Retirement as we know it didn’t exist in the 19th century, writes Joe Pinsker. The norm then was to work until you could no longer physically do the job. Now with age expectancy increasing to 100 years experts project the 20th century model of forty-year careers will need to be expanded to 60 years. He shares several concepts about how employment strategies will need to change to support workers for the long term.
In the United States, demographers predict that as many as half of today’s 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100. This means over the course of 100-year lives, we can expect to work 60 years or more.”
Source: The Atlantic, December 14, 2021. Link. Laura Carstensen proposes allowing workers to scale their hours up or down throughout their careers, based on their responsibilities outside of paid work. She imagines two parents being able to temporarily reduce their full-time jobs to 20 hours a week when caring for their young children or aging parents. Under this model, people would work the same amount overall as they do now but make up for periods of reduced hours with periods of longer hours and/or by spreading work out over more years of their (longer) lives.
INSIGHTS: Pinsker shares this perspective closing the article. “It might be difficult to imagine that widespread financial stability and a more humane style of work could become a new norm. But the world we’re living in now would have been just as hard to imagine for our predecessors who worked practically until they died.”