"A career? In this economy?"

Reflections on longevity

I was recently reading a thought-provoking book called “Die with Zero” by Bill Perkins. The main idea is that you should die with zero dollars and that many people over-save and generally spend money the wrong way for most of their life... It’s a fascinating book with many counter-intuitive suggestions. I won’t go into it too much today, but instead I want to focus on just one piece.

One of Perkins’ exercises in this book is to map out your life in five year increments to get a sense for what you might like to do at different ages in the future. The exercise has you take a piece of paper and write down your goals and dreams in buckets from your current age until a future age when an average person in your situation might pass. So for instance, let’s say that you think you’ll live to 80 and you’re 50 years old, then you would map out buckets for when you are 50-55, 55-60, 60-65 and so forth, and then add potential activities to each bucket.

As I started to do this, taking pen to paper and charting it all out, I had a few epiphanies along the way:

The first thing that struck me is that the future is much more definite than I normally think. When I typically think of “old age,” it’s some indeterminate period of time after “I retire.” It’s usually one big bucket in which I put things that I would like do when I have plentiful leisure. When I did the age bucketing exercise, however, I realized that not all decades are created equal. The buckets of activities for a future 60 year old versus a 90 year old are drastically different. As Perkins explains in the book, when people start to approach their later decades they actually don’t want to and/or can’t do as much. In fact, if you see how people spend money throughout their lives, in their later years they tend to under-spend compared to their youth since it’s a slower time. (Particularly if they don’t take care of themselves physically which is why people should take more care of their backs and joints.)

The second thing I realized through the bucketing exercise is that life might be really long. When you draw five year buckets from your 40s to 100+ (it’s a day-dreaming exercise after all), you have a lot of buckets… I had to actually get two pieces of paper to fit them in. Now, death can come at any time and every day is a blessing, however, if I do live a long time, then my current decade is just a fraction of my personal timescale; even if I work another 20 years, that’s just a small part of the total pie to 100…

Which then leads me to my conundrum: if my work life will continue for decades, what exactly will I be doing that far from now given how dramatically the world of work is changing?

One way for me to anticipate what work will look like in the the next 10, 20, 30 years is to look back and see what it was like an equal number of years in the past. Doing this is an exercise in vertigo:

• 10 years ago work looked quite different: there was no generative A.I., there were no collaborative documents, we had basic smartphones, social media was facebook and tech companies were only starting to become a major fixture in the world economy. Almost nobody I knew worked “in tech” and the largest global companies by revenue were Royal Dutch Shell, Wal-Mart and Exxon. (This was only 10 years ago!)

• 20 years ago is even starker: there were no smartphones, the WWW was just rising (instagram, facebook, tiktok, etc., weren’t even born), the major companies around the world were still Wal-Mart, GM and Exxon.

• And then if we go back 30 years, well, that’s just an entirely different place: the internet was in its infancy, work took place with vast numbers of people in giant offices, there were landlines and voicemails and faxes… The top companies: GM, Exxon and Ford.

Someone in 1993 trying to imagine work in 2023 would almost certainly be wildly off the mark… Now here I am trying to imagine work in 2063. Ha!

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When I grew up there were people that had the same jobs for decades. It wasn’t rare to have someone with the same job for 20+ years: same company, same role, retire. Often, the job someone had when they joined a company used to roughly exist even when they left it decades later. In this world the notion of a “career” that was roughly consistent over time made sense. We still have some of this today (e.g., doctors, lawyers, government employees), but in a world that changes dramatically every decade and only seems to move faster with time, can this stability last? And in a world where most job categories aren’t static, what does it even mean to have “a career" as a concrete, semi-stable thing one can point to?

Living in 2023 buffeted by numerous technological waves, maybe it’s better to think about work as a series of short-term acts that build upon each other. Instead of having “one career” maybe thinking of “careers” – plural – makes more sense. Each “career” more like an “Act” of a broader play; each Act tailored to the changing work and technological environment in which it operates and catered to one’s interests at the time. In this model one doesn’t go to school once, but instead, one retools every handful of years indefinitely. Is that more plausible?

Maybe I’m overplaying this, maybe in 30 years the job of an accountant, a lawyer, or a program manager will still exist not too dissimilar to what we know today… But given the speed of AI and subsequent robotics advancements, I would be wary of that bet.

When I look a few decades ahead the only thing that is certain to me is it will be a time of heightened change. Looking at the past is a disorienting guide to the future and embracing change remains as important as it ever was.

Apple Park, California - inconceivable in 1993