Here’s why that’s not all bad news
By Professor Lynda Gratton, London Business School
Lynda Gratton is a professor of management practice at the London Business School, founder of HSM Advisory, and author of Redesigning Work and The Hundred Year Life. She has been writing about the future of work for more than 20 years.
The following content has been adapted from the above video and age references have been changed to suit New Zealand retirement age.
Politicians are telling you that you can retire at 65. But, the economics are clear: We need to be working into our 70s. The idea of retiring at 65 is fine if you die at 75. But the truth is that most of us aren’t. Every single decade, we live longer. There is a higher chance of living to 100, which means retiring in your 60s is entirely outmoded. We need to think about working right the way through our life. But of course, to do that, we must change how we think about our whole life.
I wrote about how the world was going to change, and I was surprised it didn’t change because the forces against change are pretty strong. People said, “We still need to come into the office. I know there’s a long commute, but it’s essential. You can retire when you’re 65. That’s going to be okay.” I knew that wouldn’t work, but I couldn’t see the forces that would change that.
The traditional life stages
The pandemic was an astonishing event. Suddenly, people could work from home. That concept upended many of the traditions we had about work. For example, if you look at a typical life that your dad had, it followed three stages, which everybody did at the same time:
- full-time education,
- full-time work, and
- full-time retirement.
You don’t have to have a great deal of self-insight. All you have to do is 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.
The world is changing.
Think about the way the world is changing. We are living longer, so retiring at 60 or 65 just isn’t going to work. It’s changing because substantial technological changes are coming up almost daily. 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. There’s an argument that it might even replace our creative tasks. Technology requires us to upskill and re-skill every year of our lives, and it’s changing in the sense that our family structures are also becoming much more individual. So, if we have different ways of living and family structures, we need to redesign work.
Living a multi-stage life
Here is what I think will happen. We are going to start doing what I would call a multi-stage life. It is the idea that you can do various things at various stages. For example, education suddenly becomes something you do the right way through your life. It becomes a lifetime of learning.
Work becomes something that you dip in and out of. You could work part-time rather than starting in a company when you are 20 and just going straight through. You could freelance, you could take time off. Retirement also moves back, and it takes time.
I want to point out that it is tough to work until you’re 70 in one long, never-ending streak. You have to break that up and make a life that works for you. Not the life that worked for your mum and dad. The life that works for you.
What’s exciting about a multi-stage life, but also frankly makes it more difficult, is that each of us lives our multi-stage life the way we want to. So it could be that at 30, you decide to take time off for a year and travel the world. But as you look around, you see that there are not that many other people who are going to be doing the same thing. You have to have more of a sense of yourself.
Breaking away from tradition takes courage
The truth is, the traditional 3-stage life is relatively easy. You don’t need to think very much about it; you can just get on and do it and do it the same way as all your peers do. In multi-stage life, you do something that perhaps nobody else in your peer group has done. In other words, you become a social enterprise; you do your own thing, which takes courage.
The sort of question that you want to ask yourself is, “What’s important to me? What is it that I want to get out of my life? How do I want to live my life?” These are big questions you need to ask yourself now to make the most of the trends shaping our work.
Let’s ditch the idea of retirement. Let’s work as long as possible and make work fun, exciting, and a learning experience.
