Stanford's New Map of Life
Stanford Center on Longevity · A program of work begun in 2021, still running.
Stanford's centre on longevity started from an observation rather than a treatment: many people alive today will live to a hundred, and almost every institution around them - school, career, retirement, housing - was designed for a life about thirty years shorter. Its New Map of Life sets out ten principles for what has to change. Most are social rather than medical, and one of them is the argument this practice exists to make.
The ten principles
- 01Make the most of the hundred-year opportunity
- 02Invest in future centenarians
- 03Align healthspans to lifespans
- 04Prepare to be amazed by the future of ageing
- 05Life transitions are a feature, not a bug
- 06Learn throughout life
- 07Work more years, with more flexibility
- 08Build financial security from the start
- 09Age diversity is a net positive
- 10Build longevity-ready communities
What this changes here
Our reading, not theirs.
The third principle is our whole thesis in four words. The others are a useful corrective to a field that talks as though healthspan were only a clinical problem: learning, work, money and community decide a great deal of how later life goes, and a practice that pretended otherwise would be selling a smaller thing than it claimed.
The topics this bears on
Where to go next
The other work we read