Retirement Was Invented When Life Expectancy Was 45

Retirement was invented when the average life expectancy was 45.

We've added decades to human lifespans since (and that's before the newest innovations in longevity kick in). Yet, we haven't updated a single assumption about when people stop being valuable.

A week ago I was at Baker McKenzie, speaking at the Professional Services Retirement Forum - hosted by Next-Up, Victoria Tomlinson FRSA's consultancy that has been redesigning this conversation long before anyone else thought it needed redesigning.

The room was full of HR directors from leading law, accounting and consulting firms. Senior people who know exactly what happens when a partner leaves a firm after 30 years. Relationships, judgement and the client history that lives nowhere but in one person's head (and possibly scrawled in a notebook).

It basically walks out the door with them.

Next-Up's data puts a number on it: a typical partner who left at 58 has spent the next 12 years referring £2 million of opportunities to professional services firms. Not one back to his old firm.

That's much more of a knowledge problem than a retirement problem. And now in the age of AI, it's solvable.

AI doesn't fix this by replacing people, instead it finally giving a senior partner's knowledge somewhere to go - captured properly, transferred properly, taught to junior team members in the way each of them actually learns. Indeed at Atheni we are already building systems that do this brilliantly.

I shared a stage that afternoon with the extraordinary Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, who has been making this argument about longevity and the future of work longer and more rigorously than almost anyone. Three years ago it was Avivah who told me I could start a new business in my fifties (at the Postcards from Midlife event I'd gone to for inspiration). That I had another 25 years.

The book Victoria and I have written together - Expiry Date: Never, out with Pearson this September - exists because we are both, frankly, proof of the title. Victoria is 70. I'm 55. Between us we have about 60 years of evidence that experience doesn't expire.

And today we have the right tools to amplify it.

Inspiring too to hear perspectives from so many 'retired' Partners. Building communities, winding up not down and still going strong.