A psychologist has suggested that we've arranged our lives all wrong.
Laura Carstensen is the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. She says that we need a new life model.
She says current one “doesn’t work, because it fails to recognize all the other demands on our time. People are working full-time at the same time they’re raising children. You never get a break. You never get to step out. You never get to refresh. . . .We go at this unsustainable pace, and then pull the plug.”
She instead reckons that a life's work should be redistributed across a longer time frame, suggesting that education and apprenticeships could stretch longer, through the years when people are starting families.
She wonders why we cram all the work into the early part of our lives and juggle children at this time too.
She thinks full-time work ideally would begin around the age of 40, rather than in our early 20s.
Careers would be longer, with a gradual transition to part-time work in the later years before full retirement around age 80.
