Work, Retirement, and New Working Ages
For decades, working life was understood as a straight line with a clear end.
People studied, worked continuously, and at a certain point definitively left employment to enter retirement. That scheme, which worked in societies with shorter lives and stable trajectories, no longer fits the reality of long-lived societies.
Today we live longer, enjoy better health for more years, and move through multiple life transitions. In this new context, the question is no longer only when to retire, but how we want to relate to work throughout a long life.
The Exhaustion of the Binary Model
The traditional model divides adult life into two large blocks: activity and retirement. Work or retirement. In or out.
Productive or dependent. This binary logic shaped public policies, labor frameworks, and social expectations for decades.
But longevity has revealed its main limitation: life does not behave in a binary way.
Many people want to continue working after the legal retirement age, though not necessarily under the same conditions. Others need to reduce their workload before reaching that age. Still others alternate periods of employment, caregiving, education, or late-life entrepreneurship.
The rigidity of the model does not reflect the real diversity of life trajectories.
Long Lives, Multiple Work Trajectories
In long-lived societies, a professional career is no longer concentrated in a single occupation or a single stage of life. It is increasingly common to find work biographies marked by pauses, reinventions, returns, and changes of pace.
This is not an anomaly; it is a direct consequence of living longer.
When life is extended, work ceases to be a phase and becomes a changing relationship.
The key is no longer to work more years, but to work differently, with greater flexibility, autonomy, and meaning.
Retirement as a Transition, not a Rupture
Retirement, as it was originally conceived, marked a clear boundary: people moved from activity to definitive withdrawal. Today, that boundary is becoming porous.
For many people, retirement is a gradual transition: reduced working hours, mentoring, project-based work, occasional collaboration, structured volunteering, or social entrepreneurship. This is not about prolonging working life out of obligation but about avoiding an abrupt disconnection that impoverishes both the individual and society.
Thinking of retirement as a transition makes it possible to protect health, adjust rhythms, and maintain social and professional ties.
The Value of Work Beyond Employment
In long-lived societies, work cannot be reduced to formal employment.
Caring, teaching, accompanying others, transmitting experience, participating in community life, or contributing to knowledge are socially valuable forms of work, even when they are not always paid.
The problem is that our systems of recognition remain almost exclusively tied to employment. This renders invisible a vast amount of contribution, especially in later stages of life.
Rethinking work means expanding the notion of contribution, not diluting it.
Companies Facing the Age Challenge
Organizations are also being called to transform. Age management remains one of the major taboos in the labor world. Prejudices persist regarding learning capacity, technological adaptation, or the productivity of older workers.
However, evidence shows that intergenerational teams are more resilient, more creative, and make more balanced decisions.
Harnessing accumulated experience is not a concession; it is a strategy.
Companies that fail to integrate diverse ages will lose talent, knowledge, and continuity.
Lifelong Learning
New working ages require truly continuous education. This is not about retraining only when the market demands it but about keeping open the possibility of learning at any stage of life.
Late-life education is not an emergency fix; it is a structural condition of long-lived societies. Without it, hybrid trajectories become a privilege for a few.
Investing in lifelong learning is investing in employability, autonomy, and dignity.
Public Policies for Flexible Trajectories
The end of the work/retirement binary demands more flexible regulatory frameworks: combining pensions and work, facilitating gradual transitions, recognizing non-conventional contributions, and protecting those who cannot extend their working lives.
Not everyone ages in the same way, nor works under the same conditions.
Intergenerational justice does not consist in imposing uniform solutions, but in offering real and equitable options.
Beyond the Fear of Working Longer
Too often, the debate around work and longevity is framed defensively: fear of losing rights, of delaying retirement, or of precarizing old age. These fears are legitimate.
But the real risk is not rethinking work—it is failing to rethink it. Maintaining a rigid model in a flexible society generates exclusion, frustration, and wasted capacity.
Longevity should not be experienced as a sentence to work longer, but as an opportunity to reorder the meaning of work across the life course.
How would you like your relationship with work to look when you are twenty years older than you are today?