Longevity promises us more healthy years of life. But what happens if, as a result, we also live longer—and actually reach 90, 100, or even 110?
A longer life may also mean outliving our generation, losing friends and companions along the way, and facing an entirely new social reality of old age.
And financially, there is an uncomfortable question as well: Who will pay for those additional 10, 20, or 30 years of life once our income has long since come to an end?
The more successful longevity becomes, the more urgently we need to think about what a longer life means for society, for our social structures, and for our economies.
Perhaps the crucial longevity question, in the end, is not how long we can remain healthy, but whether our systems are prepared for the possibility that we actually will.
I’ve given this some thought.
From “being allowed to live healthily” to “having to live healthily”
Die Ärztekammer Hamburg vergibt inzwischen Fortbildungspunkte in Sachen „Longevity“. Mit Hochgeschwindigkeit hat dieses Thema den Markt erobert. Möglichst lange gesund, geistig fit und selbstbestimmt bleiben. Wer wollte das nicht?
Longevity is therefore one of the major issues of our time. Investors are pouring billions into research, startups are selling supplements, diagnostic tools, and biohacking products, and a growing number of people are trying to delay the aging process as long as possible.
But despite all the enthusiasm for living longer, an uncomfortable question arises:
What actually happens if we live healthier lives and thereby even extend our lifespans, without at the same time creating the social, financial, and societal conditions necessary for this longer life? Perhaps we’re creating ghosts we haven’t even thought about yet. Do we really want to live even longer then?
1. A Brief History of the Origins of Longevity
The desire to live longer is, of course, nothing new. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term “longevity” can already be found in writings from the 16th century. What has changed is the perspective.
The modern longevity movement did not, therefore, arise solely from traditional gerontology. It received a significant boost from an unusual combination: biotechnology met the Silicon Valley mindset.
While medicine has traditionally focused on treating diseases, a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors has begun to ask a different question: Why are we tackling cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia individually when aging itself is one of the most significant common risk factors?
- As early as 2006, PayPal co-founder and investor Peter Thiel invested in the Methuselah Foundation, led by gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. A few years later, Google began to focus much more heavily on this topic.
- In 2009, Google founded its own venture capital arm, Google Ventures, now known as GV. One of the key figures there was Bill Maris. It was from his circle that the idea for Calico—the California Life Company—ultimately emerged.
- In 2013, Google spun it off into a separate company. Together with biochemist Arthur Levinson, Calico was tasked with researching the biological basis of aging and, potentially, developing interventions that would allow people to live healthier lives for longer. Google provided long-term funding for this effort.
That was more than just the founding of yet another biotech company. It was a paradigm shift that very few people are aware of.
The technology industry began to approach aging in much the same way it approached other major technological challenges: as a complex system whose workings could be understood, modeled, and potentially changed. This was reinforced by a mindset already deeply rooted in Silicon Valley: if a problem appears technically solvable, why should we accept it as an immutable fact?
Ray Kurzweil, who would later join Google himself, became one of the most influential proponents of this idea. In his thinking, the boundaries between biology, information technology, artificial intelligence, and human life extension began to blur. From this convergence of capital, technology, biotechnology, and a strong belief in the future, what we now know as the longevity industry eventually emerged.
Companies such as Calico, later Altos Labs, and numerous other biotech and venture-capital projects are pursuing very different approaches, from researching the biological mechanisms of aging to what is commonly referred to as cellular rejuvenation.
As a result, the social narrative has also changed.
16th century: longevity = long life / long lifespan
19./20. Century: Longevity as a Topic in Demography, Gerontology, and Aging Research
From around 2000: increasing integration of genetics, biotechnology, and gerontology
Starting in the 2010s: Silicon Valley, Google/Calico, venture capital → Longevity as a field of technology and investment
Incidentally, nature as part of the solution hardly played a central role here.
So it is no longer just a matter of treating age-related diseases; it is increasingly about influencing the aging process itself— and thereby potentially redefining the boundary between healthspan and lifespan. This is precisely where today’s longevity paradox begins.
2. Longevity Today
The basic idea is certainly plausible: A healthy lifestyle has been shown to increase the likelihood of living longer. On average, people with healthy lifestyle habits not only have more healthy years but also a higher life expectancy.
The problem, therefore, is not the idea of longevity itself. The problem lies in reducing it to its positive effects. Because if longevity simply means improving and extending our biological lifespan, we are only looking at one part of the equation. A person can remain physically and mentally capable for an extraordinarily long time and still eventually face entirely different problems.
I began thinking about this when my wife took on her first client in Germany. He was nearly 100 at the time; today, he is 103. Wealthy, prominent, and remarkably fit, both physically and mentally, he was, in many ways, a textbook example of successful aging.
