In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Jane Duncan Rogers, author and end-of-life planning pioneer, for a wide-ranging conversation about facing mortality with honesty and even joy. Jane makes the case that end-of-life planning is a form of emotional liberation, freeing the energy we tie up in avoidance. They explore grief and widowhood, the ‘after-self’ that emerges from loss, and Jane’s image of the heart as a flowing stream with gates that open and close. The conversation ranges across assisted dying, ageing without children, the power of micro-communities, and the confidence and voice that can emerge in Q3. Above all, Jane reframes ageing as an unmasking — an invitation to meet the person you never expected to become, and to greet later life with what she calls quiet joy.

Jane Duncan Rogers is a writer, speaker, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life planning. She is the author of Gifted by Grief, written in the years following the death of her first husband, and the creator of the Substack Embracing Age, recently recognised at the Advantage of Age Awards. In 2016 she founded an end-of-life planning organisation, which she led for eight years before passing it on. Now in her late sixties, she writes and speaks candidly about grief, widowhood, ageing without children, and the emotional liberation that comes from planning honestly for the end of life.

Tomorrow is September 1st. Across Europe, suitcases are being unpacked, out-of-offices switched off and families are turning their attention to the annual rituals of back to school and back to work. It’s a moment when we tend to think about young people’s futures: what they will study, where they will go next and what sort of working lives await them.

So perhaps it’s a good week to ask a slightly uncomfortable question. Have we spent so much time expanding the horizons of our daughters that we forgot to do the same for our sons? We successfully encouraged our daughters to cross the gender divide. We forgot to teach our sons.

For half a century, girls and women have been applauded into universities, professions, management and careers once considered male territory. Girls could become scientists, run companies. Mothers could work. Ambition wasn’t unfeminine. It was progress, hard won and still incomplete.

Meanwhile, something else was happening. Many of the well-paid manual jobs that once gave non-graduate men income, identity and status were disappearing. Manufacturing shrank, knowledge work expanded and some of the fastest-growing areas of employment were in female dominated sectors (healthcare, education, care and personal services).

Women crossed into men’s world. Men have been much slower to cross in the other direction. Perhaps it’s time we helped them.

Follow the jobs, not the culture wars

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I seem to have retained an emotional calendar for a life I no longer live. August means freedom. September means work. Except I now design both, so the annual sinking feeling that arrives somewhere after my mid-August birthday and then builds to a crescendo is becoming increasingly hard to rationalise.

The rain finally returned to my yellowing country this week. Proper English rain, after months of drought and hosepipe bans (British for not being allowed to water the flowers while watching them expire). The blue skies darkened and opened, the garden drank greedily and the earth released that extraordinary smell that comes when rain hits dry ground. I just discovered (with delight) that it has a name: petrichor. A beautiful word for a smell I love, although it also seems to trigger my annual late-August melancholy.

Every year, sometime after my mid-August birthday, I feel it. The nights drawing in, the summer slipping away, September looming. Slow and sunny is over. I blame France.

After three decades of living there, la rentrée is deeply embedded in my psyche. The French don’t just come back from their holidays. The entire country re-enters life - the same weekend. Schools restart, offices refill, politicians return, books are published, dinner invitations proliferate and the périphérique returns to gridlock. La rentrée is less a date than a national state of mind: enough of pleasure, family, love and food. Back to town and the relentless rhythms of métro-dodo-boulot.

That Was Then, This Is Now

Except there is an increasingly obvious flaw in my annual state of glum. It isn’t true anymore. The September I’m heading towards is full of friends, family and mutt (my daughter has hogged Tigger for weeks now), ideas and writing, teaching and trips, projects I’ve chosen and people I want to see. There will be a deadline or two — I’m perfectly capable of inventing those for myself — but increasingly little of the dullness, drudgery and obligation that so many people understandably associate with September’s toll and “going back to work”.

Here’s Tigger’s reaction to rain:

I design my own life now, which makes me wonder why some part of me is still responding to a calendar designed for a historical one.

This year, la rentrée has another layer: leaving the country and returning to the city. We’ve spent much of the summer at Oakdene, our new place in Somerset, and I’ve discovered that I love not only the country, but the alternation between two lives.

In the country, life turns inwards. Towards the garden, the weather, books, long walks and deep conversations, sleep and the endless theatre of nature large and small. I have become absurdly interested in birds (although apparently I’m not alone. Almost two million people in Britain used Merlin’s bird-identification app this spring, while birdwatching among the young has risen more than tenfold since 2018. It seems Gen Z and I are simultaneously discovering the joys of looking up from our screens and listening to the trees). Rain matters. So does whether the hydrangeas are happy and if my elderberry bush has survived the drought. London turns me outwards again, towards people, family, friends, ideas, exhibitions, dinners, teaching, airports, conversations and the happy collision of other people’s lives with mine.

For years, the goal was to find the right life. Increasingly, I wonder if the richness doesn’t lie in the rhythm between different ones: life among people and life among nature, outwards and inwards, stimulation and reflection, summer and autumn. Neither needs to win. One makes me appreciate the other. Both are enhanced by the other.

Learning To Leave The Party

Which brings me to my friend Manfred Kets de Vries, who has just written a wonderfully provocative essay called The Immortality Business: On Our Refusal to Leave the Party. Manfred is interested in our growing obsession with longevity — or, more precisely, the point at which the sensible desire for a long, healthy life tips into a refusal to accept that life has limits.

He is not arguing against maximising healthspan. Quite the opposite. Eat well, sleep, move, stay curious, nurture relationships and protect your capacity for wonder. But there is a delicious line in his essay about the danger of becoming so preoccupied with preserving ourselves that “one is no longer living. One is maintaining the equipment.” I laughed, then checked my sleep score.

“If summer never ended,” he writes, “we might cease to notice summer.” Perhaps my reluctance to let go of August is a tiny, harmless version of something much bigger. We’re not terribly good at endings.

We want to hold on to summer, youth, beauty, success, health, children at home, the job title, the body that once did what it was told. The burgeoning immortality industry merely takes a very human instinct and adds biomarkers, supplements, cold plunges and tons and tons of venture capital.

My son sent me a delightfully Canadian video this morning, amassing an animal-heavy resistance army defending Lake Ontario against Trump’s word wars. It made me wonder whether our fantasies of dominance are all distant cousins: dominating countries, nature, ageing, even death itself. We humans are remarkably reluctant to accept boundaries we haven’t personally approved (and even some we have). Perhaps there’s wisdom — and considerable comic potential — in remembering that not everything is ours to conquer.

