StemCell Therapy

The 100-year life is here. We're not ready.

The New Map of Life calls on us to shift from a deficit mindset that laments the losses now associated with agingwhether to health, mobility, financial security, independence, or social engagementand to assess the economic and social contributions of older adults so that we can get a true accounting of net costs and benefits of our current population structure.

We can invest in future centenarians by optimizing each stage of life, so that benefits can compound for decades, while allowing for more time to recover from disadvantages and setbacks.The pivotal years between birth and kindergarten are the optimal time for children to acquire many of the cognitive, emotional, and social skills needed for a healthy, happy, and active life.

Todays 5-year-olds will benefit from an astonishing array of medical advances and emerging technologies that will make their experience of aging far different from that of todays older adults. And while there is no way to stop the process of aging, the emerging field of geroscience has the potential to transform how we age, by seeking to identifyand reprogramthe genetic, molecular, and cellular mechanisms that make age the dominant risk factor for certain diseases and degenerative conditions.

While the conventional life course is a one-way road through prescripted stages, The New Map of Life offers multiple routes connecting the roles, opportunities, and obligations that 100-year lives will bring and its expected that people will reset the GPS often. There are intersections, cloverleafs, curves, on-ramps, and off-ramps to and from the decades of life dedicated to paid work, providing more opportunities for informal learning and lifelong learning, and for intergenerational partnerships that improve the flow of knowledge, support, and care in all directions.

Over the course of 100-year lives, we can expect to work 60 years or more. But we wont work as we do now, cramming 40-hour weeks into lives impossibly packed from morning until night with parenting, family, caregiving, schooling and other obligations. Workers seek flexibility, whether that means working from home at times, or having flexible routes in and out of the workplace, including paid and unpaid intervals for caregiving, health needs, lifelong learning, and other transitions to be expected over century-long lives.

The impacts of the physical environment begin before birth, with advantages and disadvantages accumulating over the entire course of life, determining how likely an individual is to be physically active, whether they are isolated or socially engaged, and how likely they are to develop obesity, respiratory, cardiovascular, or neurodegenerative disease. We must start now to design and build neighborhoods that are longevity-ready, and to assess potential investments in infrastructure through the lens of longevity.

The speed, strength, and zest for discovery common in younger people, combined with the emotional intelligence and wisdom prevalent among older people, create possibilities for families, communities, and workplaces that havent existed before. Rather than dwelling so anxiously on the costs incurred by an aging society, we can measure and reap the remarkable dividends of a society that is, in fact, age-diverse.

Meeting the challenges of longevity is not the sole responsibility of government, employers, healthcare providers, or insurance companies; it is an all-hands, all-sector undertaking, requiring the best ideas from the private sector, government, medicine, academia, and philanthropy. It is not enough to reimagine or rethink society to become longevity-ready; we must build it, and fast. The policies and investments we undertake today will determine how the current young become the future oldand whether we make the most of the 30 extra years of life that have been handed to us.

The rest is here:
The New Map of Life - Stanford Center on Longevity

This entry was posted on August 7, 2024 at 2:43 am and is filed under Longevity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |