
When We All Grow Up
A little under twenty-five years ago, the global population of people over sixty years old was six hundred million. That number right now is around one billion. In a little over twenty-five years, it will be over two billion. This growth is not linear, but an upward-reaching curve.
What will the world look like when we all grow up?
I was raised on lessons of the industrial revolution, global expansion, and the computer age. The age of change. The age of youth. Our world belonged to the young, and the young changed it faster than it had ever changed. I was expected, as were all my peers, to continue to be part of the young, driving social change through innovation. This was the 2000s and early 2010s. Computers would get smaller and faster. Wars would get smarter and more secret. Soldiers were out and spies were in. Power would change hands. Us kids? We were the leaders of tomorrow. What a lucky time to be able to exist in, tomorrow! For the age of youth had not yet ended.
In 2020, the rate of growth of our planet’s elderly population overtook that of under-five children for the first time in recorded human history. For the first time ever (that we know of), we were getting older faster than we were making babies. Policies on ageing, which were there to give the older, subset of our population the human rights and dignity that we seemed to have left behind in our expansion, began to take on a new focus. If we were all to be old, then the rights of the old were simply the rights of us. And the dignity of the old would be the same as the dignity we afforded ourselves.
A surprisingly significant part of our world’s development has hinged on convenience. We changed manufacturing processes to make things easier and built devices to make living and communicating easier. However, there was a noticeable disparity in this development. While it got easier to live and stay at home, actually working outside stayed just as hard in many cases. The demise of walkable cities. The trend towards hostile architecture in urban spaces, including some corporate designs, has created environments that can be challenging for people with disabilities. All of this meant we had focused too much on increasing convenience out of work, and too little on making sure the structural bare bones of our society could be driven and maintained by a population without the advantages of youth.
It feels as though my generation does not yet lead. It seems the pathway to leadership has become increasingly narrow for younger generations, with established executives maintaining their grip on top positions. A 2019 Korn Ferry analysis of the top thousand US companies placed the average age of a CEO at fifty-nine years. The traditional financial industry had the oldest CEOs (at sixty on average), while the young and innovative technology and energy sectors had the youngest CEOs (at only fifty-seven, wink). It is either tomorrow was a lie or it has not yet come.
It seems the very lucky and very rich elder statesmen drive the world at the helm, while the less well-off elderly are left to suffer the slow degeneration of age in a world that has not yet adapted to make them feel useful. The young don’t feel useful either. They man the machinery of the world at the behest of their well-off elders and hope space opens up at the top when it’s their turn. It’s a system that can’t cope. It’s flawed now. It will have even more of an impact in 2050.
Fortunately, it is changing in some ways.
One major success of the World Health Organization has been its foresight, its exploration of data even before the implications of said data become evident in society—concisely, its focus on Prevention, a cornerstone of Public Health. In conjunction with the International Labour Organization, the WHO began to set standards for occupational health and safety as far back as 1950, when the hidden consequences of the Industrial Revolution began to rear their ugly heads. The field of Occupational Health is consequently well developed today, and the pathways for hazard prevention and control that aim to make every essential job accessible to every willing and trained individual (not just one that is young and not yet damaged) are already well laid out.
Even the age of leadership is changing. The percentage of CEOs aged 30-39 grew from 0.9% in 2017 to 2.1% in 2023. The concept of intergenerational fairness is being approached—gingerly by some, doggedly by others—and puts us on track to answering the hard questions of not just our generation, but every generation.
The world of the future must not be one fractured along the lines of generational insularity in hierarchy, despite the fact that the world of today very much is. Tomorrow must not be the dream we sell to our children, because if tomorrow belongs to me, dear father of mine, where will you be? When we arrived at tomorrow to find the leaders of yesterday alive and well, it became a fight to grab a piece of that promise we were sold, while those who sold it grappled with the horror that their longer lives might be spent without the same purpose they once had.
So perhaps, yes, the world does, in many ways, belong to the young. But what we've learned from the ways in which it doesn't is this: the age of youth may not have ended yet, but its challenges are more complex than we once thought.
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