But what if the point of longer lives isn’t to stretch a single season indefinitely? I’ve spent the past few years arguing that our new longevity is creating 4-Quarter Lives. But four quarters aren’t useful if we keep trying to make them all look like Q2. The opportunity isn’t to remain forever who we were at 35 or 45. It is to keep becoming, and Manfred puts this rather beautifully:

“We cannot remain who we were. But we can continue becoming someone.”

Perhaps that’s what I’m learning from my home-alternations and shifting relationship with September. I don’t actually want endless summer. I know I’ll love London and the energy of the city - once I get there. And I know that after some weeks of bustling, outward-facing city life, I’ll be longing for a bit of Somerset again — for the quiet, the oak tree, and the spacious luxury of noticing what the sky is doing.

Mortality Is The Message

Maybe life’s seasons work the same way. Manfred suggests that mortality itself can become an organising principle. Once the horizon becomes visible, the question changes from simply how much time do I have? to what deserves the time I have? Finitude forces choices, and choices give shape to life.

That’s what’s so liberating about Q3. We spend so much of our earlier lives obedient to calendars other people have written for us: school terms (now I get my granddaughters!), working weeks, annual holidays, career ladders, retirement ages. Eventually, if we’re lucky, we get to pick up the pen. Perhaps that’s the real freedom I’m still learning to inhabit: not freedom from seasons, schedules or work, but the freedom to compose the dance between them.

Maybe I’ll reinterpret that familiar little dip I feel when the late-August rain and the yellowing leaves sweep in the first sense of fall. The garden, after all, isn’t mourning summer. After months of drought, it is drunk with relief. The rain isn’t an ending; it’s what allows something else to begin, and petrichor is the smell of a world thrilled to be moving on.

Perhaps the art of a longer life isn’t making summer (or the party) last forever, but learning to move between seasons — outward and inward — and finding something worth arriving for in each. And smelling the petrichor.

Read/ Watch

• Manfred Kets de Vries, The Immortality Business: On Our Refusal to Leave the Party

• What Canadians have to say about ‘Lake America’. (Spoiler alert: ‘no.’)

I was 60, and spent a year at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, surrounded by people who had reached that peculiar point in life where the question shifts from:

“What am I going to achieve?” to
“What do I want to do with the time I have left?”

Since then, I’ve become slightly obsessed with the art — and science — of midlife transitions

.I’ve studied the growing research on longer lives, life transitions and adult development. I’ve watched and learned from programmes around the world designed to help accomplished people navigate their next chapters. And I’ve folded much of it into what I now teach about longevity and longer working lives at Oxford Saïd and Católica Lisbon.

The problem is that many of the really good programmes in this space are expensive, selective, institutional — or all three.

So I wanted to create something different.

The Midlife Rethink is my attempt to democratise some of this learning.

Three live online sessions. Two hours each. A small investment of time and money. And a surprisingly rich journey through where you’ve been, where you are now, and what might be calling you next.

We look at the research, of course. We use AI as a new kind of thinking companion. But my favourite part is always the people.

There is something rather wonderful about gathering a group of strangers from different countries, professions and lives, all standing at some kind of turning point. People arrive thinking they are there to work something out for themselves. Then they discover how illuminating — and often how much fun — it is to share the rethink with everyone else. I learn something every time I run it.

The next open Midlife Rethink starts 15 September, with sessions on the 15th, 22nd and 29th. Unlike the versions I run for universities, alumni groups and organisations, this one is deliberately open to anyone who feels themselves somewhere in the midst of a transition — or simply curious about what their next quarter might hold.

And because Elderberries readers have been accompanying me through so much of my own rethink, annual paid subscribers get 20% off. Just hit reply to this email to receive the code.

Consider it a small invitation to stop, look around, and wonder aloud: What now?

Link to register here.

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by pensions expert Richard Smith for a conversation about money, longevity and the decades we spend planning for a future we can’t predict. Smith explains why the average UK worker now juggles three or four separate pensions across a churning career, and why almost 80% of people have no idea what they hold in total. The two explore the coming UK pensions dashboard, which will finally connect over 100 million scattered records, and unpack why an income figure people can relate to matters far more than a headline pot. They turn to the harder questions Q3 raises — how to spend when you don’t know how long you’ll live, why even wealthy savers freeze at decumulation, and why women face a double longevity-and-pensions gap. Throughout, Richard argues for awareness delivered with what he calls a pensions hug.

Richard Smith is a UK-based career pensions professional who began in pensions administration and has spent the latter part of his career focused, in his words, narrowly and deeply on one topic: pensions dashboards. He helped the UK government define the data standards underpinning the dashboard technology ecosystem and has held roles across the programme since. Now working largely pro bono and independently, he is a leading consumer-advocacy voice for the initiative. He has toured Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway researching how other countries connect citizens’ pensions, and advises fintechs on making pension data understandable to ordinary savers.

I had promised you an article about Elon Musk and AI today. Instead, I got distracted by love and money.

More precisely, by a fascinating discussion in the FT about the gender pension gap. It’s important, and it sent me down a rabbit hole about what longer lives are doing to the financial architecture of couples.

So, before we tackle the great AI unknowable, let’s start with something we think we know — but maybe don’t.

Couples know an astonishing amount about each other. How the other takes their coffee. Which cupboard they will never think to look in. Who is incapable of walking past a new kitchen gadget without wondering whether life might be transformed by owning it. But here’s a rather more consequential question:

Do you know how much is in your partner’s pension?

That is the deceptively simple question FT consumer editor Claer Barrett asks in a recent column. Her answer, after years of talking to couples about money, is that many don’t. We may think of ourselves as sharing a financial life, while underneath it sit two very different individual financial futures.

And the difference is usually gendered. By age 55, Barrett notes, the average man has accumulated a pension pot nearly twice the size of the average woman’s. There are familiar reasons: women’s lower lifetime earnings, career breaks, part-time work and the continuing disproportionate impact of raising children.

We’ve known about the gender pension gap for years. What interests me is what happens when you put it together with longevity.

