Time to go off script
Yochai Shavit is a longevity scholar at the Stanford Center on Longevity — and he comes at the whole subject from an unusual angle. His centre isn’t primarily trying to extend lifespan, or even healthspan. It takes longer lives as the starting point — in the US, roughly 30 extra years added over the last century — and asks the harder question: what do we actually do with them?
His answer is that it’s time to go off script. For generations we’ve run one script for a human life: about 20 years of education, then 30–40 of work, then a short retirement at the end. That worked when people died around 60. It breaks completely when people live to 90 or 100 — suddenly there are decades on the other side of the old plan. So the task, Shavit argues, is to rewrite the life course: to spread learning, working and resting differently across a much longer life, and to build the social structures that let everyone benefit from the gift of extra years.
That’s why he sits in Creating the Movement — his work is about culture and society, not biology. And it reaches into Longevity Basics too, because his other great theme is purpose — and how it is meant to change. Expecting a 40-year-old to hold the same purpose as their 20- or 80-year-old self, he laughs, is a little naive. One of the real gifts of a long life, he says, is being able to make even big decisions and add two quiet words: “for now.”
The Center takes the whole lifespan seriously, from the womb onward — what happens in the first five years matters as much as the last thirty. It’s a hopeful, humane reframing of the entire project: living longer is only worth it if we also learn how to live long well.
