The 100 Year Life

Based on an Extract from 100-Year Life by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott

100 years ago, the chances of living to the age of 100 were slight, but for young people today, the chances are high. The younger you are now, statistically, the longer you are likely to live. In every decade since 1840, life expectancy has increased by two to three years. So, someone born in 2007 has a 50% chance of living to 104, someone born in 1997 has a 50% chance of living to 101 or 102, a person born in 1987 has the same chance of living to 98 or 99 and so on.

The steady improvements of life expectancy have been achieved in a variety of ways and importantly through developments in healthcare. People are also better educated about how to live a healthy lifestyle.

Because it was so rare to reach the age of 100, in the UK, centenarians used to receive a message from the Queen, or King. In 2007, there was one individual who sent out the cards but by 2017, because there were so many more recipients, 7 card-writers were needed.


My father- in law worked in a variety of roles connected with shipping all his working life. Having first gone to sea at the age of 16, when he turned 60, he left his job working for an organisation that was responsible for lighthouses around the UK so the rest of family thought he would retire and settle down. He did not do so, rather he began working as a maritime surveyor and for the next 20 years or so he and his little company investigated damaged shipping containers when they arrived at Felixstowe Docks. If a cargo of strawberries had gone mouldy, for example, he would analyse the output from the datalogger fitted in the refrigerated container to see whether the temperature had changed suddenly during the voyage and then he would write a report saying who he thought was responsible. It is fair to say that my father-in-law loved his job, which only ended as he turned 80. Despite being called out to problems at weekends, late at night and having to climb in and out of the holds of container ships, he thrived on being busy, responding to new situations, meeting a variety of people and feeling useful.

The extract we have just listened to is based on the introduction to the book called the 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity. As we heard, the average lifespan (and it is important to stress that there will, sadly be variations from the average) has been steadily increasing in wealthier parts of the world. Because of how we are able to live our lives, the improvements in medicine, education and diet, more people are living longer. Arguably all this will be more relevant to those of you who are younger than me but, Government figures predict that someone as old as me has a 15% chance of reaching 100, while for someone born between 2006 and 2011, it’s closer to 30%. If that is right, nearly 1/3 of SS pupils will live to be 100 or older.

And of course, all of this sounds jolly good. Surely if we live longer, we can achieve more, develop more interests and enjoy spending time with our great grandchildren? Except, the book suggests, the standard pattern of life may need to change from the traditional stages of education, work, and retirement which has largely been the case up to now. So, for instance,

• it might be that we all have to work longer in order to be able to fund our retirement – because, if we live longer, we will need to have saved more for our pensions. Some countries in the world have an increasingly elderly population already and this requires more financial support from the younger generations who are in work now.

• It is likely that people will have a series of different careers, partly because they are working longer but also because technology is likely to change the roles carried out by humans and those carried out by artificially intelligent machines.

• …and in order to move between careers over a longer working life, there may well be occasions when, beyond what we might have considered to be normal university age, we may well go back to a form of university to undergo further training. It is going to be less likely that folk complete studies and begin a single career that lasts them until they retire.

There is always a danger that we worry too much about things that are beyond our control and there is a strong argument that we should simply focus on being the best we can be now; learning as much as we can in a breadth of areas is likely to give us the biggest range of future options.

Equally, we are going to need to keep learning throughout life and therefore it will be important that we learn how to learn. It almost doesn’t matter what we are developing an understanding of, we need to know how to do so in order that we can continue to learn more in the future.

And it is likely that over our working lives, we will work with different people, and people who are different to us. They may be a different age, from a different part of the world or different in some other way; the more we can get along with others, the more useful we are likely to be.

And in this world of change, I suggest that we should treasure the constants in our lives, our families and the good friends we make in School…the lasting friends who will be able to turn to even when we are 100.

And finally, to some extent, the role that individuals have had in society has defined who they are: the doctor, the lawyer, the physicist, the teacher have been known by what they do as well as who they are as people. If through our working lives, we are likely to be doing different things at different stages, perhaps the people we really are will matter more than the job we do, for a period of time. Therefore, it will be more important to be known for the values we uphold, kindness, positive, being interested in others, dependable…and clearly living those values is something that is within our control now.

So, if some of you were to meet up in the year 2100, I wonder what you would be doing. I suspect I may not be able to make that gathering, but you will have had, I hope, interesting working lives across the world – perhaps even beyond; hopefully you will be enjoying retirement in some form by then and hopefully you will have friends and family around you. Perhaps some friendships made here will have endured but fundamentally, despite the inevitable changes that will have taken place in the world, hopefully, the values that we live by will remain unchanged.