With technology and advances in health, 70 will be the new 50, there will be lots of people willing and able to work. It’s actually happening now with the baby boomer generation not really retiring and the millennials feeling squeezed out, that’s only going to continue. Working to 70 doesnt necessarily mean working full-time either. There will be plenty of people working flexibly and if they are older and ok financially but working to stay engaged, then high salaries may not be the main focus. By 2025, 75% of the population will be millennials and younger, what do you think will happen when that group becomes 70 and is as tech savvy as anyone else with 40 years of advances in medicine and health? Will start to see 100 as the avg lifespan and people will probably work until their 80s.
I'm doubtful about much of this.
- Yes, we have advances in medicine, but the average person's diet isn't as good as those of previous generations ... so that's working against a longer lifespan. Fewer people smoke though, and that's helpful for long lives.
- The article tipster references mentions obesity as an obstacle to longer lifespans ... we all know that's true. My RN daughter says that obesity is a +1 for every other health difficulty you're experiencing ... and diabetes is another +1 for every other health difficulty you're experiencing. I think that's true.
- 2025 is not far away; I don't think the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are all going to die out in such numbers that Millenniels and youngers will make up 75% of the American population ... remember, the youngest Baby Boomers are still in their 50s and some Gen Xers are in their 40s. For those two generations to make up only 25% of the population within eight years doesn't seem likely.
- Will today's tech savvy milennials still be "cutting edge" in 20-30 years, or will a new generation of tech have made their knowledge as obsolete as floppy disks?
- I read somewhere -- don't remember where -- that lifespans are growing longer for upper-class people (because of medical advances, as you mentioned), but that people in manual labor jobs are dying at the same ages as their grandparents and great grandparents. Bodies that work hard do wear out.
I wonder about this in myself. I perceive myself to to learn tech things perfectly well, but only if I have a compelling reason to learn them.
I'm the same. I have no problem learning tech-y things, but everything tech-y doesn't interest me, and if I don't see it as something useful to me on a personal level, I just don't bother. Sometimes this is a problem at work. :)
Sure, but by the time millennials are 70, iPhones will seem like slide rules, or worse. There will be a lot of new developments and paradigm shifts -- we can't assume that technology will build directly from what we have now. In fact, we should assume the opposite. Younger generations will certainly be using things that millennials won't "get." I don't see the millennial generation being particularly insulated from the trend of time and technology marching on, and of the older generations not getting it.
Exactly. Consider how much yesterday's manual typewriter shares with today's iPhone ... pretty much just the arrangement of the keyboard. I don't know what's coming in future years, but I suspect it'll make the iPhone look like that old typewriter.
Remember, too, that technology is a fickle mistress. It's great when it works, but you need to have other knowledge behind it for the all-too-common times when technology fails us. A very common thing I see at school: We're moving to sooooooo many computer-based lessons, and about every two weeks the wifi goes down, leaving us without computers. The teachers who have nothing but tech in their lesson-plan arsenal are adrift and fall apart. Those of us who taught before Smart Boards and computers carts just change gears and roll right on.