02/08/2024
I am having a week off from teaching yoga classes, as my new series on the human body systems and how to keep your body healthy starts next week. And so I am sitting in my sofa reading by the fireplace ... picking a book from a huge pile of books that I want to read to enrich my coaching practice.
I just started this fascinating book, entitled "The new long life- A framework for flourishing in a changing world" by Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton. They are both professors -Andrew teaches economics at the London Business School and Lynda teaches management practices at the same school. Both authors are focused on the understanding of the profound shifts reshaping our world and the actions needed for us humans to flourish individually and as a society.
Lynda has been appointed by former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan to be a member of his Council for designing the 100 year Life Society.
I was particularly interested by their chapter on reimagining time, changing your perception on aging and transitioning from a traditional "three stage life" (education, work, retirement) to a multi-stage life where you redistribute those core activities over the whole of life, reducing stress during the second stage (work).
This is an invitation to rethinking your life as non linear and allowing yourself to follow your own supporting path.
Excerpts of the book :
"Your decisions about the future allocation of time are made in the present. Your path forward will be constructed from everyday choices you make now- and this never-ending sequence of decisions often has trade-offs to be made.
You know the feeling -you wake up in the morning not knowing how you are going to fit everything in. Frequently you don't. Instead you focus on doing some activities today, push others back to tomorrow, and leave the rest for some time in the future. In other words, you are making trade-offs between various periods of time and by doing so implicitly deciding what matters most.
It's hard to make sensible decisions about the future when you feel pressured. These "pinch points' can be particularly tough in the second stage of a traditional three stage life. A three stage life of education, work and retirement creates a specific approach to trade-offs. During the first stage you have little money, but you are building up skills to support your working career. In the second stage you have little leisure, but you work hard to finance retirement. In the third stage you run down your financial assets and enjoy leisure. This puts significant time pressures on the second stage and there is a clear evidence that this can become a period of low psychological well-being. During the second stage too many activities are competing with each other -working hard to establish a career, putting money aside for retirement, raising a family, looking after elderly parents, trying to maintain relationships, wondering about the purpose of life.
In a longer life you have the opportunity to reduce these pinch points by redistributing activities. When you redistribute core activities (education, work, retirement) across the whole life, then ultimately you reduce some of the time pressure, stress and trade-offs that occur during each life stage.
That means for example that time spent on education becomes a series of activities around lifetime learning; or that the "downtime" of retirement is redistributed across life -in for example, more time spent with your children as they grow up, or more time traveling and taking a gap year. There is much sense in this redistribution for, as studies show, when people overload activities into the hours of a single day, they become stressed and unhappy, but when these activities are redistributed over weeks or months, they feel a greater deal happier.
On the face of it, this redistribution appears relatively straightforward. The reality is that it's difficult to achieve. Some of the barriers are corporate practices that punish non-linear work narratives. But it is more than this : it is also about your own perspective on time."
Home A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World About The new long life Smart new technologies. Longer, healthier lives. Human progress has risen to great heights, but at the same time it has prompted anxiety about where we’re heading. Are our jobs under threat? If we live to 100, will we eve...
