Ageing STRETCHES all parts of life

This mental re-frame will help you make sense of ageing debates and the current trends around housing, fertility, retirement and more.

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Ageing is many things to many people.

For some, it means the collapse of the welfare state Ponzi Scheme. For others, it means a lack of workers. For others, it is evidence of the enormous successes of modern medicine and economic growth.

As I have noted before, fears about an ageing population are age-old.

Here’s the thing.

Many concerns about ageing stem from a misunderstanding about how living longer affects life events.

Some think ageing means adding years in retirement, with no change to the rest of your life.

This is wrong.

Ageing has stretched out all periods of our lives. We have longer childhoods and study periods, longer work lives, and longer retirements.

Reframing in your mind that an ageing society is stretching out lives, rather than adding years at the end of lives, gives you a proper sense of what is going on.

The below diagram shows how this has occurred over roughly my lifetime since 1980.