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Last week, we lived in the trees. Not under them, or beside them, but somehow in them. Hudnall’s Hideout is an extraordinary wooden cocoon suspended high in the Wye Valley, all soaring triangles and glass, the bed lifted among a canopy of green. You wake with birds at eye level. At night, an owl laughs in the darkness. Woodpeckers time the rhythm of your days. I can’t recommend it enough.

One afternoon, as I was reading in the hammock, a movement caught the corner of my eye. A big feline-looking creature was delicately navigating a branch nearby. Too big for a cat, different ears from a fox, too agile for anything I could immediately identify, it turned out, we think, to be a pine marten. They’ve recently been successfully reintroduced into the Forest of Dean. I was gifted a glimpse.

It looked entirely at home. We were the intruders. There was no Wi-Fi, instead, a sauna, a deck, two novels and a hammock that quickly became my headquarters. Also a husband who occasionally felt that perhaps we might leave the premises and do something. I was less convinced. I was ready to go as far as the lookout, a sister hut 100 metres down our path, complete with a bar and breathtaking view over the Wye Valley.

There is something about being lifted above the ground that shifts your perspective. The forest becomes a sea rather than a leafy sky. Birds and squirrels become neighbours. Human busyness retreats somewhere far below. Which was perhaps why the news from below sounded particularly insane.

This week, Yuval Noah Harari was talking to The Economist’s Insider. He thinks we have perhaps two years to get serious governance around AI before we lose our ability to control what we have created. I’ll come back to his arguments Tuesday, because they deserve a piece of their own, but his analogy of AI as a new kind of immigrant is brilliant and chilling. Imagine millions of newcomers arriving in our societies who don’t sleep, don’t eat, don’t need visas, can cross borders instantaneously, reproduce themselves endlessly and may soon be cleverer than we are. While we politicise yesterday’s immigration in our fast-ageing societies. What rights do we give them? What jobs? What power? And who, exactly, will be in charge of whom? Quite a thought for a hammock.

Believing in Miracles

Driving home down the valley, I had one eye on the weather forecast. We wanted to stop and see Tintern Abbey. The forecast was for rain (what a drought-struck UK has been praying for all summer) and then clearing. I thought if we timed it right, we might just luck upon a rainbow over this extraordinary vestige of millennial history. Tim was sceptical but indulgent, and we duly walked around the magnificent ruins in the rain. I kept one eye on the sky. Then, just as predicted, the skies cleared… and we were blessed with a powerful arc of colour right over the Abbey.

Tim hooted. Although, to be fair, he said if anyone could conjure a rainbow over Tintern Abbey, it would be me. I do believe in rainbows, though not quite in the unicorn-manifesting sense. More in the stubborn conviction that life occasionally rewards unreasonable optimism, and that sometimes you have to drive through the rain because something beautiful might be waiting at the other end.

There are few better places to be rewarded than Tintern. For centuries, generations of monks lived, prayed and worked there, beneath the soaring roof of a great Gothic church built to glorify God and presumably to last. Then history did what history does. Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the roof disappeared, the buildings were plundered and nature moved in. Almost 900 years after it was founded, we wander reverently through the remains, admiring somebody else’s idea of eternity.

There is scaffolding all over it at the moment, and I loved that almost as much as the ruins. Here was the present, in the middle of a 5-year project busily trying to hold up the past, preserving what it could of yesterday for people who haven’t arrived yet. It connected strangely with the rest of my week, because upon re-emerging from the woods, we went to the opposite extreme.

Returning to ‘Reality’

We went to uber-chic Bruton where Tarkovsky’s 1970s film Mirror was playing in the art gallery at Hauser & Wirth, chosen by the artist-in-residence, Angel Otero, to reflect his own favourite themes of memory, identity and time. It’s a beautiful, bewildering film in which memory refuses to behave chronologically, mothers are survivors, and history a savage slash through lives. I was also just starting George Saunders’ Vigil, also about a man looking backwards at a life from its ending.

Neither is easy, and together they were almost a post-forest assault. They left me wondering whether, at the end, our lives bear much resemblance to the coherent narratives we spend decades constructing around them. Careers, achievements, identities, houses, status, all that strenuous self-importance may simply dissolve.

Perhaps what remains are simply loose fragments: a kitchen, a smell, our mother’s face, a child’s hand, something cruel we said 40 years ago and inexplicably never forgot, a bedroom, a dog, someone laughing, a person we loved and didn’t tell enough, light falling through a particular window.

Standing inside Tintern Abbey offers its own answer to the question of what survives. Not much, when you consider what has disappeared. And an astonishing amount, when you consider the beauty that remains. Enough stone to hold the shape of a dream. Enough beauty to stop strangers in their tracks nine centuries later. Enough memory for today’s scaffolding to be wrapped lovingly around yesterday’s ruins.

Turning 65 this month may explain why all this is landing differently. I don’t feel time running out, but I do feel it becoming more precious. I am increasingly determined to use these next years fully — and equally determined not to confuse fully with busily.

God knows we’ve done enough filling. Days, diaries, planes, programmes, ambitions. I don’t need a bucket list or a productivity plan for ageing, and I have no desire to optimise my remaining decades. I want to inhabit them. That will include writing, teaching, working and building things I still care passionately about, but also sleeping nine hours when I’m tired, reading in hammocks, loving the people I love, watching impossible Russian films with the man and arguing afterwards about what the hell they meant, and going somewhere beautiful just before closing time because the light might be right. Sometimes it will mean doing absolutely nothing.

The world may indeed be approaching one of those extraordinary hinges in history. Harari may be right that decisions made in the next few years will shape everything that follows. AI may transform our understanding of work, power, intelligence and what it means to be human. Or some entirely different catastrophe or miracle may be waiting around the corner.

Synchronistically, my wonderfully woolly study chair was delivered yesterday, and this morning the man was laser focused on hanging my rococo French mirror. He spent careful hours positioning it so that it perfectly reflects the window opposite. Chair and mirror are now waiting for me: a place to sit, look out, look back and reflect on this next chapter.

We don’t know what it holds, and neither did the monks at Tintern. They built for eternity and eternity had other ideas. Yet nine centuries later, something remains: magnificent walls, open windows framing the sky, scaffolding holding memory together — and two people who drove through the rain, standing awe-struck beneath a rainbow.

For now, wonderfully, we are not memories yet. We are still here, peeking at the future from the treetops, while the light falls through the window.

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Anne Button and Rachel Cohen to explore how universities can support purposeful midlife transitions at scale.

