2030: The Longevity Economy Tipping Point

It appears inevitable that by 2030 the new economic reality of an older population will be clear to just about everyone. That means you want to get started now.

While the longevity economy is already here, one looming milestone keeps coming up in the context of the shift to an older society. And that’s the year 2030.

• That’s when every Baby Boomer is over 65.

• That’s when the first Gen Xers reach 65.

• That’s also when the first Millennials turn 50.

If you’re already interested in marketing to people over 50, it’s hard not to see the significance of 2030 as a tipping point. But while we’ve seen the demographic shift coming for decades, most people are still clueless that it’s happening or don’t even want to think about it.

To the extent the shift has been reported, it’s characterized as a crisis. The thinking is that older people are a drain on resources and society at large, and without more young people, how will we pay for these non-productive people?

When the topic is broached from the other side, it’s the retirement crisis – or that people won’t be able to stop working at 65. Never mind that the true retirement crisis is the depression and high suicide rates that come with the loss of purpose and status once people leave the workforce.

As an example of how the lack of retirement has been treated as a crisis for nearly a decade, here’s a Time article from 2014:

> 2030: The Year Retirement Ends

Note the alarmist tone:

​​Boomers scrambling to get by on a minimal income. Gen X-ers who can’t afford to stop working. Millennials staring at a bleak financial future. This is the retirement apocalypse coming at us fast – unless we do something about it now. 

We’ve been socialized into thinking retirement is the way it’s always been, even though it was literally invented less than 100 years ago when Social Security was introduced to force older workers out of the labor market. 

And even then, it didn’t catch on until marketers in the 1950s convinced older Americans that they really wanted to retire, all in exchange for the temporary treasure trove of cash that pensioners had at the time.

Okay, so that Time article was written nine years ago. And yet, here’s the New York Times just a few days ago in a piece called How a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World:

The projections are reliable, and stark: By 2050, people aged 65 and older will make up nearly 40 percent of the population in some parts of East Asia and Europe. That’s almost twice the share of older adults in Florida, America’s retirement capital. Extraordinary numbers of retirees will be dependent on a shrinking number of working-age people to support them.

Forget 2030 — this journalist somehow thinks nothing will change leading up to 2050 without massive government intervention. And while it’s clear that governmental participation will be required, there seems to be no media recognition that market forces (and marketers) created the current perceptions around retirement. In all likelihood, it will be the same forces that create change in another direction.

Meanwhile, you’re seeing more and more pieces like this one from the Wall Street Journal that opens with the line: 

The first thing to know about people who shun retirement to work past age 80 is that they are probably busier, and possibly cooler, than you.

> Why High-Powered People Are Working in Their 80s

The subtext is that the most ambitious among us think retirement is not what a serious person does at 65 or even beyond. And maybe that’s true at this point. But what of the millions facing the prospect of not retiring because they simply can’t afford it?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that workforce participation among people 75 and older will climb to 11.7% by 2030 from 8.9% in 2020.

It appears inevitable that by 2030, our new reality will be clear, and it seems dangerous for people to feel like they’ve been robbed of a “golden years” retirement that’s been a fiction for decades. It’s our job as marketers to help people psychologically reframe the situation while encouraging a shift to ongoing work that has meaning and purpose as well as profit.

And, of course, the idea is not to wait to get started until 2030. I think in about five years, just about every business will have figured out that they need to speak specifically to people over 50.

There are plenty of near-term opportunities right now, and getting established for the long term means getting started building your audience now. For example, Copyblogger started in 2006, two years before content marketing had a name, and it wasn’t until 2015 that we first hit eight figures in revenue. 

Playing the long game means starting before the broader crowd realizes what’s happening.

Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of ground so far in Longevity Gains, but it’s been mostly foundational. I’m working on packaging up the early posts into an ebook format for easy reference.

From here, we’ll start moving into the “how to” of marketing to older adults, along with product categories and business models to consider. That means we’ll return to the long-form article format next week.

For the remainder of this week’s issue, let’s look at some longevity economy news.

The Oprah Effect

For a 100-year life, we are going to have 60 years or more of working in order to have more income over a longer period of time. But we are all going to work differently. Over this new long working life, we will have lots of flexibility built into our various life stages.

If Oprah can get people to accept The Secret as science, she can certainly wake people up to the implications of the longevity shift that’s underway. Author Michael Clinton writing for Oprah Daily makes these key points:

• We’re going to have to work longer and smarter to make it to the finish line

• ​​Second acts will be the norm, not the exception

• It’s time to embrace the multigenerational workplace

• Being a newbie is a cognitive superpower

It’s a good overview of how society will have to restructure to accommodate a predominantly older population and the longevity economy that comes with it:

Are We Ready to Live to 100? (Oprah Daily)

Related: The age-reversal industry will be worth $610 billion globally by 2025 and is aiming to blow past 100-year life spans together with extended healthspans (El Pais, translated from Spanish)

The Perpetual Labor Shortage and the AI Impact

America’s aging population is reshaping the workforce, with far-reaching economic consequences.

The maddening thing about modern journalism is how compartmentalized it can be on emerging trends. For example, here are a pair of articles from the Washington Post and the New York Times that explore how the population’s aging ostensibly means fewer workers worldwide than we need for economic growth.

And then you’ll read separate articles in these same publications speculating on whether artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs. While that issue has concerned me for the last five years, I’m starting to see clear indications that we’ll need a workforce augmented by AI just to keep up.

Now add in the fact that older people are already working longer well before the 2030 tipping point, and extrapolate out for Generation X and Millennials. I hate to sound overly optimistic, but the combination of longevity and computer science may intersect in just the right way at just the right time.

In the meantime, we know that delayed retirement has begun even among the wealthiest generation:

The boomers’ exit from the workforce has been cushioned by a shift toward working later in life. More Americans are working into their 60s and 70s because of longer life spans, financial incentives to retire later, and the need to make ends meet. The trend was reversed briefly in the covid-19 pandemic, but that wave of early retirees has largely returned to work.

Another solution that is repeatedly raised is increasing immigration to the United States, which I think is a good thing regardless. But we need to see some real analysis that factors in the convergence of longer work spans and the rise of productivity-enhancing technology before we conclude that the sky is falling thanks to the ongoing demographic shift.

The Boomers are Retiring. See Why That’s Bad News for Workers. (Washington Post)

The U.S. Population Is Older Than It Has Ever Been (New York Times)

Healthspan is the Key

According to a new study, older Americans are heading in the right direction and staying healthier longer.

New data shows that older people are doing a better job of taking care of themselves, which extends their healthspans as well as the number of years they live overall. As we’ve discussed, healthspan is still heavily correlated with educational attainment.

The education piece is important because every generation that follows the Baby Boomers is more educated than the previous generation. It’s my hope that as advances in medical age reversal gain more attention from a wider audience, we can help educate more older people about the benefits of nutrition, exercise, and sleep in the meantime – regardless of whether they went to college.

Great News! We Are Getting Healthier (Next Avenue)

The Gen X Show

Gen-Xers aren’t actually the “forgotten middle children” that the media often makes us out to be.

Last week’s article on Generation X was a hit, mainly among Gen Xers. Hey, I know my people. But just in case you think I was advocating extra hard due to my membership in the club, here’s an article from 2022 I didn’t cite that also recognizes we’re running the show.

Gen X is running the world — and nobody even realized it (New York Post)

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll begin exploring the particulars of how to effectively market to older people.

Keep going-

Brian