For decades, we’ve drawn life as a straight, predictable line: study, work, retire. Three clear segments: youth, adulthood, and old age. A script that worked because it fit a biological and social reality that has now changed radically.
That line no longer exists. And if it still exists in our collective imagination, perhaps the time has come to start erasing it.
Spain and Portugal are among the longest-lived societies in Europe. Spain leads the EU with a life expectancy of 84 years, and Portugal is above 81. According to Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE), by 2055 nearly a third of the Spanish population will be over 65.
We live longer—and for longer after 65—but our social, economic, and cultural structures are still organized as if life barely went beyond 65, as it did in the mid-20th century.
Longevity isn’t just a demographic issue. It’s a structural shift that is redefining work, education, the economy, urban planning, communication, and relationships between generations.
The labor market still penalizes those over 50. In Spain, the employment rate among people aged 55 to 64 is around 53%, far below countries like Sweden or Germany, where it exceeds 75%. It’s an obvious waste of talent and experience accumulated over decades.
At the same time, education continues to be designed as if learning ended with university, when we know the capacity to learn remains active far beyond what the collective imagination assumes.
In recent years, I’ve interviewed people in their 80s, 90s, and well over 100 who don’t talk about an ending, but about continuity. I’ve spoken with doctors researching how to extend healthspan—the period of life lived in full health—not just the number of years. With mayors in places where longevity coexists with demographic challenge: municipalities where more than 40% of the population is over 65 and where the question isn’t how to manage aging, but how to build community with it. With creatives and communications directors who are starting—at last—to portray older people as active subjects, with desires, needs, and complexity, rather than as stereotypes reduced to fragility or nostalgia.
The silver economy—the set of economic activities linked to older people—already represents more than 25% of GDP in Europe, and it’s estimated it will continue to grow steadily in the coming decades. It isn’t a niche. It’s an economic engine that many companies still don’t know how to read or how to keep pace with.
And the question that appears again and again is the same: Are we prepared to live longer than we had planned?
The new line of life is no longer straight, nor is it divided into three acts. It’s longer, more flexible, more hybrid. It includes second professional careers, creative projects that begin at 70, relationships that reinvent themselves, internal migration toward more livable places, forms of care that overflow the traditional model of the nuclear family. It calls for new public policies that go beyond the pension system. It calls for new narratives that abandon the old age–dependence equation. And it calls for new forms of intergenerational collaboration based not on tolerance, but on mutual recognition.
From this space at CENIE, I want to help broaden that conversation: to analyze how longevity is transforming our territories, our economy, and our culture; to explore what we’re doing well and what we still think about using last century’s categories; and, above all, to ask ourselves what kind of society we want to build when your 50s, 60s, or 70s are no longer a phase of decline, but a central stage of life.
Longevity is not a problem to manage. It’s a social achievement we must learn to organize. It has been the result of decades of medical advances, improved living conditions, and protection systems that transformed our societies.
Now we face a new question: how do we live well a life longer than we had imagined?
The line of life needs to be redrawn—with ambition and with better structures to sustain it.
