Are increasing life spans a good thing?
Last year, I read a book called Factfulness by Hans Rosling. This book has, to an extent, changed my perspective on human evolution. It has provoked thoughts in me, led me to read up more on how we as the human race are heading, and given me a number that I’m fixated on.
The world population will peak at 11 billion people.
This gives us a great way to think of the future. As a Product Manager, opportunity sizing is something I do frequently, but this is sort of the opportunity of how many people you can potentially reach in the decades to come.
Also, you can also calculate how much resources (food, water, housing, internet bandwidth, carbon emissions, etc.) we need in order to sustain a good life. Sure, you won’t be accurate in predicting, but you would be able to get a general sense of how much more we need.
But the book did more.
It talks about how human life expectancy improved from 35 about 2 centuries ago to 70+ years currently.
The reason I am writing this essay just now is because of an equally interesting concept I came across a few weeks ago. In this video, Anshumani Ruddra (Chief Product Officer at Hotstar) speaks about how we need to constantly innovate to stay relevant these days. One relatively smaller point he did talk about was the concept of retirement at 60.
With our life expectancy increasing, retirement at 60 will no longer be viable in the future. We will live longer, thus needing more food and resources, thus needing more money in our later years, so our retirement savings would have to increase. Chances are – to increase the wealth, we will likely work for many more years than decades.
We might work until 70, some will work till even 80 (Amitabh Bachchan, please don’t stop ever!). From our graduation age of 22 to the age of 70, you’ll likely work for 48 years of your life. Now this is interesting for many reasons.
Also, in the decades to come, as machines do more of what we do today ourselves, most of what we do will be replaced with new ones.
This is a thought-provoking concept that presents with itself several opportunities that one can think of.
If you want to learn where the world is headed, I highly recommend taking a look at Factfulness.
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