The Long Tomorrow — Redefining Retirement
Why Age 65 Is About to Become Obsolete
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The Long Tomorrow explores how AI, robotics, and longevity science improvements are reshaping the second half of life. I publish 2–3 thoughtful posts on this topic each week.
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Retirement at 65 made sense when people lived to 72 decades ago. But what happens when we routinely live to 100 — or even 120?
The answer isn’t just economic. It’s existential.
The age-65 retirement model is one of the most durable social defaults in modern history. It’s been firmly etched in our national psyche for almost 100 years now. It shaped how we planned our lives, built our careers, and structured entire economies. It created a life arc: education, work, retirement, death — with a pension or Social Security check marking the third act.
But that arc is collapsing.
Originally established in the late industrial age and codified through programs like Social Security in 1935, retirement at 65 was never grounded in human potential — it was grounded in mortality tables. Most workers would be dead within a decade. Retirement was a brief, earned reward for decades of labor, not a whole new life phase.
That is no longer the world we live in.
The System Wasn’t Built for This
People are now arriving at 65 healthier, sharper, and more capable than any prior generation. But instead of this being seen as a starting line, it's still treated as the end — a polite societal pat on the back before fading into leisure or irrelevance.
Consider these present-day examples:
Warren Buffett, now 94, continues advising at Berkshire Hathaway even after stepping down as CEO — and will step aside fully only late this year.
Roger Penske, 87, still oversees his transportation conglomerate and sits on several corporate boards.
Robert Greenberg, CEO in his early 80s, is yet another Fortune 500 leader defying conventional retirement norms.
And it’s not just CEOs:
Howard Tucker, born in 1922, is recognized as the world’s oldest practicing neurologist — still seeing patients at 100+.
In the U.K., Dr. Aileen Adams, born in 1923, served as a consultant anesthetist and lecturer well into her 90s.
Shigeaki Hinohara, the celebrated Japanese physician, practiced medicine until age 104, profoundly influencing elder care in Japan.
And Mick Jagger, 80‑years‑old and still electrifying audiences with The Rolling Stones as recently as summer 2024.
These individuals aren’t statistical outliers — they’re signals of a broader demographic trend. If high-performing professionals routinely remain active into their 80s and 90s, why does society still reserve "retirement" for age 65?
Meanwhile, the numbers don’t add up anymore:
Social Security is facing a demographic implosion: too few workers, too many retirees, and benefits calibrated for lives that ended much earlier.
401(k)s and IRAs have replaced pensions, but most Americans haven’t saved nearly enough to fund 30+ years of post-retirement life.
Healthcare costs increase with age, outpacing savings and shrinking the very independence and dignity retirement was meant to deliver.
The entire structure — from tax codes to retirement policy to employer benefits — is misaligned with biological reality. We are outliving the models designed to support us.
A New Life Arc Is Emerging
We are beginning to witness a shift from the three-stage life to a multi-phase, nonlinear model. Instead of a single long career followed by a clean retirement, the future will likely involve reinvention at multiple life stages:
Early career, mid-career, late-career — all punctuated by periods of rest, retraining, entrepreneurship, or caregiving.
Retirement becomes fluid: not a cliff but a flexible deceleration. People may ease in and out of part-time roles, consulting, mentoring, teaching, creative projects, or gig work well into their 70s and 80s.
Lifelong learning becomes essential — not just as economic insurance, but as emotional scaffolding for lives that now span five or six distinct decades of adulthood.
Government and corporate systems are lagging behind. Age 65 still triggers automatic systems — Medicare, benefits eligibility, cultural assumptions about “winding down.”
But what if age 65 is only halftime?
Can AI and Robotics Help — or Hurt?
Artificial intelligence and robotics are no longer futuristic add-ons — they’re fast becoming central to how we live, work, and age. As we stretch human lifespans into triple digits, these technologies will determine not only whether we can afford those extra decades, but how we’ll experience them.
AI is already reshaping the experience of aging in quiet but profound ways:
Health-focused AI platforms like Qure.ai and Aidoc are augmenting radiologists and flagging emergent conditions before symptoms arise — enabling earlier treatment, faster recovery, and less downstream debility.
AI-powered financial planning tools such as SmartAsset and Betterment can dynamically adjust retirement trajectories in real time, helping people navigate volatile markets, shifting lifespans, and late-life expenses with more agility.
Cognitive analytics systems are detecting subtle changes in speech, typing rhythm, or facial expression to identify early signs of neurodegeneration — often before even a spouse would notice.
Digital mental health assistants, like those offered by Woebot Health, are delivering scalable support for depression, anxiety, and emotional dysregulation across later life phases where loneliness and grief tend to compound.
