Heartbreaking Loss: back to the sixties & the seventies Announce Unexpected Retirement…

The economics are clear: we need to be working into our 70s. The idea of retiring earlier is fine if you’re going to die at 70. But the truth is most of us aren’t.

Every single decade, we live longer. So the thought that you might live to 100 is a possibility. And so the idea of retiring in your 60s I think is entirely outmoded. We need to think about working right the way through our life. But of course, to do that, we have to change the way we think about our whole life.

I’ve been writing about the future of work for more than 20 years. And frankly, I was beginning to get pretty frustrated. I wrote about how the world was going to change, and I was sort of surprised it didn’t change because actually the forces against change are pretty strong. People were saying, “Well, we still need to come into the office. I know there’s a long commute, but it’s really important. You can retire when you’re 60. That’s going to be okay.” I knew that wasn’t going to work, but I really couldn’t see the forces that were going to change that.

The pandemic was an astonishing event. Suddenly 50% of workers could work from home. So what that did was to upend many of the traditions we had about work. For example, if you take a look at a typical life that your dad had, or that my dad had in the 40s and 50s, it followed 3 stages, which everybody did, by the way at the same time: full-time education, full-time work, full-time retirement.

You don’t really have to have a great deal of self-insight. All you have to do is to look around left and right and ask yourself, “What’s everybody else doing at my age?” Because age equals stage. But that’s not going to work for me. It’s not going to work for you, and it’s certainly not going to work for our children.

Think about the way that the world is changing. It’s changing in the sense that we’re living longer. So that means that simply retiring at 60 or 55 just isn’t going to work. It’s changing in the sense that there are huge technological changes coming up almost on a daily basis. For example, generative AI is a thing that we’re all looking at now. Why are we so excited and frightened of that? Well, it replaces knowledge work.

In fact, there’s an argument that it might even replace the creative tasks that we do. Technology requires us to upskill and re-skill every year of our life, and it’s changing in the sense that the family structures that we have are also becoming much more individual. If we’re going to have different ways of living, different family structures, we need to redesign work.

Here’s what I think’s going to happen. We’re going to start doing what I would call a multi-stage life. It’s the idea that you can do all sorts of different things at all sorts of stages. For example, education suddenly becomes something you do right the way through your life. It becomes a lifetime of learning.

Work becomes something that you dip in and out of. Rather than starting in a company when you are 20 years old and just going straight through, you could work part-time. You could freelance, you could take time off. And retirement also moves back, and it takes time.