The 100-Year Life: How to make

longevity a blessing, not a curse

Half the babies born in wealthier countries since 2000 will see their 100th birthday,
changing everything from work and economics to our relationships, says a new book

Our young selves should hang on to rewards for our older incarnations

AFP/Getty Images

By Marek Kohn

WHEN Poles want to wish somebody well, they wish them a hundred years of life. This
is a charming prospect, as long as the chances of it coming to pass are vanishingly
small. But once it starts to look as though it might actually happen, you may think that
people should be careful what they wish for you.

As Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott make arrestingly clear, it will take a lot more than
good wishes to make sure that a hundred years is a blessing, not a curse.
Life expectancies have been rising by up to three months a year since 1840, and there is
no sign of that flattening. Gratton and Scott draw on a 2009 study to show that if the
trend continues, more than half the babies born in wealthier countries since 2000 may
reach their 100th birthdays.

With a few simple, devastating strokes, Gratton and Scott show that under the current
system it is almost certain you wont be able to save enough to fund several decades of
decent retirement. For example, if your life expectancy is 100, you want a pension that
is 50 per cent of your final salary, and you save 10 per cent of your earnings each year,
they calculate that you wont be able to retire till your 80s. People with 100-year life
expectancies must recognise they are in for the long haul, and make an early start
arranging their lives accordingly.

But how to go about this? Gratton and Scott advance the idea of a multistage life, with
repeated changes of direction and attention. Material and intangible assets will need
upkeep, renewal or replacement. Skills will need updating, augmenting or discarding, as
will networks of friends and acquaintances. Earning will be interspersed with learning
or self-reflection. As the authors warn, recreation will have to become re-creation.

More than half the babies born in wealthier countries since 2000 may reach their 100th
birthdays

Clearly this will be expensive. As well as saving for retirement, people will need to pay
for self-reflection phases and education. If you are, say, a hairdresser, you wont need to
worry too much about skills becoming obsolete. But you probably wont be able to
afford much self-renewal. Gratton and Scott point out the twofold inequality of
lengthening lifespans: the rich live longer than the poor, and the better-off are better off
in all the resources needed to make increasing longevity a blessing not a burden.

Even the better-off will mostly be stretched by the demands of the multistage life,
though, and so the need for a good partner will loom ever larger. Although two cant
live as cheaply as one, they can live more cheaply together than apart. Crucially, too,
partners will look to each other for financial cover when not earning.

Theres a contradiction here that the authors dont really acknowledge. The 100-year
life demands constant review and readiness to change ones work and ones self, but
relies heavily on commitment to ones partner. Yet people already review their
relationships, resulting in changes of partner. They may need to reverse that policy.

Perhaps Gratton and Scott felt their groundbreaking book should skirt some of the
tougher terrain, so as not to discourage readers who arent ready to think as boldly as
they do.

The most significant absence is about ageing itself. Although they note that financial
literacy declines with age, for the most part they write as though people think and feel
much the same way whatever age they are. Yet recent research illustrates that younger
and older people have different incentives. Researchers at University College London,
for example, found that older people dont respond as strongly to rewards as younger
ones. They think that may be because the reward neurotransmitter, dopamine,
declines by up to 10 per cent every decade.

If they are still working, older people will be competing with younger people who have
more motivation in their synapses. Hopefully those younger people will have the
foresight to hang on to their rewards so they can pass them on to their less motivated,
less competent older selves. The 100-year life will need the old to be young, and the
young old.

The 100-Year Life: Living and working in an age of longevity

Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott

Bloomsbury

This article appeared in print under the headline A hundred and counting