How old do you think you’ll be when you die? Actuaries will tell you that most people significantly underestimate their own life expectancy. Based solely on my age and sex, I’ve got a one-in-four chance of reaching 95. That’ll be the year 2073. I’m a child of the 1980s, but I might still be alive in the 2080s.
This increased longevity is an incredible success story of human ingenuity and social progress in areas like public health, nutrition and medical science. We’ve been given this gift of much longer lives in the 21st century, but I don’t believe we’re even remotely making the most of the opportunity. Our mental models of the course of a typical life, as well as the social structures we have in society to support us, are all stuck in the 20th century. It’s time that we caught up.
Take for example how we think about what we will be doing at different stages of our lives. Most of us still think in terms of a relatively simple three-stage life. Education comes first, then on to working and perhaps raising a family, then ending in retirement and leisure. But as we live for longer, I think that this model needs to be broken down. We will need to reskill and re-educate ourselves during adult life to maintain long working lives. We will need to make more time and space to care for others in generations above and below us, alongside working. We will need to rethink retirement as not a cliff edge between a life of hard work and a life of quiet relaxation, but as a glide path where work can shift to suit our needs and preferences as we age, so that we lean out of work more gradually. And we will need to rethink how we support ourselves financially if we hope not to work, or work less, in the final decades of our lives.
I’m the director of Phoenix Insights, a new think tank set up to take the opportunities that longevity presents to the forefront of public debate and the political and economic agenda.
We want to encourage people across the UK to challenge their assumptions and re-imagine their own futures. We want to help people take new decisions to shape their lives differently, whether that be about money, work, health and caring or the place they live. We will use high-quality research and analysis to develop ideas, policies and practical actions that will make a difference. We’ll develop a clear vision of what better and longer lives look like, analyse the barriers to change and propose the solutions to improve longer lives for all of us, narrowing the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. And we’ll do this by working in close collaboration with partners in academia, civil society and beyond.
Our ability to do this is backed by being part of Phoenix Group. As the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business, Phoenix is committed to responding proactively to our recommendations as an employer, to better support its 7,800 colleagues as they age, as an investor with circa £300bn of assets under administration, and through its products and services to its circa 13m customers.
I believe that we can and must shift our society away from one stuck in 20th-century structures and ways of living, to one that truly embraces and makes the most of our longer lives.
Reforms in recent years—such as pension auto-enrolment, banning the default retirement age, the right to request flexible work and the promise of a cap on high social care costs—are worthwhile measures. But they do not go far enough.
If you look for them, the signs that we have not adapted to longer lives are everywhere. At least 12m adults are not saving enough for retirement, and pensioner poverty has begun to rise again. It is very difficult to get back into work if you find yourself unemployed in your 50s or 60s. Our chronically under-funded social care system is testament to how little dignity we are collectively prepared to afford those of us who cannot care for themselves day-to-day. Housing developers are building the sorts of houses that can sell, but not the sorts of houses that will support growing numbers with disabilities and health conditions to live independently for longer. Life expectancy has suffered due to Covid, but even before the pandemic, life expectancy for the poorest in society was starting to drop; the gap in healthy life expectancy between rich and poor is growing.
Billionaires on the west coast of the US are pumping money into geroscience—the pursuit of therapeutic interventions that could delay or reverse biological ageing and further increase the maximum human lifespan. But we’ve still failed to adapt to the life expectancies given to us by the 19th- and 20th-century pioneers of vaccination, sanitation, social security and medicine.
We have to think differently. Sometimes, I find it helpful to remember that how things are today is not how things have always been. We invented pensions. We invented the weekend. We invented teenagers. And we can re-invent how we work, save, care and live in response to increased longevity. We’ve been given this gift of longer life, so let’s use it.
