Camilla Cavendish - Extra Time - 10 Lessons for an Ageing Society - How to Live Longer and Live Better

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First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

FIRST EDITION

Text © Camilla Cavendish 2019

Illustrations © HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Cover design by Steve Leard © HarperCollins Publishers 2019

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Source ISBN: 9780008295158

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008295189

Version 2019-04-25

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

The New World of Extra Time

1 The Death of Birth

Demography tips the balance of power

2 Younger Than You Thought

The stages of life are changing

3 Just Do It

If exercise and diet was a pill, we’d all be taking it

4 No Desire to Retire

Don’t give up the day job

5 New Neurons

Old brains can learn new tricks – and they must, to keep in shape

6 In the Genes

Immortality isn’t here yet, but anti-ageing drugs are on the way

7 Out of the Ghetto

Everyone needs a neighbourhood

8 Health Revolution

Robots care for you, humans care about you

9 Finding Ikigai

Purpose Is Vital

10 Generation Hexed

We need a new social contract

Epilogue

A Different, Better World

Endnotes

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

List of Searchable Terms

About the Publisher

In memory of Richard Cavendish,

1930–2016

IN 2018, A DUTCHMAN began a court battle to make himself legally 20 years younger. Emile Ratelband, 69, told a court in Arnhem in the Netherlands that he did not feel ‘comfortable’ with his official chronological age, which did not reflect his emotional state – and was preventing him from finding work, or love online. He wanted to change his date of birth from 11 March 1949 to 11 March 1969.

Doctors had told him that his body was that of a 45-year-old, Ratelband argued. ‘When I’m 69,’ he said, ‘I am limited. If I’m 49, I can take up more work. When I’m on Tinder and it says I’m 69, I’m outdated.’ His friends had urged him to lie, he claimed, but ‘if you lie, you have to remember everything you say’.

Ratelband compared his quest to be identified as younger with that of people who wish to be identified as transgender – implying that age should be fluid. He said his parents were dead, so could not be upset by his desire to turn back the clock. He even offered to waive his right to a pension.

Ratelband, a ‘positivity coach’, is a provocateur who enjoys attention. The court turned him down, ruling that an age change would have ‘undesirable implications’ for legal rights, such as the right to vote. But this seemingly frivolous case actually illustrates something profound: we are on the cusp of an entirely new period in our history, which is coming at us fast.

This is the advent of Extra Time.

If you are in your fifties or sixties today, you have a very good chance of living into your nineties. If you play your cards right and have luck on your side, many of those years could be healthy and productive. Our chronological age is becoming decoupled from our biological capabilities.

In football, ‘extra time’ is the period when there’s everything still to play for. That will be true for many of us. Droves of people are ‘unretiring’ and going back to work. Advances in biology and neuroscience will help us stay younger longer. But our institutions, and our societies, have not caught up. Ratelband’s looks, his physical strength, his ambitions are out of kilter with what we traditionally associate with being 69. He feels compelled to go to the extreme lengths of changing his birth date. Why can’t we, instead, just change our view of what it means to be 69?

The Fierce Urgency of 100

In 1917, King George V of England sent the first ever telegram to a centenarian. It was handwritten, and delivered by bicycle. In 2017, Queen Elizabeth II sent out thousands of 100th birthday cards, with a team of seven employed to administer them all. 1

The era of Extra Time will see a growing number of centenarians. The Office for National Statistics estimates that one in three babies born in Britain today will live to 100. Some scientists even think we could live to 150 (as we will see in Chapter 6).

This should be a fairy tale. Instead, there are widespread fears that we are sitting on a ‘demographic time bomb’, with droves of elderly people about to bankrupt governments and hurt GDP. If people get less creative as they age, and stop work around 60, economies could slump and younger generations could face crippling taxes.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. More and more people, like Emile Ratelband, have no desire to retire. Fears about the declining ratio of workers to pensioners rest on the official definition of ‘working age’, as 15–64. But David Hockney became the world’s foremost iPad painter at 76; Tina Turner made the cover of Vogue at 73; Yuichiro Miura climbed Everest aged 80. Warren Buffett is still investing in his eighties and David Attenborough is making hit TV series in his nineties. Behind them stride loads of ordinary people who see Extra Time as an opportunity, who are starting businesses and are highly productive. They can defuse the time bomb.

Will they be fit enough? When a football match goes into Extra Time, there’s a premium on fitness. Here, the omens are pretty good. Today’s seventy-somethings are sprightlier than ever before, and the incidence of dementia is falling. There is work to do, though, on health inequalities. Increases in life expectancy have slowed in the UK, 2where the average life expectancy at birth is now 82 for women and nudging 80 for men. In America, life expectancy at birth has dropped for three years in a row, 3partly because of the opioid epidemic. Both countries face a battle against obesity – and poverty (see hereand here). 4

Globally, demographers think these dips in life expectancy are probably blips. The twenty-first century will be defined by people living longer, in societies which are growing older much faster than we have fully realised. But are they ageing faster? Only if you cling to out-of-date notions of what it means to be 50, 65 or 80.

Islands of Extra Time

On the Pacific island of Okinawa, there is no word for retirement. The longest-living women in the world are still caring for great-grandchildren when they hit their 100s. Okinawans are rarely lonely, because they are supported by a network of friends, the ‘ moai ’, who are committed to share both good times and bad. The typical Okinawan house doesn’t have much furniture: people tend to eat sitting on the floor, so they are getting up and down many times a day. They also have a strong sense of ‘ ikigai ’, roughly translated as ‘reason for being’. My Japanese friends tell me that you find your ikigai at the place where your values intersect with what you enjoy doing, and what you are good at.