The Need To Rethink What It Means To Be Old
For the past few years, I’ve posted up three lectures over the Christmas period that I think provide an interesting commentary on key issues of our time. The tradition is inspired by the Royal Society Christmas lectures that began with Michael Faraday in 1825.
Mauro Guillen, dean of the Cambridge Judge Business School, outlines in his recent book 2030 that there are set to be over 438 million people over 65 in China, by which time 1 in 5 people in Japan will be over 80. Similarly, nearly one in five EU citizens is over 65 years of age, with that figure expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades.
As such, changing our perspective on age and aging is perhaps the foremost challenge of our time. Stanford's Susan Wilner Golden, whose book Stage (Not Age): How to Understand and Serve People Over 60—the Fastest Growing, Most Dynamic Market in the World highlights the richness and diversity within the age group we tend to lump together as a homogenous "old" demographic, is one of the foremost thinkers on the topic.
In the first video of this year's series, she discusses the need for the workforce to adapt to ensure that highly skilled and valuable workers aren't encouraged to leave but to stay and continue contributing.
Yale's Becca Levy is arguably the foremost thinker on aging and particularly how our perceptions around aging are so influential. Her book Breaking the Age Code aims to shift our thinking around aging so that we can take a healthier perspective on the topic.
In the video below, she talks with Chip Conley, whose Modern Elder Academy aims to shift the conversation around older workers and the value they bring to the workforce.
The final lecture in this year's series on age comes from Joseph Couglin, the head of MIT's AgeLab, He famously remarked that raising life expectancy was "the greatest achievement in the history of mankind and all we can say is, is it going to bankrupt Medicare."
In the following lecture, he talks about the need to change our conversation around aging and older people. The world’s fastest-growing market is also it's most misunderstood. For decades, conventional myths have said that older adults simply want to age into a life of leisure. But defying conventions is what has defined this generation and Coughlin explains how we need to write a new story.