Anne and Rachel co-developed Change Makers, a 15-week programme based at University of Colorado Denver, designed for adults navigating their next chapter. Built for accessibility, the course runs evenings, blends online and in-person sessions, and costs under $4,000. That design choice also brings in people who are still working, often overlooked by traditional, year-long, high-cost programmes.

They explain how Change Makers follows a clear three-part arc. Inner reflection helps participants reassess identity, values, and strengths. Outer exploration opens up new options through speakers, peer exchange, and real examples. Integration turns insight into action through short, practical 12-week plans that build momentum.

A standout feature is the peer advisory process. Small, rotating groups help participants test ideas, voice long-held ambitions, and move from stuck to forward motion. Anne and Rachel share stories of alumni who have redesigned careers, stepped into community leadership, launched new ventures, or found new ways to contribute and engage.

The conversation also looks beyond the classroom. Change Makers is influencing university thinking on lifelong learning, workforce participation, and ageing. Its alumni are feeding into local media, policy discussions, and community initiatives, reframing older adults as experienced contributors rather than liabilities.

Looking ahead, Anne and Rachel outline plans for a fully virtual programme, a stronger alumni network, and a wider national reach. Their shared aim is clear. Help more people age with confidence, direction, and impact.

Anne Button is the founding director of Change Makers at the University of Colorado Denver. She designed the programme to fill a gap in higher education for midlife adults navigating transitions in work and life and thinking intentionally about what comes next. Anne focuses on making this kind of learning practical, affordable, and accessible. Her work positions universities as active players in longer careers and ageing societies.

Rachel Cohen is a gerontologist, social worker, and founder of Aging Dynamics. Her work focuses on age-friendly communities, systems change, and helping individuals shape meaningful later chapters. Rachel brought deep expertise in ageing, community planning, and facilitation to Change Makers, where she co-led curriculum and peer advisory processes. She works nationally with organisations and cities to support longer, more engaged lives.

Useful Links:

● Change Makers Programme at University of Colorado Denver: https://www.ucdenver.edu/change-makers

● Aging Dynamics: https://www.aging-dynamics.com

● Anne Button on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-button-cudenver-change-makers-program/

● Rachel Cohen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelbcohen/

The dog days are supposed to restore us. Leaders may want to check in this year.

My dog Tigger is very good at sleeping.

She does it without guilt, without a wearable, without consulting her calendar and certainly without wondering whether she ought to be answering emails instead. When she is tired, she lies down. Often magnificently. The photograph above captures a creature apparently entirely confident that restoration is a legitimate use of time.

Dogs do longevity rather better than we do.

The dog days of summer are drawing to a close. Across Europe, workers are drifting back from beaches, mountains and out-of-office messages, and employers might reasonably hope they are returning rested, restored and ready for the autumn push. Perhaps beautifully tanned, culturally enriched and enthusiastically reunited with their inboxes.

There is just one problem. They may not have slept very well while they were away.

This has been another record-breakingly hot summer across Europe. An unusually early heatwave arrived in May, followed by intense heat across much of the continent in June and again in July. June 2026 was the hottest June on record for western Europe and the second-hottest for Europe as a whole, with temperatures 3–5°C above average across France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Benelux countries. France recorded its hottest June ever, while Germany and the Netherlands had their second hottest. Many countries also broke daily temperature records. And it wasn’t only the daytime heat that mattered: unusually warm and tropical nights made it harder for bodies — and bedrooms — to cool down and recover.

That matters because hot nights interfere with one of the body’s most basic recovery mechanisms: sleep. A systematic review of real-world research on ambient heat and sleep found that higher indoor and outdoor temperatures are generally associated with poorer sleep quality and quantity. A 2026 review focused specifically on heat-exposed workers reached much the same conclusion: heat consistently impaired both sleep quality and duration.

So much for the restorative summer break.

This isn’t simply a personal wellbeing issue. Sleep is emerging as one of the most underestimated pieces of longevity infrastructure — for individuals, certainly, but also for the organisations hoping to sustain productive people across increasingly long working lives.

Read more

I turned 65 last week, an age at which almost everything I read tells me I should be downsizing: decluttering, simplifying, Swedish death-cleaning, getting rid of the accumulated stuff of a life and preparing, presumably, to take up less space. We’re doing the opposite.

We upsized.

Only 2 More Days, 50% Off

Bought a country house, are filling bedrooms, planting things, buying reading chairs and hauling home rococo antique mirrors. Partly because, after a glorious week with my little Glam’daughter this summer, we are hoping for years of grandparenting à l’anglaise: grandchildren coming to stay, muddy boots and dogs and favourite bedrooms, friends around the table, family spilling into the garden. Children growing up with memories of a place that becomes, somehow, part of their own childhood.

I’ve done this before. Years ago I bought a summer house in Chautauqua to gather my geographically scattered family, where my kids could hang out with grandparents and cousins and generations could overlap. Oakdene is the latest iteration of this same ‘gathering’ thread - except this time I’m the grandparent, and the clock feels different from this end.

If Q3 runs roughly from 50 to 75, I’ve just entered its last decade. I’m banking on another ten years of healthy, energetic, peak-ish time; maybe I’ll get 30, maybe I won’t get 10. The man is seven years older than me, so neither of us is particularly interested in postponing the good stuff. We want to milk the time we have left, with all we still have to give and share.

From Seeing the Weave to Choosing the Threads

Last week, in Seeing the Weave, I wrote about Lynda Gratton’s lovely metaphor of a long life, made up of productive and nurturing threads. One of the privileges of getting older, I suggested, is finally being able to stand far enough back from the life we’ve made to see its patterns — the themes, people and preoccupations that recur, sometimes without our noticing them at the time.

I’ve been thinking since about what comes next. Because perhaps Late Q3 isn’t only about seeing the weave we’ve already created. Perhaps it’s also when we become much more intentional about what gets woven in next — and for whom. And when we start preparing, consciously, for Q4.

Time no longer feels infinitely expandable. Neither does energy or, frankly, patience. And I can feel this creating a kind of hyper-mindful selectivity in me, about… everything: work, friends, invitations, money, travel and, it turns out, furniture. Does this deserve a day? A year? A wall? A call? A piece of the next decade?

That isn’t quite the same as simplifying. It feels more like composing. No surprise Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing A Life is one of my favourite books.

