SOURCE LINK: SOURCE: The Atlantic – Pinsker | Year: 2021 :Month: December
Life expectancy has increased, and this demands a creative, new approach to employment.
- Living longer … but working longer: Humans may soon be able to live to reach 100, which clearly indicates extra years on the job. We may foresee to work 60 years or more in a 100-year life. For most individuals, 40 or so years of labour is more than enough, so the prospect of another 20 is unsettling.
- Until the late nineteenth century, people normally worked until they were physically unable of doing so, at which point they believed their family would take care of them. On average, a 20-year-old worker in 1880 might expect to labour for less than two years before dying away.
- What changed? What has changed since then is that retirement has become financially feasible: in other words, individuals have quit working because they can afford to do so. Also, retirement is too binary—you either work a lot or you don’t.
- Here’s the plan: Instead of a fixed path through school, job, and retirement, the concept envisions individuals zipping in and out of those periods, as well as sprinkling in time for leisure and caring for loved ones as well. The goal is to continue working till later in life, but with longer periods of time spent working less (or not at all). This idea is appealing; it may even, astonishingly, make a 60-year professional career seem more reasonable.
- Let’s start with midlife mania. What modern society asks of working parents is well nigh impossible. In order to care for their young children, two parents might temporarily cut their full-time work schedules by half and then gradually increase their hours again.
- A brave, new world: Higher pay, affordable housing policies, decoupling health insurance from work, and a variety of other proposals for enhancing people’s financial stability and job flexibility might all contribute to this option. Financial security for everybody and a more humanitarian approach to work might become the new standard.
Many obstacles stand in the path of this kind of change. Nevertheless, the society we live in today would have been incomprehensible to those of our forefathers who toiled away till the end of their days.