Will we live to 120, and who pays for it?

I want to start in 1889.

That year, Otto von Bismarck's Germany created the first national old-age pension. The age to collect it was seventy. Life expectancy at birth was around forty, pulled down by infant mortality, and even the adults who reached seventy could expect only a few more years.

Read that again. A pension that started at seventy, in a country where most people never got there.

The pension wasn't a plan for a third of your life. It was a reward for the rare survivor. A gold watch for outliving everyone.

We kept the number and changed the life.

Today, in most rich countries, retirement lands somewhere between sixty and sixty-seven, and life expectancy is in the eighties. That's already a twenty-year gap the system was never designed to fund. And now the biotech era is knocking.

I'm not going to tell you that everyone alive today will reach 120. I don't make predictions, remember. But the direction is not in doubt. The tools to slow aging, edit genes, and grow replacement tissue are arriving on the same curve every other technology arrived on: expensive and uneven first, then cheaper, then ordinary.

What's the pattern?

Which means the first people to get the extra decades will be the people who can pay for them. That's not a scandal. It's the pattern. The first credit cards, the first cars, the first internet connections all went to the same people. Then they didn't.

So the question was never "will we live longer." It's what happens to everything built on the old number.

A pension designed for seventy. A career designed for forty years of work, then stop. A mortgage. A marriage. A "job" that assumes you'll do roughly one thing.

Sixty-year careers don't fit inside any of those. And here's the second-order effect, the one I actually think about: if you're going to work for sixty years, you can't afford to be one thing. The job is not the goal. It never was. Longevity just makes that impossible to ignore.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

If you run a company: stop treating age as a proxy for anything. Your most valuable hire in 2040 may be seventy-two and on her third career.

If you run a pension or a benefits plan: model the sixty-year career now, before someone else has to explain why you didn't.

And if you're a person: plan to begin again. And again. Not because the first thing failed, but because you'll have time for a second and a third.

We have added years before. Sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines: each one broke a system that assumed people died on schedule. And each time, we rebuilt the system.

We'll do it again. The question is whether we start before the bill arrives.

What would you do with an extra twenty years, if you knew they were coming?

Related: Is a chatbot now your patient's first doctor?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote