| Participation-Span (part 2 of 2)

| Odile Robotti

| We tend to think of participation as solely a personal choice. I think it should also be framed as a societal responsibility.

Today’s institutions were largely built around a twentieth-century, pre-longevity assumption: that retirement means, quite literally, pulling back from society. That leads, almost inevitably, to treating an ageing population as a burden to society and a problem. Instead, maybe it’s a design challenge: how do we increase Participation-Span?

Read part 1

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Participation often ends not because people lose their health, their curiosity, their desire to matter, or their need for purpose, but because the pathways become hard to find, hard to walk, and often feel like a consolation prize rather than a worthy role. The goal is to ensure that those who wish and are able to remain engaged can find pathways that are visible, desirable, and socially valued – not just available, but worth choosing.

To build societies where Participation-Span keeps pace with healthspan, and where people thrive together across longer lives, five conditions need to be in place.

1. Awareness. Just as we’ve successfully communicated the importance of exercise, nutrition, and sleep for living longer and healthier lives, we need to communicate that participating in society benefits both individuals and society itself. Unlike exercise or nutrition, there’s no industry with a substantial financial stake in selling participation, which may be why nobody talks about it, and why closing that gap will likely take public campaigns or policy intervention rather than the market.
2. Orientation. We can’t expect everyone to have a clear idea of how to participate in society after a major life change — retirement, widowhood, an empty nest. A clear vision of one’s future self is far from common, and even people who want to contribute aren’t always aware of what they’re capable of. Many of us over-value the technical skills specific to the industry we worked in and under-value meta-skills (i.e., skills transferable across domains, such as the ability to read people, to communicate, to influence). Orientation is a normal, expected step in choosing a college or a career path, with well-documented benefits: higher satisfaction and lower drop-off. There’s no reason it shouldn’t play the same role after retirement or other major life transitions.
3. Pathways. Increasing participation-span requires readily available opportunities to participate, and to resume participating, that take people’s preferences and constraints into account. The harder these are to find and act on, the more people give up, often before they even try. A caregiver stepping back to look after a parent or a spouse needs exactly this kind of pathway back in: not just goodwill, but visible, concrete points of re-entry. Designing accessible pathways to help people find their way in, or their way back into, the shared life of society is therefore a core goal.
4. Culture. To begin with, the third and fourth quarters of life need to be rehabilitated rather than treated as antechambers to the exit. Even more importantly, lifelong social participation needs to be valued, recognized, made desirable, and expanded to include a wide range of forms. Generativity, Erik Erikson’s term for the drive to guide and contribute to those who come after us, should be celebrated as much as achievement. Many of the roles that become more important later in life, such as mentoring, caregiving, civic engagement, knowledge sharing, community leadership, remain far less visible and prestigious than executive positions or hierarchical advancement. If we don’t redefine success, many later-life transitions will keep feeling like a fall back and a loss rather than an evolution. Extending Participation-Span means celebrating continued engagement in the shared project of society through changing roles across the life course: leadership evolving into mentoring, professional expertise into teaching, career achievement into civic engagement, experience into stewardship.
5. Mindset. A participation mindset is the belief that our role in society continues to evolve throughout life, rather than ending with retirement or the conclusion of a particular career. It requires the belief that we can keep learning, evolving, and contributing to something that gets bigger, not smaller, as we get older.

Maria’s story

Imagine Maria.

She retires from her corporate career at sixty-five.

Over the next 18 years, she mentors young entrepreneurs, teaches financial literacy at a community center, serves on the board of a local nonprofit, and spends the summer caring for her grandchildren. Alongside these commitments, she discovers a passion for landscape painting, eventually exhibiting her work in a local group show, and regularly attends concerts with her husband and a group of longtime friends.

When Maria is 81, her husband—five years her senior—passes away. By 83, declining health gradually limits her ability to participate. But she does not disappear into isolation. She is surrounded by relationships and institutions she helped strengthen over many years. Former mentees visit regularly. Neighbors she met through community initiatives help with everyday tasks. The community center where she once volunteered now offers activities, companionship, and practical support.

The society Maria helped build becomes the society that sustains her.

Not because participation is a transaction, but because it creates relationships, trust, and a sense of belonging that accumulate over a lifetime. 

An invitation

Participation-Span is an idea. It is an invitation to rethink the role of older adults in society and the contribution they can make to our collective future. Complementing lifespan and healthspan, it gives us another way of understanding and shaping longevity.

Much remains to be explored: how it should be measured and strengthened; what policies, institutions, and cultural norms best support it; what role employers could play in creating pathways to participation for people approaching retirement; and how we might rethink what success looks like in longer lives and build a culture that values evolving forms of participation.

Viewing longevity as just a biomedical challenge is reductive. It is also a societal design challenge and an individual developmental challenge. Participation-Span is a prompt to begin exploring one of the key challenges of longevity: how longer lives can remain connected to the shared life of society.

Odile Robotti is founder of Learning Edge, a management training company; author & speaker on the social and organizational impacts of longevity and on retirement reinvention.