Heroes Not Zombies

Did Charles Handy come up with the concept of the “third age”? I’ve done a bit of searching online but I can’t find the answer to that. Wikipedia reckons the Third Age, is the history of Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings! In The Empty Raincoat, Handy describes four ages –

1. Formation – education, training, life experience
2. Endeavour – work, parenting, house-keeping
3. Second Life – extension of the Second Age, or something different
4. Dependency – the final years

He attributes roughly 25 years of life to each of these stages (or ‘ages’).

Whoever coined the term originally, the concept is a useful one, and as Handy points out, with increased life expectancy and quality of life for most of us, the Third Age is becoming increasingly important. He points out that the Third Age used to be what we called retirement and was seen as a time to do nothing, live off your pension, then die! Nowadays, with the changing demographics producing many more older, healthier people, and correspondingly lower proportions of younger people in society, he says we can no longer think of the Third Age as a time for doing nothing and earning nothing. He describes four sources of income in the Third Age –

1. State pension
2. Occupational pension
3. Savings/inheritance
4. Paid work

and he says that as neither State nor occupational pensions will be enough to live on in the future, that we’ll increasingly have to rely on paid word beyond the age of 65. This needn’t be a bad thing of course. Many people feel tossed on a waste heap on retirement day. But certainly, it’d be good if it wasn’t about just more years of 9 till 5 and wages! Given that most people will have some pension income, and maybe also some savings or inheritances, then paid work needn’t take centre stage but might potentially be more meaningful work – something which adds value to life beyond a simple income. But, then, that’s a pretty good goal to have at any age, isn’t it?

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One of the concepts which Charles Handy writes about in The Empty Raincoat is the ‘s’ curve. Here’s an example of one –

We start something new, it develops and grows, then the problems and limitations start to appear so the growth flattens out, and in the final stage, decline sets in.

Handy says

It’s one of the paradoxes of success that the things and the ways which got you where you are, are seldom the things that keep you there.

In other words, when things are going well, we shouldn’t become complacent thinking that we’ve got it all sussed. If we want to keep growing (and if we don’t we’ll start to shrink or decline) then we have to change what we’re doing now. The future will be different from both the past and the present.

An example of this from medical practice would be the treatment of an individual with a chronic illness. The doctor might find some therapies which are helpful eg some particular drugs which work for this patient, but, as time passes, those therapies won’t be so helpful any more.

I find the idea of “proven” or “unproven” treatments to be very unhelpful. Not only because no treatment will work for every patient, so a treatment is only “proven” for that person when we see how things turn out for them, but that because everyone is always changing, what works now, what is “proven” now, will stop working, or at least stop working so well, as time passes.

If we are to continue to improve and to grow we need to understand the reality of this ‘s-curve’ and as

it’s easy to explain things looking backwards, we think we can then predict them forwards

we soon find that the next phase, the new medicine, the new way of doing things, will be quite unlike the present – related to the present and emerging from the present – but different.

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