Just over a century ago, a boy born in America could have expected to live, on average, to 46. A girl born in the same year, 1900, might have reached the grand old age of 48. Yet by 1950, a dramatic rise in life expectancy, due mainly to better nutrition and improved detection and treatment of disease, meant that an American baby boy would probably make it to 65, and a girl to 71. By 2000, this had gone up to 74 for males, and almost 80 for females. Britain's longevity figures, and those of other rich countries, tell a similar story. In a little over 100 years then, life expectancy in wealthy countries has risen an astonishing 40%, and it continues to rise at a minimum of two years per decade.
Life may sometimes feel short at a philosophical level, and there is always the chance we may die young. But for most people in well-off countries today, life is not, as the 17th-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. Compared to our ancestors, we are awash with time, wealthy in the thing that matters most. We are part of the new time rich.
The Schwartz exercise
If in doubt that your best years are still ahead of you, you may change your mind after doing an exercise devised by David J. Schwartz, a professor in psychology at the University of Georgia who also taught courses in career and life skills. Schwartz wrote the famous motivational book The Magic of Thinking Big (1959), which points out that many people suffer from 'age excusitis', an ailment that is all in the mind, but which has crippling effects on the ability to achieve all we can in life.
He recalls that when participants in his courses complained that, at 40, they were too old to move into a different position or career, he would trot out the usual reassurances such as 'You are only as old as you feel'. These had no effect. But then he stumbled on a method of calculating current age in relation to productive lifespan. This would usually astound those who took it. Schwartz mentions an academic colleague who, after 24 years as a stockbroker, decided that he wanted to become a college professor. At 51, going against all his nay-saying family and friends, he enrolled at university, and within a few years was running the economics faculty at a liberal arts college. Another man, at 45, with three children and little money, entered a ministerial training programme, and five years later had his own congregation.
...and its surprising results
Schwartz began his exercise by asking his seminar participants to establish the span of an average person's productive lifespan. Let's say that most people begin their working lives when they are around 20. How long will their productive life last? When Schwartz was writing in 1959, life expectancy was lower than it is now, so he settled on 70 as the average end age of a productive life. But it has gone up around two years a decade since then, so it is not unreasonable to think that we can lead a productive live until we are 80. This gives us a span of 60 years of productive life, six decades in which to make our mark.
How old are you right now? If you are 30, and the productive lifespan is 20 to 80, you still have 50 years of productive life left. That in itself is encouraging, but let's turn it into a percentage. Using a calculator, take the 50 years you have left and divide it by the span of productive life: 60. Then, multiply it by 100. So that's 50 ÷ 60 x 100.
Result: at 30, you have 83 per cent of your most productive time still left.
The numbers are equally surprising and inspiring for a 50-year-old. When you hit 50, you still have 50 per cent of your productive working life ahead. How different this is from the usual way of thinking, which goes along the lines of, 'At 50, I have only 15 years left until retirement, so most of my working life is over.'
Even a 65-year-old, historically the average retirement age in wealthy countries, still has 25 per cent of productive time ahead of them. No wonder older people are staying on to work, and no wonder employers increasingly value them.
Thinking long
The 'life is short' maxim is so ingrained in our cultures that it is rarely questioned. Yet the facts on increasing longevity should make us think again. You realise, 'Yes, I do have time', and with this extra time there can be few excuses not to pursue something remarkable, or something of great meaning to you.
Though David Schwartz's bestseller extolled thinking big as the secret to achievement, if he were writing it today (half a century later, and with the average person having over a decade longer to live), it is likely he would have given even more emphasis to his exercise, because the formula for success today is not just to think big, but to think long. If we had lived in a former age, we might have had one chance at a career. Today, simply because we are around longer, we have multiple opportunities to succeed.