Disrupting the conventional life cycle

Many still have in mind a ‘life map’ that they use as a reference and feel pressured to conform to: studying until our mid-twenties, landing our first job as we graduate, building a career and a family, retiring in our sixties. As Stefano Cavalli argues, any society produces patterns, sets of norms, that shape the onward course of human lives.

The development of pension schemes, along with other social policies, highly contributed to institutionalizing and standardizing the life cycle inherent to the industrial society. The three age ranges were each assigned a specific function: education for the young, productive activity for the adults, inactivity and retirement benefits for the elderly.

Yet this model is overturned. The changing world of work, linked to the decline of the Fordist system and the emergence of an information and knowledge society, has led to non-linear life courses, often punctuated by periods of inactivity, training programs, and career transitions.

Life courses are becoming the fruit of individual elaboration, rather than that of institutions. However, the social state keeps on managing populations according to age: social laws set the minimum age of contracted workers, through compulsory education, or the age to stop working, with retirement policies. But shouldn’t institutions adapt to this disruption of life cycles? Are age-neutral policies an option? For instance, shouldn’t the education system be meant for perpetual learning rather than primarily addressing twenty year-olds?

Not only the established education and pension systems, but also our social security and unemployment insurance, are failing: they need to be redesigned in order to cover new risk profiles that come with more unstable and discontinuous professional paths. Some thoughts have been given to this, as seen in recent propositions, e.g. the idea of a universal basic income.

Finally, we are at a time where people are in search of meaning. Many feel the need for a higher purpose. Fortunately enough, individuals have increased autonomy. As British management guru Charles Handy explains in The Second Curve — Thoughts on Reinventing Society, technology advances have led to a revolution in terms of communication, allowing quasi-unlimited access to information and goods. One can buy and sell on his or her own, educate him or herself, create content, launch a business.

Some people, regardless of their age, do take the leap and switch paths when they are no longer invested in their work. They start new ventures and forge their own, differentiated life trajectories. In his book, Handy argues that the ascent doesn’t last forever, and that one should jump to the “second curve” of his or her career before getting too comfortable and missing the signs of downfall.

The idea is that a curve initially declines in a time of experimenting and learning, before rising in a period of growth and prosperity, and finally falling away. The key to constant growth — in terms of one’s career or a company’s business — is to start on a second curve before the first one wears out.

And this proactive mindset is probably one we should embrace. By the words of the French philosopher Jean Guitton, “Être dans le vent, c’est avoir le destin des feuilles mortes” — let the wind carry you and you may face the same fate as dead leaves.

Lila AIT-AHCENE & Jade HANNON