Time to take age out of the equation

A doctor once told me that aging is not for the faint-hearted. It kinda sneaks up on you. Yet inside your head you still feel much the same as you did in your youth.

I had my first aging crisis when I was 18. For a week after my 18th birthday I was totally convinced that I was getting old and doing nothing useful with my life.

I had another one at 25 when I realised it was only five years until I would turn 30. Shock. Horror.

Somehow I made it through 40 by convincing myself that I still looked 36. No such luck at 50. I went for a four-hour kayak in ocean currents on my 50th birthday and came back feeling like I was 100.

I don’t even want to think about 60 (which thankfully is a way off yet). But I suspect some sort of crisis will be in order.

In a society that still has something of an obsession with aging, we spend a lot of time talking about the “problem” of the aging population.

The fear is that everyone is going to live into their 80s, 90s and beyond. This will create a massive imbalance in the workforce, and produce welfare and health bills that will crush the group of poor, youngish sods still slaving away and paying taxes.

Frankly it is time to turn this whole notion on its head.

An aging population should not be seen as a problem. It is an opportunity. As we move further away from grinding manual jobs to economies based on knowledge roles, the human body becomes far more resilient for longer.

It is not out of the realm to think about 70-year “careers” and there is plenty of evidence that staying highly engaged and active is good for us.

There is something bizarre about a world in which viable contenders to become President of the United States are often in their 70s yet we still have a mentality about retiring at 65 from “normal” jobs.

In fact, a 2011 study by Chicago demographer S. Jay Olshansky found that, despite eight years of one of the most high-pressure jobs imaginable, presidents generally lived longer than other men of the same age and era. The average lifespan of the first eight US presidents was 79.8 years at a time when the life expectancy for the average man was 40!

In 1958, Gallup discovered that, for men who lived to the age of 95 and beyond, the average retirement age was 80.

In his brilliant book, Before Happiness, Shawn Achor cites a 1979 study by Ellen Langer in which she was able to reverse the effects of ageing on a group of 75-year-old men by having them pretend they were 20 years younger.

As you get older you start to realise that, even though your physical body shows some signs of wear, your brain usually does not. In fact, it probably improves with age and experience.

I don’t find I have any less ability to understand contemporary technology now that I did in my 20s and 30s. If anything, I understand it better because I have a much broader context in which to apply it.

The biggest problem with the perception of aging is just that – perception. The reality is someone in their sixties or 70s in a knowledge economy job can be one of your most valuable assets.

Yet we still often discriminate against these workers because they are perceived as past-it or nearing retirement.

There is often an assumption that people have “their day” and then stop learning and reading. There is no logical basis for this. Humans are capable of learning throughout their lives.

As technology improves, the physical fraying that comes with advancing years can be managed and even reversed.

If we start talking about the amazing opportunities around longer life and keeping valuable skills for longer in the workplace, we can have a very different conversation. The traditional notion of retirement is as outmoded as safari suits and Windows 1.0.

At a time when we are activating previously dormant assets like spare rooms (Airbnb) and private vehicles (Uber), it seems very odd that we are under-valuing, under-estimating and under-utilising our human assets.

The same is true for our young people who are facing an increasingly difficult transition from education to work. But that is a story for another day…

Comments in this post are personal and not related to my day job. My life will constantly transition but I will never retire. Just do new things.