The Longevity Explosion

Long life is our greatest achievement. We, the Lucky Few, have lived longer than all previous generations.

In “Redesigning Long Life“, the Stanford Center on Longevity reports,

Over the next 30 years, the US population age 65+ will double from 40 million to 80 million, and the share of old people will increase from 13% to 20%. By the time the last baby boomer turns 65 in 2029, one in five Americans will be age 65 or older. By 2032, there will be more people age 65 or older than children under 15.

North Americans born today have a possible lifespan a full 20 years more than some of us born in 1925. We have already lived much longer than the “greatest generation”, the cohort that preceded us. And we can look forward to more years added to our lives ahead. Science and technology are constantly working to increase our longevity. This growth has escalated so fast in the last few decades, that we wonder if the world can possibly absorb it.

The surge in global population has not been the result of a long, slowly evolving trend. Rather, it has happened in a startlingly short span of time, and represents a cataclysmic event in the history of the world. As electricity, refrigeration, pasteurization, vaccination and other innovations became widely available, world population boomed. The Longevity Study puts this transformation into perspective:

In less than a century, more years were added to life expectancy than all years added across all prior millennia of evolution combined.

We planned for younger people

When our generation developed the urban and suburban environments we occupy today, the world was a much younger place. We built parks with climbing apparatus, transportation systems with steps and platforms, suburbs with great distances between services, and super highways that required quick thinking drivers who could switch in and out of lanes and read highway signs at high speeds. When we built sidewalks, we assumed pedestrians could step over curbs, we put up street signs that were attractive but hard to read, sweeping staircases that looked good, but were difficult to navigate, street signals and crosswalks that required people to move quickly. This infrastructure served us well at the time, and we thought it would last long into the future.

We made some adjustments for the elderly

The medical community and the senior homes industry were the first responders to the needs of elders. The rise in medical and residential services to the elderly was swift and impressive. Technology has been a boon to ageing populations: wheeled walkers, scooters, hearing aids, motorized beds and electronic health monitors have all made life easier and safer for the elderly. Urban designers provided graduated curbs, ramps and handicapped parking, and installed audible crosswalk signals to guide the visually compromised.

The pressures on health and residential care will continue as the elder population grows. As the first line of defence, the medical community will train more professionals in gerontology, and technology will become even more creative in developing support for mobility and other needs. These are the obvious needs, in full view, and easy to understand.

We need to rethink services to match our growing numbers

But visualize almost a fifth of our population as elderly, with the special needs arising out of our unique capabilities and non-capabilities. Consider a population in which almost 25% of us move a good deal slower than the rest, have poorer eyesight and hearing, and require computers and smartphones that are easier to read and use. As we remain healthy and mobile, and no longer willing to be housed in residences hidden from view, our needs will reach into all aspects of our society—from the medical and residential concerns of today to how pensions are provided, how communities are designed, and how communication is delivered.

We need to rethink culture to match our longer lives

With one in five of North Americans reaching the age of 65 in less than 15 years, a shift in emphasis is needed to bring our needs into focus.
As more and more of us live well into our 90s and past 100, changes are needed in the way we think about the significant cultural markers we observe as we age:

• Given the less than 20 year average for marriage survival, we will need to marry later, and change our attitudes toward 2nd and 3rd marriages
• We will need to work longer, while at the same time, considering the rights of younger workers
• We may need to give up owning single residence homes
• We will need to give up our cars, and use public transit

This may require that manufacturers and shapers of our economy think in a different way. What is the point of creating innovations that can’t be used by a large part of the population—cars that can speed around curves at high speeds, smart phone that are geared for agile fingers, packages that provide lengthy preservation, but cannot be opened by anyone over 60.

It will take an about-turn—a rise in consciousness among the currently young and middle-aged population, who will be the elderly of tomorrow. It will require that businesses, planners and builders become pro-active and future-oriented and make the big cultural changes needed. For those that think it is all too much, Gregg Easterbrook (The Atlantic, Oct. 2014) makes this optimistic observation:

But the story might have a happy ending. If medical interventions to slow aging result in added years of reasonable fitness, life might extend in a sanguine manner, with most men and women living longer in good vigor, and also working longer, keeping pension and health-care subsidies under control. Indeed, the most-exciting work being done in longevity science concerns making the later years vibrant, as opposed to simply adding time at the end.