A FOURTEEN YEAR GIFT OF LIFE
Address to the Symposium on Aging
Tokyo, Japan, May 1999

Daniel Yankelovich

All of the industrialized democracies — the United States, the nations of Western Europe and Japan — are undergoing a remarkable demographic transformation, with the most dramatic changes taking place at the two ends of the age spectrum — at birth and at death. Fewer babies are being born while at the same time people are living longer and remaining active for a longer period of time.

The scale of this change is unprecedented in human history. It is also, when one reflects on it, a totally surprising change. The strange combination of declining birthrates and increased longevity is a mix the world did not expect to see and has never seen before. Because it is so radical in its implications, the nations of the world are just beginning to think about how to adapt to these new realities.

Japan is ahead of the other industrialized democracies in facing up to this shift as a social/political issue. The aging society problem (koreika shakai mondai) is more familiar to the individuals and executive groups in this room than it would be to comparable groups in Europe or the United States. But at the same time, the United States and Europe are taking leadership in developing new institutions and encouraging more responsiveness of corporations to changing social issues.

I would like to devote the first part of my talk this afternoon to the phenomenon of aging as a new world reality and then focus on some of its implications for the business community and other institutions.

Aging as a new reality

Two of America’s most insightful gurus — Peter Drucker and Pete Peterson have written at length about the aging phenomenon and its implications for society. By coincidence, both of them are great friends of Japan (as well as personal friends). Pete Petersen served as Secretary of Commerce and is currently the Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute of International Economics and the Blackstone Group, a leading investment bank. Earlier this year he published a book, titled Gray Dawn, that presents a compelling analysis of the aging problem. The other Peter — Peter Drucker — who is one of the world’s most famous management thinkers, has also written a new book, called Management Challenges for the 21^st Century. Drucker’s book is not yet published but it will be later this year.

I would like to share with you a few quotations from both of these books to show how seriously these authors take the new demographic realities:

The first quote is from Peter Drucker. He states:

In an interview that Drucker gave to the Yomiuri Shimbun last month, he urged businesses, services and financial institutions to gear themselves to the needs of the growing cohorts of active, economically powerful older people. (He pointed out that through their pension plans the elderly in the United States have a huge stake in America’s corporations.)

Pete Petersen is even more alarmed at our lack of planning and preparation for the coming demographic revolution. He states:

Both Drucker and Petersen are especially concerned with Japan because the demographic transformations are particularly severe here in Japan. For example, Drucker states that Japan (and Italy) "are drifting toward national suicide by the end of the 21^st Century," with Japan’s population threatening to plunge from 125 million people to 50-55 million.

Petersen states that: "Twenty years ago, Japan was the youngest society in the developed world. By 2005, it will be the oldest…today there are more elderly than there are children under the age of 15."

The Lifestyle Challenge

I share the concern of these two far-sighted thinkers, and I would like to build on their work by focusing on an issue that will be decisive in our success or failure to adapt to the new demographic realities -- how older people use the gift of longer life to modify their lifestyles.

As people’s longevity increases, we are all beginning to realize that the traditional retirement lifestyle no longer meets the needs either of the individual person, or the economy, or the larger society. In the English and European languages, the literal meaning of "retirement" is to pull back from something. The meaning is wholly negative. To retire, in the traditional sense, is to stop doing something, specifically, to stop working. In the past, retirement carried only this negative meaning. It had no positive implication of moving to something new. When you retired, you stopped participating in the economic life of the society and you prepared yourself for the death that soon followed.

This lifestyle made sense when the distance between retirement and death was a matter of months. It makes no sense when the distance between retirement and death is a matter of decades.

The traditional retirement lifestyle is bad for our societies in three respects:

1. Economic. There are several negative economic consequences that come from traditional retirement. Consumer spending now drives two thirds of the economy of the United States. If older Americans, who are becoming an ever larger proportion of the population, stop spending as they retire, the effect will be a constant negative pressure on our economy. The same considerations must be true for Japan. When Third Age people, as Mr. Yamaguchi calls them, slow down as consumers, the entire economy must also slow down. At the very least, the process of economic revitalization will be retarded.
   
   Also, as the younger work force grows smaller and the demand for knowledge workers in the new global economy grows larger, our economies cannot afford to lose the valuable human capital represented by older knowledge workers. (I will return to this point later.)
   
   
2. Generational. The traditional retirement pattern also threatens the relationship between the generations. As ever fewer young people assume responsibility for the ever larger numbers of the older generation, and as the older generation consumes an ever greater part of our countries’ economic resources, resentment and anger is bound to develop, tearing at the fabric of our cultures and our civil society.
   