Meanwhile, robotics is beginning to transform how we think about independence in later life — moving from support to partnership:
Mobility aids and exoskeletons, like those from Ekso Bionics and SuitX, are helping older adults and stroke survivors regain gait, balance, and even stair-climbing ability. What once would have marked a steep decline now marks a comeback.
Service robots in healthcare and hospitality, including Moxi by Diligent Robotics, are handling deliveries, specimen transport, and supply restocking — freeing up nurses and support staff to focus on care and connection, not logistics.
Therapeutic robots like Paro the Seal, developed by Intelligent System Co., have shown measurable benefits in reducing anxiety and agitation in dementia patients — offering soothing interaction without relying on overextended human aides.
The effect of these technologies, taken together, could be enormous: more years of health, more years of agency, and potentially fewer years spent in dependency.
But the other side of this coin is far sharper.
AI and robotics are also eliminating entire classes of work — many of them occupied by older adults. Warehouse automation, self-checkout systems, autonomous vehicles, and robotic process automation in offices are advancing quickly. Without intentional design, they risk forcing early exits from the workforce — not because of aging, but because of algorithmic efficiency.
Even more paradoxically, some of these same tools — cobots, exosuits, wearable monitors — could extend careers if deployed wisely, especially for those in physical trades or caregiving roles. The key difference is agency: are we using technology to empower people, or to replace them?
Looking ahead just 5–10 years:
General-purpose humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus and Agility Robotics’ Digit are moving beyond prototypes into early commercial pilots. Within a decade, they may become ubiquitous in logistics, food service, eldercare, and domestic assistance.
Brain-computer interfaces, precision rehab robotics, and real-time telepresence systems will allow specialists to continue contributing long after physical decline — turning 75-year-old surgeons, professors, or designers into virtual presences with full impact.
If we get this right, we can turn 90 into the new 60 — not just biologically, but economically and socially.
But if we get it wrong, we may create a new underclass: millions of capable, long-lived humans made obsolete not by aging, but by our failure to evolve work and purpose alongside the machines.
Longevity without integration is just alienation with better lab results.
And that’s the deeper risk: not just living longer without money — but living longer without meaning. If traditional retirement no longer fits, and the technologies meant to support us also disrupt us, we must ask: what will define the arc of a life well lived? What replaces the script we've long relied on — and are we ready to write something new?
If Retirement Isn’t the End, What Comes Next?
The emotional fallout of a broken retirement model may hit even harder than the financial one.
For generations, retirement was seen as the reward for a job well done. It offered closure, clarity, and societal validation.
If we erase that structure, what replaces it?
What becomes the measure of a life well lived when the final milestone keeps moving?
What gives us purpose in our 80s or 90s, when career, family, and health may all have transformed or disappeared?
How do we structure identity, continuity, and community in a life with no built-in ending?
We risk entering an era where people are biologically alive but culturally unmoored — a generation adrift between outdated models and still-emerging paradigms.
When Aging in Place Becomes Obsolete
One of the unspoken assumptions embedded in the traditional model of aging was the gradual decline into dependency — and a host of services emerged to meet that model.
From companion services to gig-based errand helpers, entire industries have arisen to support seniors "aging in place."
But even these support models are becoming outdated.
Instead of bridging into dependency, some of the most advanced tech-driven longevity solutions are aiming to skip that phase altogether. The goal is not to support frailty — but to prevent or reverse it.
Remote diagnostics, wearable health monitors, and AI-powered preventive care are enabling seniors to live independently longer — with better metrics than ever before.
Robotic assistants and adaptive home tech are replacing low-wage gig labor in elder care, creating more scalable, dignified systems.
Telehealth and on-demand therapeutics are collapsing the traditional health support pyramid — making "assisted living" more of a tech stack than a facility.
This is not just disruption — it’s replacement. And legacy service providers may find themselves offering answers to questions that no longer exist.
Consider These Questions:
If age 65 no longer marks the end of work, what should it mark instead?
What would it take to retire not based on age — but on contribution, creativity, or even curiosity?
What would a society look like where 90 is midlife — and what institutions must we build now to prepare for that reality?
Next Time…
In the fifth article, we’ll go deeper into the workforce transformation already underway — and why the belief that we can simply retrain our way through technological upheaval may be the most dangerously optimistic myth of our time.
Let’s Rethink Retirement Together
If you work in aging, healthcare, policy, or AI, I’d love to hear your thoughts:
Is it time to retire the idea of retirement altogether?
You can join the conversation (and the rest of the series) in my regular The Long Tomorrow posts here on Substack.
And if you're already grappling with this in your own work — let’s connect.
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Another thoughtful and important article 🫶