Welcome to Day #4 of the #60DayChallenge! See this post if you need to be brought up to speed!
OK…let’s dive in…🌊🌊🌊
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One of the benefits of living in a world of abundance is that technology fuels medical achievements we previously thought impossible.
Case in point: the COVID-19 vaccine. What previously took almost a decade…developing an effective vaccine…has taken less than a year. The previous record was about four years with the mumps vaccine.
Futurist Peter Diamandis has suggested that…
The latest research on longevity suggests there is no reason that people born today can’t live to at least 120 years old… perhaps even to 150 and beyond.
He suggests those medical advancements include artificial intelligence, gene sequencing and gene therapy.
In a study published in 2019, researchers made a powerful connection between a strong sense of purpose and a lower risk of mortality after 50.
Think about it: If medical advances coupled with a strong psychological sense of purpose provide individuals the possibility of an extended lifespan, how will we need to reframe education, schooling…..to best support the ever-more critical factor of purpose?
One of the ways people find purpose….certainly not the only one, especially if we are visioning a more human-centered world and learning ecosystem…is through work.
Future of work thought leader, Heather McGowen writes in her latest book, The Adaptation Advantage:
The old model that parsed life into sequential steps of education, career, and retirement is blurring. Once, we were “educated” early in our lives enough to get us on a 40-year career ladder that we climbed until we retired and then, by design, soon after died. Today, considerable leaps in human longevity have stretched that career phase out a decade or longer.
A single dose of “education”—a process that infers an end state of being “educated”—isn’t sufficient for a career arc that looks more like a spiral. Instead, we need to swap education for learning, a continuous state of discovery and reinvention. Work, then, leverages that learning and the work itself becomes another form of learning. And retirement? Societally, we neither planned for nor funded the 20 or 30 years of retirement that is the reality of our longer lives. Simply, we need to imagine a different model that blends these three bands of life, mixing learning, work, and retirement in an iterative cycle that spans 50 or 60 years or more.
Longevity, purpose, reframing system structures in support. Connections?
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❓ Provocations:
Will we change our education system when we know the lifespan could be upwards of 150? Why would we want to alter the current system in an environment of such longevity? How might a human-centered system support individuals and communities across the (extended) lifespan?
💎 Resources:
The Adaptation Advantage Heather McGowen and Chris Shipley
🧠 Mindset:
Purpose; flourishing; success.
💡 Area:
Longevity
📣 Drop your thoughts in the comments or in the Facebook group. 🔥🔥🔥
- A silver lining - January 22, 2022
- Is our use of tech working against us? 🤔 - September 8, 2021
- What’s NOT going to change in the next 10 years? 🤔 - September 7, 2021