Like so many writers, the last, liminal week of the year beckons with invitations to sit and digest what has gone by. I’m sitting in front of the fire in a fog-bound little barn in Somerset, contemplating the density and intensity of the 12 months past. And the lovely card the man gifted me (above), a perfect image of me and my two besties. Unlike non-writers, or people who actually remember their pasts, I entirely rely on cards, journals, notes and elderberries columns to have an idea of what just happened. Google photo helps too.
New World, New Cycles
2024 was a huge year for the world. It feels like we are entering a new era, with new rules and new players emerging in new groupings. I hope that my peaceful, progressive lifetime wasn’t an ahistorical blip. It’s getting rocky out there, and Trump 2 hulks on the horizon to my west, Putin to my European East and Xi to the east of that. It’s gonna be bumpier, messier and more lethal. But then any historian will tell you ‘twas always thus, with the strange exception of a few decades post-WWII, as Simon Montefiore suggests in this Sam Harris podcast, Is History Repeating Itself? If you want a good overview of all the cliffs we are standing on, check out How Likely is World War 3? on the UK’s top political podcast, Leading.
Personally, it was the start of my 10th 7-year cycle (from 63 to 70). So I look back on 2024 as an end to the 9th. Several 56-year-old friends of mine are just starting into their 9th. My 9th cycle was a period of transition towards a next chapter both professional and personal. I became a grandmother, went back to school, studied all things longevity, became a podcaster, a professor and a substacker. All fitting foundations for a next phase.
It’s only in the rear view mirror that you can really see the process and progression unfold. Luckily, I wrote it down. I summarised 2022 as a post-covid period of intellectual renewal and mother-loss (Summarising 2022 - What 3 Words? Learning, Loss & Home). A generational turning of the wheel. Then 2023 as The 4 Phases of Transition: Leaving, Looking, Loving, Leaping where after years of searching and researching, I found my next thing and started to build it (and lost my puppy - who I miss on every walk, and every couch).
I won’t start scoping out the future until January (when do you start turning forward?), but will keep my gaze here trained backwards for a moment more. I hope you aren’t sick of all the ‘24 lists, summaries and ‘best of’s’! It’s a fascinating and often surprising exercise to look back at the past year, and what this tribe of elderberries most liked, read or commented on. Here’s a short overview, starting from the beginning…
“Men have often reached the peak of their careers at this age, but a widespread stereotype of women is that they are somehow done and dusted post-menopause. The emerging reality is that Q3 (age 50-75) may be women’s best career years.” It also waded into the whole DEI review that unseated Harvard’s President, and I’m not entirely sad to see the evolution and adjustments beginning to impact this space.
Is this where all the progress women have made over the past 50 years is going to lead? To a young generation of women taking off with enthusiasm into bigger, broader futures and men backlashing into conservative retrenchment? This trend is more likely to lead to a dystopian future of fraught relationships, ever-lower fertility rates, fast-ageing societies, and the rise of authoritarian leaders ready to reverse course on gender roles. Sound familiar?
In this podcast episode, Oxford’s David Runciman gives Turgenev’s Father & Sons a scarily relevant updating. You’ll never look at arguments between the young(er) and the old(er) quite the same. Father & Sons is a political and emotional description of inter-generational conflict. It’s an 1862 Russian novel signalling the end of an era and pointing to the germs of the violent revolutions to come. The older generation is characterised by the father characters as ‘superfluous,’ the sons as ‘jaundiced.’ The latter are angry at what their fathers did - or failed to do - and at the world they’ve been left (sound familiar?)
It’s forever been that the older are concerned about the kids. What does a generation that was dying to get its drivers license → so it could get a car → so it could get away from its parents say to a generation that ain’t that interested in a license, can’t afford a car, and is happy to hang out with their family - and sit in the back seat texting their friends?
If we don’t help men transition to more gender balanced societies, economies and companies, everyone suffers. This transition doesn’t happen by itself. It takes leadership, investment and focus - on men. I know, I’ve been doing this work for the past 20 years at 20-first. We ignore the gentlemen at our collective peril. But it’s much better when the Surgeon General of the United States says this than when I do. (It’s also much better if the - male - CEO of your company says it rather than the female head of HR or DEI.)