Not Slowing Down, Balancing Differently

I’m not really slowing down. That’s another bit of the ageing script I don’t particularly recognise, despite my Substack friend Denise Taylor making a compelling case for it — while conspicuously failing to follow her own advice. I am, however, balancing differently, and increasingly asking what the time, money and experience we’ve accumulated are for.

On the financial side, that means figuring out what we need so that we can understand what we can give, support, loan and spend. On the work side, it means becoming choosier while remaining as ambitious as ever about impact. I’m on the Advisory Board of a new Healthspan Festival, working on building something like my Midlife Rethink programme for India, teaching at Oxford Said and exploring how we can scale our Longevity Leadership Programme from Lisbon through other business schools. These are the kinds of projects that interest me now: ideas that might travel, multiply and matter beyond the hours I personally put in.

Maybe ambition itself changes shape. I’m no less ambitious than I was, but I’m increasingly uninterested in proving or accumulating. I want to contribute, to build things that might scale beyond me, and to put my time and experience behind ideas capable of having an impact. It’s not less ambition. If anything, it’s ambition sharpened by a clearer sense of time. I’m starting to take deadlines much more seriously.

Which brings me, obviously, to the carpet.

A Room With a View

I’ve been composing my study at Oakdene. It’s becoming the Elderberries Room, where I will write this newsletter, Zoom around the world, think, read and work — and, if all goes according to plan, occasionally do absolutely nothing.

Somewhere between choosing a carpet and buying a £2.50 cushion in a charity shop this week, I realised I was composing this little room in exactly the same way I’m trying to compose Late Q3. It’s an exercise in layering, remembering and embracing. Almost nothing in it has been bought because it “goes”. Instead, things seem to be earning their place because of the threads they carry into the room with them.

My Mother’s Girl

First, this girl. She came from my mother and the man had her beautifully reframed for my birthday. One of the more touching gifts of my life, this inter-generational care and legacy-shouldering. I don’t know much about it, except that it hung in my mother’s living room all my life. When my mother asked me what I might like after she died, I pointed at this portrait, seeing in her some inner part of my mother’s story - and my own. I suspect my father gifted it to her after I was born - the girl she had always wanted (she had my name ready before my eldest brother was born and had to wait two kids later to be able to bestow it).

The painting is by Louis Anthony Burnett (1907–1999), an American painter known particularly for his portraits of women and girls. Burnett was a mid-century figurative artist who exhibited at the Whitney and the National Academy. His portraits are characterised by subdued palettes, quiet light and psychological restraint. Mine seems to be typical: a solemn young girl emerging from washes of blue-grey, cream and dusty pink.

Only now, sixty years later, with the help of AI, I just discovered her provenance, sitting in a study already gifting me new understanding. One of those magical moments when new technology reaches backwards into an old life and illuminates something that has been talking quietly to me for decades.

She’ll hang in my Room With A View. Her colours perfectly echo the green walls I chose as a palette for my study. As the room comes together, everything else seems to be arranging itself around them.

JOY!

Then Juliet, my oldest friend, gave me this card when she came for a birthday visit. We’ve been friends since we were three. JOY!, it announces, in pink and acid yellow, surrounded by greens, and it happens, absurdly, to contain almost the entire emerging colour palette of the room.

But that’s not why I’m keeping it. I’m keeping it because there is something extraordinary about having someone in your life who knew you before you knew yourself. At this age, I’m increasingly conscious that our oldest friendships aren’t simply relationships; they are repositories, carrying versions of us that no one we meet now can ever know. Juliet’s card has earned its place and reflects her decades-long knowing of me.

A Home Within Our Home

The man found me these little wooden houses at my favourite little shop, Made Found, in Wincanton. They now sit on the windowsill, making tiny coloured shadows in the afternoon sun: a little model of the hope and dreams we’re building together, inside the home we’re building together, in the forefront of the view from my room.

And because apparently even our knick-knacks got the memo, they too are green and dusty pink and smoky blue and natural wood. The palette seems to be composing itself without much help from me.

£2.50. On Sale.

Then there is this cushion: olive green, woolly white daisies, black centres and mustard piping. It cost £2.50 in a charity shop. On sale. It pulls half the room together and makes me smile every time I look at it.

Which is a useful reminder that mindful curation isn’t about buying expensive things, “investment pieces” or even particularly good taste. It’s about resonance. Some things earn their place because they’ve travelled through generations, some because they’ve travelled through friendships, some because somebody you love spotted them and thought of you, and some because they cost £2.50 and are completely fun and fabulous. And make your heart sing.

THIS!

Then there’s the chair. My new friend Lucy Ryan has this Loaf Shearer, and the first time I sat in it at her house I had one of those wonderfully uncomplicated moments of recognition: THIS! I wanted one. Mine is enormous, cream and curly lambswool, with a matching pouffe, and I plan to spend a considerable portion of Late Q3 curled up in it.

But Lucy’s presence in the room feels significant for another reason. We’ve only recently become friends, and this autumn we’re launching a new 60+ group together for NOON. One of the joys of this stage, I’m discovering, is that curation doesn’t mean closing the collection. Juliet has known me since I was three; Lucy has arrived in my 60s. I want both in the weave. The richness is precisely in the mixing: old friends who carry versions of us stretching back decades, and new friends who open doors onto versions of ourselves we haven’t met yet. The same is true of this room — my mother’s painting beside a newly discovered antique, old wood beside a brand-new chair, memories beside possibilities. The things we keep needn’t all come from the past. Some earn their place because they point towards the future.

A Frilly, Fancy Old Mirror

Then there’s the slightly mad old French mirror I found in a small antique shop near Semley. I’ve written about it before. It’s battered and imperfect, its old white finish worn through in places, and much grander than anything I would normally imagine myself buying. AI helped me explore the rococo history behind its exuberant curves and carvings and understand a little more about what I was looking at. The man is fixing it up in his new and much-beloved workshop.

It will hang opposite the window, which means that when I’m sitting in the Shearer I should be able to see the great oak tree outside reflected back at me. I love the thought of an old mirror reflecting a living tree into a new room: past and present, indoors and out, all caught in the same frame.

Elderberries Everywhere

And finally, the elderberry itself. For my birthday, the man thoughtfully gifted me this botanical image of an elderberry (it’s becoming a theme in my life), and only after I’d put everything together did I really look at its colours: sage and olive leaves, creamy flowers, almost-black berries, tiny touches of dusty pink, all held in natural wood.

