The Future

It is likely that each of us will live longer than our parents and much longer than our grandparents. In fact, by the year 2050, only 41 years from now, 33% of the world’s 9.1 billion people will be over 60 years old. Today’s 21-year-olds will be in that group and will be society’s pacesetters.

What this means is that those in their “second third of life,” between 30 and 60, must learn about what today’s over-60 group is doing as they reinvent the third third of life. These new positive aging models will allow a rare opportunity for intergenerational learning.

As it turns out, today’s “third third” women—the Greatest Generation, born between 1923 and 1945 and who are now between 64 and 86—are the real models and pacesetters for the future. These women lived through and participated in extraordinary times: the Great Depression, World War II, the birth of the United Nations and Israel, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the first moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of Communist China, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of the Soviet Union, the advent of telecommunications and the Internet, and now the first African American president of the United States.

What a century it has been!