   
3. Quality of life. The traditional form of retirement no longer serves the quality of life needs of Third Age people or the needs of our civilization. The assumption behind traditional retirement was that by age 60 or 65, people had exhausted themselves, that they had lost all of their vitality, and that their strongest need was for rest and dependency. That assumption remains valid today only for much older people. Drucker and others have calculated that the correct age for traditional retirement today should be 79, rather than 60 or 65, based on the conclusion that today’s 79 year old has reached the same physical and mental state that a 65 year old person had reached earlier in the century.
   
   The vast bulk of the retirement population — those under 79 years of age have the energy, the vitality and the youthfulness to fill their retirement years with something positive. They are able to move towards a positive goal, and not just move away from participation in the economy.
   
   I also believe that traditional retirement is harmful to the quality of our civilizations, not just to the quality of life of the individual. I believe that active participation by older people is essential to preserve and enhance our various cultural heritages. Third Age people should be the custodians of the culture. I will come back to how this might be done in Japan a little later.

With these considerations in mind, I would like to turn now to the practical question of strategies our societies can adopt to stimulate a more positive conception of retirement, a conception that will lead to more active participation of older people as consumers, in the work force and as citizens of the larger community.

In thinking about new strategies, it is always helpful to see what is taking place spontaneously. The process of transforming the meaning of retirement is far advanced in the United States and in Europe, especially among the people that marketers call "early adopters." Marketers have learned that when new products are introduced, typically only a small fraction of all consumers rushes to buy them. Early adopters are consumers who possess particularly high levels of initiative and imagination. My friend, John Gardner, refers to them as "the first birds off the telephone wires."

It take time (sometimes months, sometimes years or sometimes even decades) for the rest of the market to catch up with the early adopters. But what successful marketers have learned to do is to study the behavior of the new adopters and find strategies for helping the majority of consumers to catch up with them.

Most people are not early adopters. They resist change. Sooner or later, people do adapt to new realities, but usually not quickly enough. The tempo of change is so rapid in our societies and people are so conservative that adaptation to new circumstances may come ten to twenty to thirty years too late.

One useful strategy for business is to observe the lifestyle changes that early adopters make spontaneously and then learn how to encourage others to make these same kinds of changes. This is the approach I am recommending not to invent new lifestyles for Third Age people, but to observe the lifestyles that early adopters have invented for themselves and then find ways to make it easy for the bulk of the population to adopt them, or variations of them.

Let us briefly review six lifestyle patterns that Third Age early adopters in the United States and in parts of Europe have developed for themselves:

Six Third Age Early Adopter Patterns

• Even with an aging population, the cult of youth remains powerful in the United States
• Emotionally speaking, youth means retaining vitality and energy as well as looking young.
• Youth is also associated with "having fun" and "enjoying life."
• Staying young means staying in shape physically: using exercise machines, walking, jogging, bicycling, etc.
• Staying young mentally is also important.
• In the past older Americans resisted most forms of new technology. At the present time, however, that resistance has been greatly reduced, especially for computers and the Internet. The usage patterns of college-educated Third Agers are almost the same as younger cohorts. Resistance to new computer technology is now a matter of education, not age -- those without a college education are the least likely to use the new technologies. This is a research finding of importance.
• The effort to hold on to youthful vitality and a youthful appearance adds up to a vast market, not only for products like exercise machines and bikes for older people, but also for automobiles, cosmetics, clothing, cosmetic dentistry and surgery, diet foods, drugs, vitamins, computer-based electronics, etc.
• As the baby-boom generation moves into their fifties, American companies are beginning to shift from their long-time preoccupation with younger consumers toward Third Agers.
• Let me give you one dramatic and fascinating statistic that shows how much more active older people have become than they used to be. For the past twenty years, the prominent Swiss social scientist, Christian Lalive, has been conducting a longitudinal study among older Swiss citizens. His study shows that in Switzerland in 1979, one third (34%) of 65-74 year olds were living active lives, while very few 75-85 year olds were doing so. But in this brief 20 year span since 1979, the proportion of Swiss 75-85 year olds living active lives has leapt to 38% -- almost two out of five. In other words, there are now more 75-85 year olds living active lives than there were 65-74 year olds living active lives two decades ago.

• This is the most common pattern of the six.
• Total retirement comes a shock and can be a great source of worry. This is because work provides more than economic benefits. Even in the United States, it is one of the main sources of people’s status and identity. It is also a major source of people’s social life. And above all, it gives structure to the day. The prospect of "doing nothing" fills people with anxiety.
• Also, most Americans have not made adequate financial provision for their retirement.
• Therefore, a majority of Americans do not wish to stop working altogether. A whopping 80% of today’s baby boomers state that they intend to continue working after they retire. Many will look for part-time work that will fill the time void and also provide some extra income.
• Most are willing to do this part-time work for a fraction of their normal remuneration.
• Companies that actively seek Third Agers and are willing to be flexible and respond to their needs are highly regarded.
• Companies work with not-for-profit organizations like AARP to design programs for older, part-time employees.
• Retirees who can supplement their retirement pensions through part-time work feel free to spend their money without worrying about the future.
• This pattern is likely to grow so common in the future that the old concept of total retirement meaning the complete stoppage of paid work is likely to become obsolete.