There was my room. There was also, of course, Elderberries.

I hadn’t planned any of this, which takes me straight back to last week’s weave. We like to think we design our lives, but increasingly I suspect we make thousands of small choices and then, if we’re lucky and live long enough, eventually become able to see the patterns emerging between them. Perhaps the trick in Late Q3 isn’t to start controlling the weave, but to become more conscious of which new threads we choose to introduce.

Composing With AI

And then there is the extraordinary new pleasure of being able to see the composition before it exists. I’ve been feeding Sol, my AI accomplice, photographs of the room and its accumulating cast of characters — my mother’s painting, the old French mirror, Lucy’s Shearer chair, the colours of the elderberry print — and asking it to pull them together, move things around and audition carpets beneath them. Suddenly you can see whether something adds a competing voice or brings the whole room to visual serenity.

I love this new ability to play with possibilities before committing to them. And perhaps that, too, is a useful metaphor for Late Q3: composing a life isn’t only about what you keep, but how you bring the old and new together, editing and experimenting until the different threads begin to feel like a whole. A little imagination, a lot of curation — and, these days, a little help from AI.

Given all the current angst on Substack about using AI, I realise this may be mildly provocative. But I’m increasingly convinced that one of the jobs of Late Q3 is embracing the future, not demonising it. I don’t want to spend the next decade defending the world I knew against the world that’s coming. I want to stay curious, learn the new tools and use them to make whatever comes next richer. AI isn’t replacing my taste, memories or choices here. It’s helping me play with them, making the composition visible while I’m composing it. Every bit of them.

I’m not interested in decluttering my life. I rather like it over-brimming with wonderful people, lovely things and cool ideas. I want gorgeous glam’kids coming for summer stays, friends new and old around the table, more ideas capable of making a difference, more generosity, beauty, afternoons with the man, work that matters, and time in that wonderfully woolly chair (being delivered next week). What I’m increasingly unwilling to do is fill the gaps with things — or people, projects and obligations — simply because there’s a gap.

Late Q3, I’m discovering as I cross its threshold, isn’t about downsizing at all. It’s about increasing the ratio of meaning to everything else: more house, perhaps, but fewer meaningless things; more ambition, but fewer projects; more generosity and less accumulation. A good composition isn’t necessarily minimalist. It contains what it needs, with enough space around each element for it to matter.

The Things We Keep

And so I think back to Zoe’s week with us this summer. Perhaps one day she — or another grandchild — will remember the solemn girl hanging in Glamma’s study, play with the little wooden houses on the windowsill, curl up in the wonderful woolly chair or know the old oak first through its reflection in a battered French mirror. That’s how ordinary things become family things: not because they’re valuable, but because they sit quietly in the background while a family lives around them, accruing meaning.

Perhaps that’s the other side of Lynda Gratton’s weave that I hadn’t quite understood last week. Some of the threads we choose in Late Q3 aren’t really for us at all. We’re weaving them into someone else’s beginning.

So, at 65, I’m not particularly interested in disappearing neatly into a decluttered beige sunset. I’m still composing — carefully, selectively and joyfully — with the old and the new, with what I’ve inherited and what I’m still discovering. Perhaps the things we keep aren’t evidence of our reluctance to let go at all. At their best, they’re clues to what we still intend to give, share and pass on.

What are you still adding to your life — very selectively — while the world tells you it’s time to subtract?

Only 2 More Days, 50% Off

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Jane Moffett, author of What Next? and the Founder of KANGAROO Coaching, for a conversation about the life stage still awkwardly labelled retirement. Moffett argues the adjustment after leaving work can take up to seven years, because stopping work is a major psychological transition involving shifts in identity, values and meaning — none of which can be hurried. She maps six recurring challenges, from the manner of leaving to the reshaping of time, structure and relationships, and pushes back on the pressure to name a purpose, offering meaning as the more useful word. The conversation turns to gendered career shapes — the male mountain versus women’s rolling landscape — the layer of Q3 women hitting their strongest decades, and why so few couples do this thinking together. Both agree: start early, and don’t go it alone.

Jane Moffett has spent thirty years supporting women through major life transitions, particularly the points where the professional and the personal intersect — becoming a mother, leaving the workplace, returning after a career break. Her interest in the transition out of work grew from conversations with friends of her own generation: the first large cohort of professional women to have built full careers, and to face stopping work with no blueprint to follow. Finding nothing written for women in the UK on the subject, she researched and wrote What Next?, a six-part map of the challenges of redefining retirement.

Useful Links:

Book - From Retired to Defined

Sometime in 2026, deaths in Britain will start outnumbering births. Not eventually. Now.

The Office for National Statistics already flagged 2025 as the last year the count runs the other way. From 2026, natural population growth turns negative — and stays there. The total fertility rate in England and Wales fell to 1.41 in 2024, the lowest since records began in 1938, with a provisional dip to 1.39 for 2025. Scotland is a decade further into the same story: deaths have outnumbered births there since 2014.

Two serious thinkers debated what this means last week on BBC Radio. Organisations need to understand both, because the workforce consequence lands whichever one turns out to be right. This is a summary of their brilliant, essential conversation.

It's my birthday! 50% Discount

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This week I turn 65. Elderberries turns five and is connecting with 5,000 subscribers - and my granddaughter is soon 5. That’s a lot of 5s!

Milestones have a habit of making me reflective. I’ve been daily dog walking with memories swirling around my brain. At 60, I went to Harvard for a year and a career move into longevity. At 65, I hosted my granddaughter for a week in my new country home. The professional pivot, followed by personal growth. As I think back over these midpoint years of my Q3, there are patterns and rhythms I’m still just beginning to learn to read.

This was in the back of my mind as I recorded a podcast with Lynda Gratton, who’s publishing a new book this fall called Living The 100-Year Life. We were talking about her book’s central metaphor: that long lives are a weave made up of many threads (8 in her telling): half on the productive/ professional side, half on the nurturing/ personal side (more, anon). One of the gifts of reaching this stage of life isn’t simply having woven all these threads. It’s finally being able to see the weave, understand the patterns that make it whole and be grateful for the loom you were given to start weaving a life with.

Join me in exploring our new, longer, 4-Quarter lives?

