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The concept of longevity holds different implications across age groups, shaping their concerns, opportunities, and societal roles. Younger adults (20-35) face economic challenges like unstable jobs and housing costs, alongside caregiving duties predominantly shouldered by women, highlighting the need for gender role shifts and financial products tailored to their future planning. Public policies focusing on education and health investment are critical to support this cohort’s outlook. The 36-50 age group benefits from extra time afforded by increased lifespan but grapples with uncertain pension prospects. They often serve as intergenerational bridges, facilitating digital literacy for older adults and redefining work and family life through late parenthood and remarriage.
For those aged 51-65, longevity brings both renewed life satisfaction and new responsibilities, including managing their own health amid emerging chronic conditions and supporting both younger and older family members. This group faces potential delays in retirement and social isolation, underscoring opportunities in health behavior change, customized services, and political activism. Adults between 66 and 80 experience longevity as a gift, with advances in technology enhancing mobility and continued employment possibilities, enabling them to prepare proactively for end-of-life considerations. Finally, the 81-140 age cohort, despite confronting loss of independence and limited time, often attains serenity and acceptance. Their primary focus is on extending healthy life rather than mere longevity, with care and technology sectors playing vital roles, and political engagement addressing systemic issues like immigration’s impact on caregiving availability. Overall, understanding these diverse age-specific perspectives is crucial for addressing the challenges and harnessing the opportunities of an aging society.
Description of the concerns and opportunities associated with increased longevity in different age groups.
The prospect of a longer-lived world is not the same for a 20-year-old person as for someone who could already be described as elderly, a term that, by the way, almost no one likes. Do we understand the elderly? Do we know what they want? Do we know more about this stage of life when it has already been reached or can and should we know when we are far from reaching it? But not all older people behave the same, this behavior varies according to age cohorts.
If advertising is the reflection of society, it would obtain a clear fail when it comes to understanding the concerns and needs of the aging population that is increasing. Ads for the same product aimed at different age cohorts prove this.
Marketing is already segmented in this sense, but it is enough to take a look at the advertising to see that something is wrong, that it is not logical that only reverse mortgages are advertised to the elderly or dating services are only offered to the elderly for that age segment, to name just two examples.
Below are the concerns and opportunities associated with increasing longevity in the different age groups represented by the participants of the Future Trends Forum on Longevity. From all of them arise reflections of interest.
From 20 to 35 years old
Faced with the prospect of becoming the Methuselah of the future, the youngest have many needs, which they want to be met and which imply duties for the rest of society. At first, a very interesting field opens up for people of this age, such as an important job opportunity to take care of their elders and do so in a paid way, so that two problems would be put to an end at once: job instability and the lack of caregivers. In this area, there is a gender gap: in the 21st century, this type of work is associated with women and it is something that should change in this generation to face the long-lived world that is coming our way.
To attend to their own old age, today’s young people face a serious economic problem: lower-paid, more unstable jobs, more expensive housing and, in countries where education is not covered by governments, the beginning of working life with the debt they have had to acquire to study their university career.
Offering opportunities for savings, financial products for this purpose aimed specifically at their age group is something that the financial sector could do for them.
The Public Administrations could take measures to alleviate the disenchantment with the future of the youngest and the redistribution of taxes is something that must be put on the table, with education and health as the top priority of their destiny.
From 36 to 50 years old
A priori, everything is rosy in this generation in the face of a future in which they will live longer, in which they seem to have been granted extra time that no one counted on. However, the perspective changes when they take a look at the previous generation, the so-called baby boomers, who were able to buy their homes without too much difficulty and knew that they were going to enjoy a fair pension.
Currently, this generation has to accept that the pension system is very likely to be unsustainable and that it will not cover their retirement. In exchange, they almost have a second chance, a double life in which they will have time to do many more things in all areas, from the reinvention of work unthinkable in the previous generation, to the family, with an increase in late parenthood and even second and third marriages.
The increase in longevity gives this age segment the opportunity to act as a bridge between generations, to make those immediately before and after theirs improve their coexistence by helping, for example, the digitalization – a capacity that they have been able to learn and assimilate – of the elderly.
From 51 to 65 years old
The increase in longevity fully touches this sandwich generation, located between those who are already considered older and all the rest. It is a happy generation, as demonstrated by the sociological concept of the u-curve of happiness, which states that it is from the age of 50 that life is enjoyed again, after a stressful stage in which you have to move forward with a career, a family and also think about the future.
That feeling of being in an interesting scenario coexists with that of a new responsibility: that of knowing that everything that is carried out at that stage has a direct impact on old age. Thus, among the concerns the so-called red zone predominates – the moment when life begins with non-fatal health problems, but with a high impact on quality of life. What worries us is not so much its existence as the uncertainty of when it will begin.
Because this moment can come at the most inopportune time, taking into account the responsibilities of this generation not only to themselves but also to the younger ones – many at this age still have to support their children, university students – and the older ones – it is this age segment that has to financially support the health care of their parents, whom he often has to take to live with them.
Thus, there are many areas of opportunity that focus on this generation. They are those relating to:
– Improve health and well-being. How to change their behavior to delay that red zone as much as possible.
– The world of work. It is more than possible that it is this population group that faces, without prior knowledge, a delay in the retirement age.
– Social life. Old age is still seen as something negative and that somehow separates its protagonists from socialization
– Politics, because this is a generation that can do a lot for change.
There are also business opportunities aimed specifically at this generation that, due to its heterogeneity, requires customization in aspects ranging from diet to financial planning.
Age cohorts: 66 to 80 years old
For people who have not yet reached the age of 81, the increase in longevity comes as an unexpected gift, which opens up a world full of opportunities, when what was seen just a few years ago at that age was a world plagued by unpleasant certainties.
If it was previously intuited that the loss of mobility associated with ageing was synonymous with being locked up at home or becoming a burden on close relatives, now technology allows you to see around the corner vehicles that can transport a person without a driver, or even an assistant.
If before it was inevitable to end one’s working life at the age of 65, now a future is glimpsed in which there are also job opportunities, in which experience can be a value recognized by the rest of generations. It is at this stage that people begin to see physical problems around them, and it is also the ideal time – especially if you are not apprehensive – to prepare for the end of life to which each one aspires.
Age cohorts: From 81 to 140 years old
Despite being the group that is closest to death for a mere matter of statistics, it is not an unhappy generation, since happiness is built through the balance between reality and expectations. Although the world that currently surrounds the elderly may not be the best, they do not have great expectations either.
This generation lives with realities that are difficult to assume, the feeling of loss is the most generalized:
– There is a fear of losing financial independence, health, social interaction.
– You fear that you will not have time to do all those things that you have not been able to do before, from reading to spending more time with the people you love.
The positive part is that this period of life is accompanied by greater serenity, a feeling of not owing anything to anyone or having anything to prove to society. In this group, the increase in healthy life is much more worrying than the increase in life expectancy itself. A healthier life does imply many opportunities, most of them focused on the technology and care sectors. In this sense, politics also has something to say to those active voters who are concerned, for example, about obstacles to immigration that may jeopardize the care they need.