• Increasingly, retirement is seen as a time for people to do what they have wanted to do for years, but could not do because of family responsibilities and the constraints of their jobs. People refer to these long-hoped-for activities as their "fantasies."
• Sometimes the fantasy is an event, like taking a trip around the world or living in France or Italy for a few months. Sometimes it is an activity like improving one’s golf game.
• Increasingly, however, the fantasy involves a total change in lifestyle, including work. For example, a New York financial analyst and his wife, a successful lawyer, have the fantasy of buying an inn in rural Vermont (in New England), fixing it up, managing it and becoming part of a rural small town community.
• In our research we are finding this "Inn-in-Vermont" theme more and more common, namely, to exchange a hard-driving professional urban career for a quieter life which involves doing a completely different kind of work in a close-knit community.
• The fantasy often has an artistic component, reflecting a deep-seated creative urge to express oneself before it is too late. (People say, "If we don’t do it now, we never will.")
• This desire can express itself in a variety of forms, especially hobbies. Former President Carter makes furniture. Others take up cooking, the piano, painting, poetry, decorating or communing with nature.

• Those people fortunate enough to be engaged as knowledge workers have little desire to stop working, and see no need to do so (e.g., professors no longer have accept mandatory retirement at age 65).
• Typically, knowledge workers identify themselves completely with their work which, because it is mental rather than physical, is not as physically demanding.
• Some wish to continue working full time. However, most accept the desirability of cutting back on their commitments, but without changing the essential nature of their work.
• The desire on the part of knowledge workers to stay engaged in their own type of work opens up a large opportunity for business. Peter Drucker believes that "the organization that first succeeds in attracting and holding knowledge workers beyond retirement age and making them fully productive will have a tremendous competitive advantage."

• Psychologists who study the life cycle have concluded that the phase of life after one’s children have become adults is often characterized by concern for others and a lessening of youthful narcissism.
• Sometimes the concern is focused on one’s own family and grandchildren. Often, however, it broadens out to cover friends, neighbors, one’s community, region, tribe, nation, religion, and humanity.
• Third Age people find themselves volunteering for a variety of activities — in schools, hospitals, reading to young people or older people, mentoring children, taking care of home-bound invalids, etc. Volunteering not only makes people feel that they are "giving something back" — a powerful motive for older people — but is also a source of new relationships.
• One form this concern takes is the desire to be custodians of the culture by insuring the health and vitality of cultural institutions like museums, orchestras and libraries.
• Stimulating and encouraging this concern for others is a great opportunity for companies to adopt a corporate stance that will win broad public support and contribute to the nation and the culture.
• My friend, Deborah Szekely, the founder of the Golden Door, (a spa that attracts famous people from all over the world), suggests the concept of apprenticeships for 60-year-olds. Such apprenticeships would modify the tradition of working for a master for a specific period of time. Rather, these apprenticeships for Third Age people would be more like reverting to the status of students in order to learn a new skill. In Japan, these student apprenticeships could be in the arts and crafts for which Japan is famous, such as origami, print making, weaving, calligraphy, etc. This is a good example of a concept that Japanese companies might apply to spread the patterns of early adopters to the population at large.

• Older Americans have come to realize that mental stimulation is indispensable to slow the onset of senility, Alzheimer’s disease and general stagnation. People who stagnate mentally and physically are likely to spend their retirement in the doctor’s office.
• There is also growing recognition that learning and understanding for its own sake can be an important source of pleasure and achievement.
• Third Age people find themselves taking courses, going back to school as students, using the Net to gather information and to connect with other people who share their hobbies and interests.
• Older Americans have also found that mental activities such as crossword puzzles, chess, bridge and other card games, or participating in public affairs lectures and debates keeps them alert and involved.
  
  

Institutional Strategies

Let us turn now to institutional strategies for helping Third Age people shape their lifestyles to the new demographic realities.

It is vital to understand that most people need a great deal of help from institutions in developing new patterns of active aging. Apart from a small number of early adopters, people cannot be expected to invent new lifestyles by themselves. They need to do so cooperatively with institutions such as government, not-for-profit organizations, schools and the media, and especially with corporations. Some early adopters will find new active lifestyles without such support, but the mass of the population needs the support, the more, the better.

The support takes two forms — direct and indirect. In terms of direct support, institutions now set the conditions within which retirees live their lives. It is institutions such as business and government that decide what the retirement age should be, the size and nature of pensions, the availability of part-time work, the products and services designed for older people, and the general corporate stance toward Third Agers.

