Bring on the nightclubbing pensioners

Attitudes, relationships and our way of life will be very different if we are all going to live to beyond 100

‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple,” wrote the poet Jenny Joseph, “and make up for the sobriety of my youth.” Her vision of geriatric rebellion – spitting in the street, plundering strangers’ gardens – will ring true to anyone who has found themselves (or a relative) growing more intransigently eccentric with age. It may also be our future. A debate is raging in the letters pages of the journal Nature about how long we can expect to live in future. Some scientists believe our maximum life expectancy has plateaued around 115 due to hard biological limits. But a new study from Canada suggests we have not yet reached such a limit and that there may not even be one: with further medical advances some of us could live until 125 or beyond. Average life expectancy in the West has increased by two years every decade for two centuries, mostly due to declining child mortality. A child born in the First World this year has, by some estimates, more than half a chance of living to be over 105.

That is surprising, entrancing and terrifying all at once. For most of our history we have assumed that our life reaches its prime between 18 and 45 and that we will move linearly through it, as through Shakespeare’s ages, from childhood into dotage. Changing this would transform our society completely. What will that look like?

For a start it will require a profound transformation of our economy or our welfare state or both. If we’re all going to live twice as long after the current retirement age, we will self-evidently have to work longer, live on less or vastly increase the amount we put aside. Basic income funded by the GDP boost from a bigger workforce, or a much toothier regime of mandatory employee and employer pension contributions, could cover that. But two-fifths of the NHS budget and 17 per cent of welfare spending already go to over-65s; any solution which has old people further subsisting on the labour of the young will be politically controversial, fiscally dubious and foster intergenerational resentment of the kind which has paralysed Japan.

Another approach is outlined by Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton in their book The 100-Year Life. They posit a “multi stage” life to replace the “three stage” model – a world in which we flexibly alternate periods of intense devotion to our careers with leisure, part-time-work and child-raising in an order of our choice. Endless reskilling will be normal and you won’t know someone’s age just because they’re a “manager” or an “undergraduate”. We could see the arrested development of millennials extended as education lasts longer, or an influx of bright-eyed career-switching over-65s into the workforce. Imagine having a strategy meeting with your mother, your daughter and your grandson – not necessarily in that order of seniority.

Social life would change too. We may see a return to the pre-1945 norm of cross-generational friendships, only with positions randomised. Marriage and relationships may loosen: “’til death do us part” has a different ring when death is so delayed. And the rise of the active, curious, high-spending pensioner is already a cliché in 2017. In the coming century, gap years, aimless follow Laurence Dodds on Twitter @Lfdodds; read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion career dabbling and hard drugs may be associated primarily with old age.

There are huge risks. In 2012 five million elderly Britons said their TV was their main source of company. Longer life without financial and social support is a dismal prospect. Moreover, if our ability to preserve people’s minds does not increase alongside our ability to preserve their bodies, we may be locking millions of people into long periods with appalling quality of life. Great advances in the prevention and treatment of illnesses such as dementia or a more permissive attitude to voluntary euthanasia, and probably both, will be necessary.

So living longer could be a curse or a revelation, depending on our decisions today. I hope we get it right, not least because, at 28, I’m in the bullseye. I want everyone to enjoy the truculent independence imagined by Jenny Joseph. I want to see teenagers menaced in our parks by swaggering, cider-swigging septuagenarians. I want nightclubs packed with old folks reliving the banging 2030s. I want gangs of 97-year-olds in powered exoskeleton suits, encrusted with eye-popping tattoos and neon green hair implants, to knock on my door and bound away, cackling. It will be a brave new world, if we can only steer a course to it.