We live longer, but we keep showing up late

Spain and Italy have the lowest birth rates in the world and the highest percentage of people over 65 in history. And yet, we Latins don’t like to “prepare for what’s coming”; we prefer improvisation.

In this column, I reflect on why citizens of Southern Europe and Latin America are, in general, so bad at planning for old age. Is it culture, system, or biology? And once the causes are analysed, I also propose an urgent shift in perspective, because ageing is not a threat that lies ahead — it is a reality already here, and it is going to catch us, once again, off guard.

By 2070, Spain will have around 227,000 centenarians. Today it has 14,277. We are, together with Italy, the world champions of longevity and, at the same time, the developed country that has prepared the least to live a long life. If this were a school subject, we would have failed.

Today, one in five Spaniards is over 65. By 2045 it will be one in three. And the ratio of workers sustaining the system is collapsing: in 1980 there were 5.3 workers per pensioner. Today there are 2. By 2060 there will be 1.3 — meaning that one person will almost entirely finance another person’s pension.

The danger of an overly generous State

And in this context, what are we doing to ensure we have enough income in old age? Very little, and not very well, because most of us are comfortably settled in a “Scrooge McDuck–style” public system so generous that almost no one feels the need to save. When you retire, a pension simply falls from the sky. So most people think: why should I save if the State already does it for me?

This is why Spaniards prefer to keep their money in cash or deposits, but not in pension plans or funds. There have been attempts to encourage saving through employer‑supported schemes, but so far they are not working.

And this pattern repeats itself with unsettling precision in other Southern European countries and across Latin America. In Ecuador, for example, only one in four people over 65 receives a pension. The rest have an alternative plan: keep working — 82% of them in the informal sector. According to financial capability surveys by CAF and the OECD in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, a significant share of the population in these countries has low financial literacy and little preparation for old age. In Latin America, only 17 out of every 100 self‑employed workers contribute to any pension system. The rest rely on family, the State, luck — or all three at once.

Is it culture, system, or biology?

It is probably a mix of all three: A traditionally family‑centred culture encourages the belief that “my children will take care of me”. A provider‑style welfare system discourages saving. And biology doesn’t help: humans dislike planning, and our brains are wired with a present bias, treating the person we will be in 30 years almost as a stranger.

There is also something culturally shared across the Latin world: presentism, a relationship with time in which the present always wins over the future. A trait that can be explained by systems that have historically failed and by economic crises that wiped out a lifetime of savings. Distrusting the long term makes sense — but it comes at a huge cost.

So if we want to change, we need to understand who we are individually and socially, and accept that our system is not sustainable.

An urgent shift in perspective

Ageing is not a future threat. It is already here. And we keep talking about it in the future tense, as if we had time. We don’t. But there are three things that could change our destiny:

Introduce changes in our systems to encourage saving, using tools that already work in other countries: mandatory contributions, automatic enrolment, real tax incentives, and employer pension plans as a collective lever.

Start saving early, even if it’s a small amount. Understand that compound interest is the only real magic in finance.

Change the narrative: stop presenting old age as a catastrophe and start treating it as a stage worth designing. I call this “intelligent ageing” or smart ageing.

Southern Europe and Latin America have built some of the most sophisticated civilizations in history. We have solved enormous problems — and we can solve this one too. But only if we stop pretending it doesn’t exist.

The alarm clock has been ringing for years. It’s time to get up. I invite you to leave the club of improvisation and join the club of conscious longevity.