The 100-Year Life.
If the prospect of hang-gliding in your 60s, dating in your 70s or acing a term paper in your 80s, grabs you, then there's some solid academic backing for the idea in the form of a recent book, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, by Lynda Gratton (co-author: Andrew Scott), Professor of Management Practice at London Business School.
Citing evidence that we are not only living longer but also remaining in better health as we do so, Professor Gratton goes on to argue that as a result of this youthful old-age, we, as a society, need to rethink our 3-stage life playbook of education-work-retirement.
That may be the difficult part. Life is so fast-paced and everything has become so short-termism that it's the rare individual who manages to live their life based on a 5-year plan, never mind a 10, 20 or 30-year one. We live as chance and opportunity dictate.
Inevitably, then the only real actionable ideas offered in this thesis is around the familiar subject of financial planning. Think Pensions. Mckinsey carry an interview with Professor Gratton about her book here.
Ultimately, perhaps, the books main success may be in lending legitimacy to two current fringe debates(depending on where you stand).
The first is anti-aging and the possibility of real biological youthful old age, suggested by the work of people such as Aubrey de Grey, who is mentioned in the book. The second is the possibility of a peaceful and adaptive change to the social order. An example being the advocacy for a Universal Basic Income - not mentioned in the book (See the result of the recent Swiss referendum on UBI - Wall Street Journal 05 June 2016).
All this goes to show that, given a sufficient passage of time and accumulation of collective experience, even the most initially laughably farfetched ideas gain acceptance. This has been particularly noted in the realm of the advancement of scientific knowledge.
In an NIH published essay entitled: "Paths to acceptance. The advancement of scientific knowledge is an uphill struggle against 'accepted wisdom' " , author, Howard Wolinsky notes:
Unfortunately, scientists do not always follow a path of pure logic, as the German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) once observed, "[a] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
That this holds true outside of science is shown by even the journey of the idea of UBI. In a recent FT article, Money for Nothing, the origin of the concept of a basic income is traced to 15th century Humanist Scholar , Thomas More. And the title of his book? Utopia: a word that has come to carry a ring of ridicule about it.
Thomas More could have just as well described his idea of a perfect social order using any of the dictionary synonyms for Utopia, such as 'Shangri-La' , 'Nirvana', 'Heaven on Earth'. But by the measure of his 7th century South Indian antecedent, Shri Kaka Bhujandar, who had ideas along similar lines, Thomas More's version would have been lacking in both conviction and visionary imagination. Why?
Whereas Thomas More confined his fantasy to a social, political and legal restructuring and couldn't have believed it would come true, Kaka Bhujandar makes the biological potential of human beings central to his projection into an ideal social structure (envision Aubrey de Grey championing UBI). And, as a practioner of a reputedly highly accurate form of ancient Indian astrology, believed it would come true.
Here's a translation, including some commentary (by Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi) of part of the writing of Kaka Bhujandar on an end to illness and old age and the coming about of an ideal society:
"Then all your diseases will disappear so fast with this Yoga that you won't need anything like a hospital. In the beginning, these great yogis, you people also, only by touching people, you can cure people. It's a fact. Like the Ardhanari Nateshwara is the Shiva that will be the state of human beings. Their old age will disappear, their body will remain as it is and they will have a body which is divine. What a promise! So don't worry too much about your bodily comforts. All right?"
"In the new Yoga system, when it will manifest in the different countries, in the new age, the administration will be governed by people who have their own powers of Yoga. Depending on how far you are in your Yoga, and their qualities as Yogis, that will be the determining fact. They will be able to create a society, which will completely fulfill their desires and their necessities and people won't need to have money accumulated with them. The poverty and sickness will be completely finished and in their absence the country, the samada, the society will be healthy and restful and without any anger."
Reasons for anchoring these predictions in the present times are based on a short extrapolation of current trends such as UBI, technological-enablement(Robotics & AI), anti-aging & longevity, meditation/mindfulness, sahaja yoga and China geo-politics. Yes, China. Apparently the bright sunshine of a happy human future may be temporarily obscured by China geo-politics and one can't help but cast the mind to present territorial disputes in The South China Sea which are simmering away in the background at the moment but could burst on to centre stage. Let's hope not.
A few explanations of terms may make the above excerpted passage clearer.
The term 'Yoga' does not refer to the physical exercises commonly associated with the word yoga. It refers to a changed state of human awareness ie an evolutionary refinement of CNS (human central nervous system).
The clue to this is to be found in the original source book of yoga, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, wherein, yoga is definitively described thus:
योग: चित्त-वृत्ति निरोध:
yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ
— Yoga Sutras 1.2
That is : ' The cessation of the flactuations of the mind generated by thinking activity is yoga'.
In Sahaja Yoga, this non-thinking awareness comes about by the spontaneous working of an innate but initially dormant energy of kundalini. This energy is understood to reside at the base of the human spine in the sacrum and emerges, on awakening, at the fontanelle at the crown of the head.
The reference to 'new Yoga system' indicates a prior version that perhaps may not have been fit for mass evolutionary purpose. And indeed in the secretive, historical practice of kundalini yoga it was just a few people who were able to achieve it's goal. Two notables were , Dnyeshwar , a Marathi mystic poet and Baba Shri Chanda, the son of the founder of sikhism. ( See letter to Atul Gawande : The Future of Aging - prevention, reversal and palliative care).
Sahaja Yoga, on the other hand, could be an example of Nature doing a massive-scale parallel processing computing problem in evolutionary terms to scale-up a local solution (unique incidences of realisation of kundalini potential ) to global level ie en-masse kundalini awakening. (See: Cool Breeze above the head ).
"Ardhanari Nateshwara is the Shiva" refers to the iconic representation of the idealised individual having perfect balance and integration of the gentle (feminine) and strong (male) characteristics also represented in the symbol of yin-yang.
"Then all your diseases will disappear so fast with this Yoga that you won't need anything like a hospital" ( See Sahaja Yoga medical research: here )