50% Off - Birthday Week Only

I just finished Ann Patchett’s beautiful new novel, Whistler, (one of her very best) sitting in Senegal with son and granddaughters. Patchett writes so exquisitely about family, memory and the stories we construct about ourselves. She made me remember my own life differently. Or at least re-arrange its telling. Her narrative arc made me see links and echoes between my own decades and generations with new eyes. Let me know if it has the same effect on you.

Sibling Roles & Stories

Just after finishing the book, in the middle of a conversation with one of my kids about the other, I had a flash of déjà vu. I heard myself and thought, “I’m steeped in sibling stories again.” I recognised a role I had occupied before - only then I was the child rather than the parent. I had listened to my mother talk/ complain/ vent about my brothers endlessly. Now I was listening to my own kids.

My mother had a tough life. She survived the Holocaust, emigrated to Canada without speaking English, lost my father to cancer with three kids under 10 and somehow built a new, entirely unplanned life. She went to university, became a professor and remained fiercely independent until the end of her long, 97-year life. She had close friends, but never (as far as I know) another love. Looking back, I see that I became one of the people who helped her carry the emotional weight of life and family across decades.

It was born of love, circumstance and necessity. But it was a role. And roles have a curious tendency to repeat themselves unless we notice them. That conversation with my own kid, a generation later, made me notice. Here I was again. Listening to sibling stories.

Family Gatherings & Geographies

It made me think of another part of my usual narrative. For years, I’ve said that I left Canada at nineteen, moved to Paris for a year and stayed for thirty. It’s a tidy story. It suggests departure, independence, reinvention. And distance from family. Like many tidy stories, it isn’t complete.

I left geographically, but I didn’t really leave emotionally. I returned to North America every summer… for 40 odd years. In midlife, before I could really afford it, I bought a summer house in Chautauqua, in northwestern New York State, chosen because it sat between my mother, my in-laws and my brother’s family. I lived far, but holidayed close. It was my attempt to create a place where our internationally scattered family might gather (but not on their turf so I could keep a degree of control). Where my kids could hang out with grandparents - maybe even cousins. Where I could lessen my guilt of having left my mom behind, on a separate continent, by spending summers with her.

If you’ve never been to Chautauqua, it’s hard to explain its magic. I loved it the first time I set eyes on it. My mother did too. What strikes me now is how much it embodies everything I’ve learned since I left almost a decade ago, about longevity readiness, and accompanying different generations with what they need at different stages of life.

The kiddie camp for little kids, ‘club’ for older ones, how it supported me in my sandwich generation years as I juggled gathering my mother, in-laws, friends, kids and kids’ friends. And how it supported the elders too. Like my mother well into her 90s as she buzzed her way around the car-less paths on her motor scooter, direct into the ampitheatre to listen to lectures, the symphony or buzz over to the adorable movie theatre. With kids, grandkids or on her own. Easy, simple, natural.

Chautauqua offered an alternative to the way the world usually works. It suggested that families, communities and generations could be designed differently. Not perfectly—we’ve seen that illusion shattered too, not least when Salman Rushdie was attacked on the very stage where we’d spent so many happy mornings listening to writers and thinkers—but intentionally.

It brought together every concept I’ve been learning about since: lifelong learning, art as therapy, intergenerational everything, exercise, beauty, nature, close communities, no cars. Now that I’m the older generation, with no one above me (ahead of me?), I realise more consciously how much joy the place offered its elders, including my mom. I wish there were more places like it - and in Europe.

Building Bridges & Borrowing Shoes

As I hiked this year’s golden August fields, I thought how much my efforts at bridging connections in my family was training for most of everything I did in life. Whatever the subject, personal or professional, I seem to have spent my life balanced between worlds - seeking to find connections.

• Between Canada and France (now between the UK and Senegal).

• Between English and French.

• Between tech and literature (my first university degree)

• Between women and men.

• Between younger generations and older ones.

• Between business and society.

• Between work and family.

• Between organisations trying to understand demographic change and individuals living through it.

• and (still) between different branches of my own family.

For years I thought my work was about gender. Then I said I ‘moved’ into the longevity space. Sitting with all these memories unfurling like the fields of ferns in front of me, I could see a similar verb, being tensed across different landscapes. Building connections across differences. Not eliminating them. Not persuading everyone to agree. Simply making it easier to cross, even just occasionally, from one world into another. From one person’s shoes to another’s. To become ‘fluent’ across people, cultures and traditions.

The thought is strangely comforting. For much of my life I believed that if I built the most beautiful, (emotionally) intelligent bridges, people would be ready to cross over them. If I chose the right place, opened the right door, hosted the right conversation, connection would follow.

Age has taught me the inevitable. You can build the bridges. You can’t make people cross them.

The Birthday Bridge

Perhaps that’s what these five years of Elderberries have been about. I thought I was writing a newsletter about longevity. Now, I realise I’ve been building yet another bridge. A narrow strip of sentences where I try and connect where we are and where we’re headed. Where curiosity is valued more highly than certainty, where you explore this new Q3 along with me, and where we’re watching something emerge together rather than alone.

A few days ago Ernesto van Peborgh wrote just that. He said the deeper purpose of writing in public may not be to communicate ideas, but to participate in their co-evolution through “shared attention, shared inquiry, and the quiet reciprocity of many minds thinking together.”

I can’t think of a lovelier birthday gift. A community of writers, walkers, thinkers and sharers. People I know, people I don’t. People I increasingly meet as I move through the years and the world. This essay emerged as most do now. It began as a dog walk, morphed into a birthday reflection, then became something else. Not because I mulled alone and longer, but because conversations—with Lynda, with my family, with the latest Ann Patchett novel, with many of you, and yes, even with AI (I admit it!)—kept revealing connections I hadn’t previously seen.

Perhaps that’s the greatest privilege of a long life. Not simply that we have more memories and experiences. But if we’re lucky, we eventually begin to see - maybe even understand - the tapestry we’ve woven.

"What's the tidy story you tell about your own life — and what happens if you look at it again now?"

Birthday Discount Offer

If any of this is stirring something loose for you too — the patterns, the roles, the bridges you’ve built without noticing — I hope it helps you look at your own weave more closely. With new eyes. To support new looking, here’s a birthday discount offer, with thanks for walking with me across this bridge towards our longer, 4-Quarter lives.

