We Now Have a 4th Stage of Existence, and it may be the end of us all.

We need a new plan for the last 30 years of life.

Photo by Leonardo Yip on Unsplash

There are, in a manner of speaking, 3 stages to life, and each lasts roughly 20 to 25 years: Youth, The Middle, and Old Age.

The first 20 years of life are spent in Development. You are born tiny and helpless and empty, a vessel for hunger and need. You grow, but more importantly, you LEARN. You learn to move, to crawl and then walk and then run and jump. You learn to speak, you learn to think. You learn and you learn and you learn. The average 3-year-old acquires a new word every 20 minutes. In 16 years, a human being goes from a vocabulary of one (the ‘waaaa!’) to 15,000. That’s a thousand new words a year (and with a peripheral ability to change and order words in near-infinite variety).

That’s just language. There’s also number sense, history, culture, music, narrative, diet, danger, rules, games, grasping, psychology, cooking, art. There’s the body itself and all the things it’s capable of. There’s our machines and all they are capable of. A near-endless ocean of things to learn.

The learning never really stops, but eventually it becomes Purpose. One emerges from development into independence and the building of a new life. The nest, the home, the job, the kids, the relationships. You find work, start saving money, move forward and all that. Get married, have a kid or two, buy a new car, a home, furniture. By some estimates, over 70% of a worker’s wage increases happen in the first ten or fifteen years at the job.

Then the kids move away, the career advancements settle into some kind of holding pattern, attention shifts to longer vacations and often enough ever-expanding peripheral hobbies. One becomes, hopefully, wise. Business is managed, grown, improved. The third part of life, roughly from the late 40s and into one’s 60s, is spent knowing one’s role in the world, living with purpose on the ground you’ve created, in the house you’ve built, among the people you’ve cultivated. This is when you tear out and replace the kitchen, buy the vacation home, embrace hobbies and join book clubs. You watch your investments start to make real money and wonder why you didn’t save more when you were younger.