The indirect form of support is equally important. It is institutions that shape the social norms in any society -- norms that prescribe what is appropriate behavior at various stages of life. Social norms are even more important in Japan than in the United States and Europe, because Japanese culture is less individualistic and more communitarian. This fact creates an opportunity for Japanese institutions to shape Japan’s social norms to the new realities of the aging society problem.

It is worth taking a moment to explore why the stance and participation of Japan’s corporations is so important in this effort. We stated earlier that in all of the industrialized democracies, but especially in Japan, people’s status and identity are closely linked to their work. That is why when people retire from their jobs they must confront anew the issue of how to maintain their status and identity. The question then arises, what is the proper role for corporate employers in relationship both to their own retirees and to other Third Agers?

Christian Lalive’s longitudinal research on aging gives us a useful framework for thinking about active aging. Lalive’s studies (and those of others) show that older people find it much more satisfying psychologically to be givers than to be receivers of assistance. His data with 80-84 year olds shows that even at that advanced age, people are mostly givers and exchangers of reciprocal help than passive dependents, if they can possibly do so. Even when someone becomes ill and must be temporarily dependent, when that person recovers, he or she tends to move back to being a giver and reciprocator.

In his Swiss National Report on Aging (1995), Lalive points out that in all societies oriented toward quality of life, there is no end to the opportunities for socially useful work. But while the opportunities for unpaid work to help others are endless, paid work is more limited. In a society such as Switzerland’s where people can retire with a fair income, Lalive believes that the contribution of Third Agers should be to the unpaid sector. But what about the United States, Japan and other countries where there is often a large gap between people’s pensions and their standard of living?

In societies where people cannot maintain their standard of living on their pensions exclusively, it is highly desirable that Third Agers have the opportunity to find part-time paid work as well as unpaid work. In the future, corporations will be well advised to rethink their policies toward paid work, volunteer work and pay levels for Third Agers in a fundamental way. In the future I believe there will have to be an explosion in work available to Third Agers part-time paid jobs, volunteer unpaid jobs and paid and unpaid limited assignments. Companies will innovate with programs that use Third Agers for staff work assistance in relation to childcare, worker training, and judgment based on experience, especially for knowledge workers.

The pay for such work should bear no relationship to the pay scale of the regular work force. In most cases, the incentive for the worker will not only be money but the intangible rewards of being affiliated with corporations who take a responsible stance toward the community and toward Third Agers. Corporate recognition will honor people and help them to maintain their status and identity.

There are many powerful psychological forces motivating people to adopt an active aging outlook which corporations can strengthen and reinforce:

Language

Let me conclude with a final comment about language and the importance of finding new words that do not carry the "waiting for death" connotations of words like "aging", "being elderly" and "retirement." Finding terms with positive connotations is particularly important when you are seeking to change norms and customs.

Mr. Yamaguchi’s term "Third Age" is, I believe, based on an sound conceptual foundation. The rationale of his terminology is that when you are young (First Age) you are dependent on others, followed swiftly by ones’ middle years when others are dependent on you (Second Age). It is only when you arrive at the third stage or age that you are finally free: free of dependence on others; free of the heavy burden of responsibilities for others.

This concept reminds me of an amusing definition of freedom. A young person asks an older one to define freedom. The older one says, "freedom is when the mortgage on your home is paid, when you no longer have to pay for your children’s college tuition, and the dog is dead." This is quite a negative definition of freedom, especially freedom from walking the dog, but it gets across the idea that freedom starts when you are liberated from both obligations and dependency and yet still have the energy to live for yourself.

The term Third Age is an excellent way of referring to this new sphere of individual freedom. But we need more than a single term. We need a whole new vocabulary of words and phrases to get across these concepts of freedom, of being active rather than passive, of giving rather than receiving, of having an expanding concern for others rather than a contracting one, a larger vision of life not a narrower one.

Speaking personally as a 74-year-old individual who is deep into the Third Age, I believe that Peter Drucker is correct in saying that in today’s world the age of 79 is equal to the age of 65 a half century ago. If this is true, how extraordinary and exciting it is to be given a gift of 14 years! I know that when my father was 65, he was tired and ready to retire in the negative sense of stopping work and other activity. In five years when I am 79 I may possibly feel the way he did at 65. But I certainly don’t feel that way now. (Peter Drucker will be 90 years old this year and he doesn’t feel that way!)

Engaging in activity is a form of life. Total disengagement is a form of death. We need new words and phrases that convey not a false youthfulness (as is sometimes the case in the United States), but a reaching out for true freedom, active engagement, the opportunity to give back something to the larger society and to create a better world for our families, our communities, our culture, our environment and the global community itself.

We need a revolutionary new conception of how to spend one’s Third Age productively.