50% Off - Birthday Week Only

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by psychologist and author Dr Denise Taylor, who after more than 50 years of work stepped away from client practice to write. Taylor argues that most people misread Carl Jung: the second half of life is not about striving differently, but about going inwards. She unpicks the assumption that work means paid work, and questions the language now forming around 60-year careers. The conversation turns to identity — who am I without my job? — and to the health and financial foundations of later-life agency, including the idea of voluntary simplicity. Taylor describes writing her new book, ThriveSpan, in the four acres of woodland she bought during lockdown, structuring it as paths through a wood rather than chapters. Her closing permission is simple: you have more time than you think.

Dr Denise Taylor is a psychologist, career coach and author who has worked in retirement and later-life for more than 40 years, beginning as a welfare officer at Royal Mail running pre-retirement seminars in her twenties. After a corporate career and a long practice in careers coaching, she completed a doctorate and turned to writing full time. Her books include Rethinking Retirement, Career Coaching for Midlife and Beyond, and ThriveSpan, Walking Gently into What Matters Now, with Olderhood Unfolding — 52 essays on ageing — to follow. She writes for the iPaper, publishes academic research, and works from her own four acres of woodland.

Faraway, still

Years ago I wrote about being a Faraway grandmother — the kind who flies in t…

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In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Rob Nathan, occupational psychologist and career coach, to ask why the three-stage life — education, work, retirement — is proving so stubborn. Recorded on his 77th birthday, Nathan argues the systems around us were built for shorter lives and have not caught up, while individuals get financially and socially bound into their employers. He draws on William Bridges to separate change from transition, and unpacks the self-limiting beliefs that keep people stuck at the edge of the diving board. The conversation turns to cultural contrasts — the respect afforded elders across Southeast Asia against a Western workplace that reads older workers as slower and replaceable — and to the case for career conversations and multi-generational teams. Nathan closes with whitewater rafting and his own definition of a good fourth quarter.

Rob Nathan is an occupational psychologist and career coach of more than four decades. He set up his own practice in 1978 and now directs Career Counselling Services, whose training and coaching work he is expanding into Southeast Asia. He commissioned, edited and co-authored The Holistic Career Conversations Handbook, including a Chapter on Career Conversations to The Holistic Career Coaching Handbook, and an earlier co-authored career title was serialised on television. He designed the Thrive at 55 programme for people rethinking work in later career. Alongside his practice he holds a master’s in creative writing, writes short stories, and runs shared reading groups for elders with Age UK.

Links:

• www.career-counselling-services.co.uk

• https://www.routledge.com/The-Holistic-Career-Coaching-Handbook-A-Guide-for-Managers-and-Employers/Nathan/p/book/9781032802350?utm_source=cjaffiliates&utm_medium=affiliates&cjevent=7d2ae9f1873a11f1806700590a18b8f7

• https://career-counselling-services.co.uk/accredited-career-coach-training/

• https://career-counselling-services.co.uk/advanced-icf-career-coaching-certificate/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/robnathanccs/

Somewhere in your HR system is a career ladder. Entry, mid, senior, exit. It was designed for a workforce that worked for thirty years and stopped. Your workforce doesn’t do that anymore.

The problem isn’t that people are working longer. That’s easy to plan for. The problem is that the ladder was never built to hold a career that changes shape three or four times — that flexes, pauses, restarts, and runs sideways as often as it runs up. Most organisations are still bolting “longer careers” onto a structure engineered for a shorter one. It doesn’t work.

The ladder assumes a straight line

Up-or-out logic works when the workforce is homogenous in ambition and similar in life stage. It stops working the moment a meaningful share of your people are past the climbing phase and into Q3’s ‘something else’ — consolidating, mentoring, working differently, working less, or working more but on their own terms.

That share is no longer small enough to ignore or write off. Workers over 55 are approaching a quarter of the labour force across G7 economies by the early 2030s. In Japan, it’s closer to 40%. A workforce that shape cannot be managed by a structure with only one direction of travel.

Ken Dychtwald made the broader version of this point in Fortune this spring: our systems, from Medicare to career design, were built for what he calls a “short-life world,” and haven’t caught up to the fact that people are now living decades past the point those systems assumed was the end. His diagnosis for work specifically is blunt — organisations still nudge experienced people toward the sidelines instead of treating five-generation workforces as a live source of talent, mentorship and innovation. Career architecture is where that catch-up has to happen first, because it’s the structure everything else — pay, progression, purpose — sits on top of.

Three organisations, in three very different systems, have each built a different piece of a possible response.

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I meant it, too, when I wrote it. No flights. No itinerary. Just a garden that needed weeding and a s…

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In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by UBER’s Briana Gilmore to explore how ageing, disability and mobility intersect — and what that means for the future of work, cities and independence. Briana reframes ageing not as a demographic segment but as an access issue, shifting the conversation from “senior markets” to systems that either enable or restrict independence. She introduces self-efficacy — the confidence to navigate the world predictably — and shows how it erodes when environments fail to adapt, not because of personal limitations. Applying the social model of disability to ageing, she argues that disability lies in environments, not impairments, opening fresh ways to design products, services and cities. Along the way she unpacks the tension between safety and autonomy, the dignity of risk, and how this thinking reshaped Uber’s approach to older users — and what age-friendly cities truly require: meaningful choice.

Briana Gilmore is Head of Global Accessibility Policy at Uber, focused on disability access, ageing and inclusive mobility. With a background spanning global migration policy, public health and urban planning, her work examines how systems shape access to resources, movement and independence. A long-time disability advocate, she integrates the social model of disability into product and policy design, challenging traditional assumptions about ageing and adaptability. At Uber, she leads efforts to expand access for older adults and marginalized communities,

Access isn’t a nice-to-have layered on top of longevity. It’s the thing that decides whether longevity is a gift or a risk. Your organisation faces the same distinction and it’s often sitting at the heart of your hiring process — embedding an ageist flaw into an algorithm.

Across the OECD, older workers are more active in the labour market than ever: the average employment rate for the 50+ cohort sits around 62%, a marked increase on two decades ago.

But for every 100 workers today, there are already 44 people aged 50+ sitting outside the labour force entirely — a ratio the OECD expects to climb to 56 by 2050 as populations age. Its 2025 Employment Outlook is blunt: without mobilising older workers and women, GDP per capita growth slows sharply in the decades ahead.

The marginal worker of the 2020s is late-career, and increasingly female. But will organisations notice - and let them in?

Employers like older workers — but only once they’re in

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