A 60-Year Career To Stop Worrying And Love The Office
We have not fully acknowledged the reality we are creating: a society where retiring becomes increasingly difficult to achieve.
When a five-year-old today learns they will likely live to 100, we call this a gift: a century of love, learning, and growth. But what we really mean is a century of economic utility—of remaining 'relevant' to systems built originally for 75-year lifespans.
Discussions about longer lives often focus on health and vitality, but they also raise important questions about work. Instead of only asking, “How will you live?” we also need to ask, “How will you continue to contribute?”
The 60-Year Career as Civilizational Architecture
The sixty-year career is not an adjustment to the current model. It is a complete replacement for it.
Consider what this means structurally:
The collapse of apprenticeship. When careers lasted thirty years, the first decade could be spent learning. You were permitted incompetence, but if you will work for sixty years, that apprenticeship must shrink—or vanish. You must be “productive” from the start, because the organization cannot afford ten years of investment when the return horizon has merely doubled, not sextupled.
The death of seniority. Hierarchies were built on the assumption of turnover. The old retired, and the young ascended. But if the old do not retire—if they cannot retire—then the pyramid becomes a column. A seventy-year-old department head is no longer an anomaly but an inevitability. And beneath her, a fifty-year-old middle manager who will never be promoted. And a thirty-year-old who is starting to understand that “upward mobility” was a feature of a specific historical moment, now closed.
The idea that a sixty-year career allows for constant reinvention—multiple roles, new identities—is appealing. However, meaningful reinvention has traditionally been more accessible to artists and thinkers than to those in roles tied to formal qualifications.
The sixty-year career is not about living longer. It is about living in an economic structure that no longer has an exit.
But We Are Told This Is Adaptation
Longer lives, of course, demand flexibility, that we must “integrate work into life” rather than oppose them, that “work-life balance” is an outdated binary.
Yes, if we are to work until we are 85, we must find meaning in this work. We should redesign workplaces to be more humane and create structures that support 'diverse teams' spanning 50-year age gaps.
But notice what is absent from this discourse: the question of whether we should work until we are 85.
We have accepted the premise before examining it. We have agreed that because medical science has extended our biological runway, economic systems have the right to extend our labor runway in parallel.
The term “adaptation” frames longevity as a challenge that we must address. However, longevity itself offers opportunities, and the challenge lies in designing societies that support fulfilling lives for people of all ages.
What We Are Actually Designing
In a world of rapid technological change, even the 'experienced' worker stays obsolete. The seventy-year-old sees experience as a liability, training for a world that no longer exists. The sixty-year career becomes sixty years of feeling behind.
We are told that work must be meaningful because we will be doing it for so long. “Meaningful work” becomes the justification for poor pay, for unstable contracts, for the erosion of boundaries. If your work is meaningful, you should not need a pension.
We are not designing a more humane relationship to work. We are creating a world where people are like subscription services—renewed, extractable, never allowed to lapse.
The Question We Are Avoiding
If we can live to 100, and if automation is eliminating routine work, and if AI is generating unprecedented productivity, why are we not working less?
The logic of the sixty-year career rests on a single, unexamined assumption: that economic growth requires human labor to expand in proportion to human lifespan. But this is not a law of nature; it is a choice.
We could choose a civilization where living to 100 means 30 years of work, 20 years of learning, and 50 years of whatever humans do when they are not being optimized for productivity, living in a society funded by the extraordinary wealth generated by automation.
If you will work until you are 85—if there is no exit, no sabbatical, no moment when you are allowed to stop producing and start simply being—what, exactly, is the longevity for?
Jens Koester is a strategic advisor focused on the structural friction between exponential technology and the enduring patterns of human culture. Through The Human Datum, he provides the intellectual architecture and foresight necessary for leaders to navigate the AI-driven decade with clarity and intentionality.