There are now a number of programmes focusing on personal midlife career transitions (I’ve written about university programmes here, non-academic ones here and here). What didn’t exist was a programme aimed at leaders and managers to prepare them to understand and lead in an era of The New Longevity. This was my big learning from my decades on gender balance. If you want to accelerate change in companies, give leaders a bit of time and space to skill up on a new issue and ‘own’ it. That’s how Longevity Leadership was born, a partnership between my company, 20-first, and Portugal’s top business school. It was a great success, and we’re running it again this June 23rd to 27th. DISCOUNTS: There’s a 5% discount if you book before Jan 7th, and a special discount for annual, paid elderberries readers, just email me.
The aftershocks of the Trump/ Biden televised debate. Biden has tragically become a text book case for ageists globally. Sitting in the newfound sanity of a calm UK run by an exceptionally professional, gender balanced cabinet, after countries like France have (just) held off the rise of autocracy and Iran voted to tentatively tiptoe back from it, all eyes are on the US. I know it’s Wimbledon finals weekend and the conclusion of the EUROS championship tonight, but the biggest game in town is still what’s going on in the US. For all of us.
The Olympics may be over, but these Games have broken a new record of their own - they are the first gender balanced Games in history. Paris 1900 was also hosting the Games where the first women were allowed to participate. So 124 years later, we reach parity. Probably a fairly accurate measure of the time deep change takes.
And, In a momentous decision this month, UN member states adopted a resolution paving the way for a UN process to establish a convention to safeguard the human rights of older people. An international, legally binding sort of instrument. My Harvard ALI colleague Luis Gallegos, a longtime Ambassador from Ecuador, was instrumental in getting this resolution across the line. Here’s my 4-Quarter Lives podcast interview with Luis explaining the significance of this move.
The UK Parliament has just voted the first round of legislation to allow assisted dying. This highly-read piece explores where other countries in the world stand on the issue, and how many have adopted it in recent years. It also outlines the debate around it, including what you call it. Advocates and opponents proffer powerful and passionately held arguments for and against. From early-adopting Switzerland to latest-to-the-table Australia, more and more countries are legalising the practice. It is now available to over 280 million people in 11 countries around the world. It was on offer to my mother, who recently (and gratefully) used Canada’s legislation to orchestrate her own wise demise.
Rather than hide in shame behind closed doors, Pelicot has fought determinedly to get this entire case, including all its sordid details into the harsh light of day for all to witness. To put the shame where it belongs. And my god, there is a lot of it to go around. There’s reams of incriminating, unavoidable and entirely damning detail. The police found more than 20,000 (sic!) videos and photographs on her husband’s electronic devices, many in a digital folder titled “Abuse.” It’s like a national course in how sad and shameful sexual abuse is, and how many otherwise ‘good’ men, husbands and fathers, can get drawn into its seemingly addictive seductions - and film it! May it awake France to the work that remains in educating men (and women) about the realities of where we are on gender balance - and the road still ahead.
Two granddaughters is a gift some of my friends can only dream of. A growing number of their kids are choosing not to have children, for a variety of reasons ranging from costs to climate. An article in the NYT this week, titled The Unspoken Grief of Never Becoming a Grandparent, underlines the strange loss of a half-consciously expected lineage. How do we mourn that which hasn’t existed?
Life expectancy is 93% lifestyle, and the old, educated guys I mostly hang out with should know better. This ain’t rocket science. In fact, despite all the hi-jinks about bio-hacking and genetic tweaking, the hilarious reality of improving healthspans is so incredibly basic. It’s even cheap, accessible and largely within our control. I’m not talking about becoming a Wim Hof/ Peter Attia age-denying extremist. Just about acknowledging the science and investing in prevention so that you don’t suffer some of its more sudden or ignoble manifestations. So what gives?
Finally, just a little note of thanks. To you. For walking with me through yet another year’s high’s and low’s, the roller coaster of the world, our families and our various weekly preoccupations. I’m deeply grateful for this time together, for these quiet Sunday mornings trying to make sense of it all. Or at least just capture it on the page in a shared kinda clucking.
See you next year.
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