People who stay in the workforce into their 70s will remain young at heart – it also makes perfect business sense

WHEN I WAS 20, I thought I’d retire at 60. By the time I was 35, I expected to retire rather earlier, at about 50 or so.

Back then, it was fashionable for professionals to take early retirement – either because they found they could or because their employers had tired of them and pensioned them off.

But now that I’m 50 myself, I find that the finishing line has been moved once again and it looks as though I’ll be slogging away until I’m 70 and beyond.

In the past couple of weeks, there have been various reports from economists saying that the only way of saving the economy from collapse is for everyone to work for much longer.

The assumption is that while this makes sense for the public sector borrowing requirement, it’s going to be tough on us.

I’m not so sure: to have a working life that spans five decades is better than one that lasts for three or four.

Work is a bit like taking exercise. It can be boring and stressful while you are doing it (and on any given day, I’d miles rather not work than work) but it is actually preferable to not working. It gives us structure, status and money; it gives us something to think about and gets us out of the house.

Last week, I had a chat with a former city solicitor who retired a few years ago. The trouble with not working, he said, wasn’t just that you lose money or status. It was no longer rubbing shoulders with young people. Working with the young makes one feel young.

When you stop doing that you start to feel old and behave like it too.

In the future, when offices are filled with toiling old people, it will be good for everyone else too.

Young people have things to learn from older ones. And middle-aged people will enjoy having proper oldies around because it will make them feel agreeably youthful by comparison.

The business case for diversity of age is far stronger than those for diversity of sex or race.

Businesses need memories and here there is an obvious division of labour.

The young can take care of short-term memory as the old lose theirs; the old can take care of long-term memory because the young have not yet acquired one.

Yet if our working life really is to last for half a century, it would have been nice to know that at the outset.

In practical terms, I realise it would not have made a shred of difference to me at 20 – my planning horizon then stretched out two years, if that.

But if the thought of a five-decade working life could somehow be built into everyone’s assumptions, it would change the nature of work in three positive ways.

For a start, there would be less of a sense of hurry to achieve and succeed right now. A working life that stretched out for longer but clipped along at a slower pace might suit most people rather better.

Next, if we all accepted that working life went on almost indefinitely it would no longer seem so dangerous to a career to take a very long break in the middle.

If there was any point in having such regrets, I would almost regret not having taken the past 15 years off entirely to look after my children.

To arrange one’s life so that the peak work period and the peak domestic upheaval happen at the same time is very poor planning indeed.

The third and most important change is that it would be seen as most peculiar to have only one career.

Fifty years is far too long to go on doing the same thing.

Nearly all the lawyers, teachers, managers, publishers and doctors I know of my age are already fed up with what they are doing and can’t face the thought of doing it for another 20 years.

One of my slightly younger Financial Timescolleagues has just quit journalism and started to train to be a doctor a couple of days after her 40th birthday.

Many people thought that she was mad, but it actually makes perfect sense.

She’ll qualify in her mid-40s, become successful in her mid-50s and then, just when medicine is beginning to seem a bit less charming to her, she’ll be 70 and it will be time to retire.

She will have applied to her career a tip I always try to apply to my social life: to leave a party when you’re still having a good time. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)