And yet his long life had a downside. His wife was already dead, and virtually all of his friends had passed away. Building a relationship with someone of his own age—and finding people from his generation with whom he can share memories, experiences, and a common historical frame of reference—is therefore simply impossible. His son himself is already in his seventies.
His prominence alone ensured that he continued to receive attention from time to time. But it could not prevent something fundamental: eventually, your own generation dies out.
3. The Other Side of the Coin—Social and Financial
This example highlights an aspect of longevity that is rarely mentioned in the current discussion. We talk about healthspan and lifespan, but not about social health.
A 100-year-old can be physically fit and still increasingly lose the people who share his biographical frame of reference. This is not simply about “loneliness.” It is about belonging, shared memories, language, humor, experiences, and the question of who is still there to share them with.
- Who really understands anymore what has shaped me, what inspires and moves me?
- Who understands my speed?
- Who understands that there is much about the world today that I don’t understand?
Then there is the financial dimension. Someone who retires at 65 and lives another 20 or 25 years needs the financial resources to support that additional time. But what if that becomes 30 or 35 years? When you look at Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s call to raise the retirement age, “longevity” suddenly takes on a different meaning. Living healthier, just to work longer?
An additional healthy year of life is, at first glance, a gift. But it is also an additional year that has to be financed. Housing, food, insurance, mobility, leisure, social participation—all of it costs money, and current policy is paying less and less attention to this reality.
For a wealthy person, a long life may still be a relatively manageable prospect in financial terms. For someone whose pension barely covers their existing standard of living, the same additional years of life can become a problem.
Paradoxically, longevity could thus exacerbate a new form of social inequality: Some people buy themselves extra years of healthy life. Others have to be able to afford them.
4. The Ghosts of the Future – Why Isn’t Longevity an Issue Today?
This, to me, is where the real longevity paradox lies. And it can be taken even further: the typical longevity customer up to the age of 65 is attractive to the industry precisely because they can still afford its products and services. The business model of the industry is therefore inevitably focused on the phase of life in which people have money, rather than the phase in which the extended lifespan actually takes place. Once they reach that point, they fall off the radar of the industry—and have to figure out for themselves how to cope.
So we are discussing how to keep people healthy for as long as possible. But we are discussing far less how people are supposed to deal with a potentially much longer life on a social and societal level.
What happens to our pension systems if people routinely live to 90, 100, or perhaps even older? Are we all supposed to work until 80? Or will we actually have to work for 40 years and then spend another 40 years out of work?
What happens to work and retirement? How will family structures change if three or even four generations are alive at the same time, while generations may be scattered across the world? And what happens to the social relationships of someone who outlives their generation by decades?
These are not theoretical questions. If longevity succeeds, they will become real.
Perhaps, then, we need to broaden the very definition of longevity.
Longevity must not merely answer the question of how long we live.
We also need to ask:
- How long can we live a healthy life?
- How long can we financialy support ourselves?
- How long do we remain socially connected?
- And for how long do we experience our lives as meaningful and self-determined?
In any case, a long healthspan and lifespan without financial healthspan and social healthspan would be a rather incomplete success story.
5. I’m in the mood for “Aging”
“Ich habe Bock auf Alter” — “I’m excited about getting old” — therefore means more than simply growing old in good health. It means being excited about the unknown world in which that old age will unfold.
Perhaps Healthy Ageing should therefore focus less on prescribing how we are supposed to live in old age, and more on strengthening our ability to remain healthy, curious, capable of learning, and self-determined in an unknown future.
That component is completely missing at present. And unless we develop it, longevity will not be enough. Because longevity only becomes truly enjoyable when we not only gain more years of life, but also look forward to the life that awaits us in those years, with an ability to adapt to change that will have to surpass anything we have experienced before.
In short: not concepts, but skills.
6. Conclusion
Longevity is fundamentally an attractive development, once we set aside some of the other negative aspects that I have addressed elsewhere. No one should object to people being able to live longer, healthier, and more self-determined lives.
But every technological or medical possibility also changes the conditions under which people live. Perhaps that is why the greatest challenge of longevity is not to get people to 100 or 110, but to create a society in which a 100-year life can actually be worth living, financially sustainable, and socially connected.
Today, we may be optimizing our bodies for a longer life without simultaneously optimizing the financial and social foundations that allow us to live through those additional years.
Because there’s one thing we shouldn’t forget:
When we extend life expectancy through better health—however one defines it—we are not just extending the “good years.” We are generally extending the total length of life as well.
And that is exactly why we should ask ourselves today what kind of ghosts we are creating with longevity.
Because once they’re here, it’ll be too late to think about it.
