The longevity transition: the necessary adjustment of the system to make us happier
Demographic transitions have been the great advances of humanity. When I say that it is not the internet, or new technologies and their applications or Artificial Intelligence, but that the great achievement of our society is the increase in life expectancy, I say this with complete conviction. The fact that more people are living longer and in better health seems to me to be the greatest wealth a society can boast. Even if we do not realise it, even if it is used as a kind of economic threat, even if it is seen as a challenge. In recent years, life expectancy, having surpassed infant mortality (not so many years ago, so common, so general, but just as painful), is accumulating in the last years of our lives. Again, I insist. It is not so much that there used to be no nonagenarians (for example) but that few people reached old age. It was a privilege of the few.
This gain of life in old age (whatever that means, even if we disagree on what it means) has meant that we are facing a new transition: from the demographic transition (passing through two) we have moved on to the transition towards longevity.
The longevity transition is a transition for which, although we have had time and examples from other countries (as it is not a new phenomenon), we have not been able to prepare ourselves. Despite the clues that other countries were leaving us, despite how relatively easy it would have been to make a prognosis exercise in the face of demographic evolution, longevity is a transition that seems to have caught us without new ideas. Once again, we seem to have arrived late and with our tongues hanging out.
Approaches on how to deal with longevity, conceived as a negative aspect around the idea of living too long, are completely monothematic and have even been monopolised by certain sectors. Sectors with particular, rather than social, interests. For example, few approaches focus on the industrial relations system beyond the fact that the retirement age should be raised (over and over again). As on so many other occasions, the focus is on the individual (you should work longer) without asking the system to account for itself: in what way, under what conditions.
In terms of social justice, it is hardly justifiable that there is no change in substance (and form) in the nature of labour relations while adaptations are (continuously) demanded from the individual perspective. If we want it to work, if we want to have not only long-lived but also happy societies, institutions must be able to anticipate the demands made on individuals with changes focused on the well-being of the former. The effort to adapt to the new demographic situation cannot be asymmetrical. Only when there is a situation of balance, a situation of bidirectional adaptation to this new (and positive) reality of longer life expectancy, will we be able to achieve the dividends of longevity.
In other words, if we want to optimise the characteristics of our new long-living societies, we will have to change the discourse and move towards a positive vision of what it means to live longer. But we will also have to adapt the new society to the new people, to the new life cycle, making the life expectations associated with living longer a positive thing and not a punishment. To do this, it will be necessary for the institutions, the system, to be able to increase their flexibility and adaptation to needs. Let us stop forcing the pieces of the puzzle (individuals) to fit together and let us be more flexible in the framework. Labour relations, timetables, the way we understand work (which now absorbs and dominates our lives and organises our hours, so that we survive Mondays as if they were torture) will have to be changed in their conception and application. I will insist on the idea that longevity and the transition to longevity is a good thing. However, in order for it to be so from an economic, social and experiential (vital, personal) point of view, the different institutions, starting with the workplace, will have to adapt. Become more flexible.
What I mean by this is that we need to stop seeing the increase in life expectancy as a situation to be responded to with austerity policies and which make the delay in retirement a necessary torture, as a kind of punishment for living too long. If this is how we understand it, we must ask ourselves what is so wrong with the design of jobs and workplaces that we consider it a necessary torture: working hours, breaks or the lack of them, excessive control, absurd demands, ways of conceiving commitment to jobs that are unsatisfactory and why they are so, the non-existent conciliation between personal, work and family life. Companies should invest in their labour relations departments to find the means to improve a situation that is neither good nor positive for people of any age. Our working model is not friendly for older people, but it is not friendly for young people either. When a young person wants to retire, let us ask ourselves why. We work too many hours and at too high a personal and psychological cost. Our job expectations are generally low and unsatisfactory, which is pointing to deep-seated problems.
From an individual point of view, we will undoubtedly need to reflect on how to make the most or make more of the gift of living longer. One of the key questions will also be how the structural dimension and the individual dimension will dialogue with each other to give rise to agreements that satisfy both parties (always prioritising social welfare). Let us not forget that positive longevity is not only about living longer, but also about quality of life. Not only in the physical health dimension, but also in the psychological and social dimensions.
