But what is really missing from the debate about longevity is how a longer life is also a source of opportunities. At the root of this problem is the fact that our society remains largely ageist: too quick to write people off, too narrow minded about life after 60.
The gerontologist Sarah Harper highlighted this last week when she called for a change to the way we talk about age. People should not be called old until they were seriously frail, dependent and approaching death, said Harper, the director of the Oxford Institute of Ageing. Anything else should be called “active adulthood”.
This raises the key point that we are no longer in an age where people cease work in their sixties, expecting to enjoy only a short retirement before they die. Instead, those who get the state pension will on average spend almost a third of their adult life in retirement, as John Cridland noted in his recent government-commissioned review of the state pension age. But despite this seismic shift, we are still structuring life in three stages – childhood, work, retirement. What’s more, the ages at which each stage begins has barely budged in decades.
It is this damaging fixation with a three-stage life that Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott explore in their book The 100-year Life. Their research in the worlds of psychology and economics feeds into a work that is a mixture of self-help book for those who want to make more of being younger for longer and a manifesto for how firms and policymakers can adapt to rising longevity.
The authors make a gloomy assessment of where governments and employers currently stand in that evolutionary process.
“What is striking is the contrast between the magnitude of change that society will embark upon as people live longer, and the relatively limited response from corporations and governments,” they write. “Saying that corporates and governments are ‘behind the curve’ doesn’t even come close.”
But the authors also have a positive message. They concede that living longer will inevitably mean most people will have no choice but to work a great deal longer. But that is not necessarily as bad as it sounds. We simply need to think more creatively about what work is, how it can change and how we can change over a longer lifetime, in what they call a “multi-stage life”. That could mean working at a different pace at different stages, changing path more often or taking sabbaticals, for example.
On top of the longevity factor, our working lives will also be shaped by rapid technological changes. Such developments as hi-tech robots and online banking are already forcing people to adapt how they work and in some cases to retrain altogether. For some workers, robots are already stealing their jobs.
But here again, a longer life offers opportunities to adapt to those pressures. As Gratton and Scott note about retraining: “Given that across a 100-year lifespan there are 873,000 hours available and if, as is often claimed, a specialist expertise takes 10,000 hours to acquire, mastery in more than one field is neither daunting nor impossible.”
It’s an alluring image: a world where people can take time out to retrain, their human skills are valued and nurtured by their employers and the government puts the education and welfare system in place to make it all happen.
So how do we get there? Employers and policymakers can start by doing more to help the current cohort of over-50s to stay in work if they want to. There are almost a million 50- to 64-year-olds who are not in employment at all but say they are willing or would like to work, according to the Fuller Working Lives report published by the government this year. In other words, despite skills shortages, employers are not making use of a whole pot of untapped talent and experience.
This urgently needs to change. As the Centre for Ageing Better points out, by 2020, one in three UK workers will be over 50 and employers will have to retain, retrain and recruit those older workers. One solution is to shorten or change working hours. Another is redefining older workers’ roles so they become mentors to younger recruits, something Cridland recommended in his review. Employers must also move away from the current model where they centre so much of their training on new, young recruits.
The onus is also on government to offer more and better education throughout people’s lives. That must include financial education to help people cope with the greater number of choices a longer life will impose. Crucially, it must be education that is readily available to all.
Similarly, our healthcare provision and welfare system will need to evolve so that everyone can benefit from rising longevity. Otherwise, as the 100-year Life authors point out, life risks being “nasty, brutish and long” for those unable to afford the kind of self-reinventions and sabbaticals that a longer life would ideally entail.
It’s a life that is hard to imagine as long as we remain stuck in our learn-work-retire model. But instead of just squabbling over care costs, pensions and retirement ages, isn’t it time we ditched that old way of living and saw rising longevity for what it is? More time to do more things.