Who decided contribution has an expiry date?

Much of our economy still runs on a simple script: learn, work, retire. But longer lives are breaking that script and the cost is already being paid. An 11-year-old balancing school and family care. Millions of adults stepping out of work to care for someone they love. Women making some of the greatest contributions in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Different ages. Different circumstances. The same design problem. We still price contribution as though it belongs to a narrow window called "working age." This edition of New Longevity Network Insights follows that contradiction across generations and asks the economic question longer lives most urgently require. Not just: how will we afford ageing societies? But: what are we already losing by assuming contribution has an expiry date?

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This month: Economic

Most economies still run on a script written for a shorter life: learn, work, retire. Three acts, one direction, and a built-in assumption that contribution eventually expires. That script is failing. But it is failing in a place most of us are not looking, because we keep looking for it in old age.

Read this month's New Longevity insights side by side, and the pattern sits somewhere else entirely. An eleven-year-old is running a household around her homework. Prime-age adults are leaving the U.S. labor force to care for others. A 28-year-old in Jakarta has a savings plan and no plan for purpose. A worker in Britain holds a handful of pension pots and cannot see what they add up to.

Different generations. The same problem: they already pay for a longevity transition our systems haven't made.

This is what the Economic dimension of the New Longevity Paradigm names: systems that disincentivize older workers, undervalue care, and leave caregivers unsupported, and the shift toward incentives that redesign work for longer lives, recognize caregivers as essential contributors, and create demand for contribution at every stage. The question is not when the contribution should end. It is what we are already losing by assuming it does.
 
Care is infrastructure
Caregiving does not begin in midlife. For some, it begins in childhood. A recent New York Times Magazine profile follows young people carrying serious responsibility for parents, grandparents and siblings alongside school and the ordinary business of growing up. It features Ashoka Fellow Connie Siskowski and the American Association of Caregiving Youth, which works with schools to identify young caregivers and surround them with support: home visits, respite, academic help, family services.
Care already flows in both directions across generations. A system that recognizes care only when it appears on a payroll will keep missing the people carrying the most of it, and the youngest may pay with their education and opportunity.
As populations age, caregiving is quietly reshaping the workforce. Research from the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP finds that more than 35 million Americans are balancing paid work with caregiving, while 4.6 million prime-age adults were out of the workforce in 2025 because they were caring for an older, disabled or sick adult. A recent Washington Post commentary argues that America’s labor shortages cannot be understood without looking at care. Ashoka Fellow Laura Baena, Spain, founder of Yo No Renuncio, works the same structural tension from another direction: pushing employers and policymakers to redesign work so people do not have to choose between earning and caring. 
Economists file this under "shortage." It reads more like a transfer: work the economy depends on, moved off the books and onto households, then counted as absence.
India is putting a price on care, deliberately. A new NITI Aayog report calls for caregiving to be recognized as a skilled profession, with fair wages, social protection, career pathways, and stronger support for family and community caregivers. It also names the gender imbalance behind unpaid care: women spend 299 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work and care, against 97 minutes for men, limiting their economic participation. Ashoka Fellow Anil Patil and Carers Worldwide have spent years making unpaid family caregivers visible and strengthening their wellbeing, livelihoods, and recognition. 
Professionalizing care is not only labor policy. It is a pricing decision the moment a society stops treating care as free and starts treating it as infrastructure it must fund.
 
Care is becoming a global export. As Japan’s rapidly ageing population drives demand for care, workforce mobility firm BorderPlus plans to place up to 50,000 Indian caregivers in Japan over the next four to five years through the country’s Specified Skilled Worker pathway. The scale of the plan points to a wider New Longevity shift. As societies live longer and working-age populations shrink, care becomes strategic infrastructure and the people who provide it become global mobile workforce.
Filling a shortage and building a workforce are different projects. The first ends at the border. The second means pathways that recognize, develop and protect care talent wherever it comes from because the countries exporting caregivers are aging too.
There is no peak. We just price everything as though there were.
Twenty-somethings are planning for money and health. Almost nobody plans for purpose. At Proud Live: Play Your Way Through Adulthood, an August gathering by Proud Project, Ashoka Indonesia and T&DON, around 40 Indonesians aged 24–30 explored what they wanted their own longer lives to look like. were asked what they wanted their own longer lives to look like. Most had considered saving and staying healthy. Few had considered the relationships, creativity, purpose, and contribution they wanted to carry forward. Ashoka Fellow Wida Septarina, founder of Foodbank of Indonesia, offered one possibility: questions about purpose and legacy in her forties led her to establish the organization, where older women now contribute as active volunteers, bringing their local knowledge and life experience to their communities. 
We have taught a whole generation to fund a longer life without ever asking them what they intend to do with it. If contribution is meant to last a lifetime, we need to start designing for it long before retirement.
Some of the most consequential work happens after the age we quietly write people off. Forbes’ 2026 50 Over 50 profiles 200 women making some of the greatest contributions in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. At 60 and 62, Leigh Brady and Beverly Anderson lead two of the largest U.S. credit unions, managing $90 billion in assets between them; and at 88, Patricia “Miss Pat” Chin continues to shape the music industry through VP Records. Their age is not incidental to their success: decades of experience bring confidence, judgment and pattern recognition. 
The contradiction is hard to miss: capability does not suddenly disappear because someone crosses an age threshold. Opportunity often does. When experience remains valuable but access to contribution narrows, the constraint is not age. It is the systems and assumptions we have built around it.
You cannot plan a life you cannot see. Longer, less linear careers are exposing how outdated our retirement systems have become. In the UK, people increasingly accumulate multiple pension pots as they move between employers, yet 79% do not know what they have in aggregate, a system originally designed for an era when someone might spend 40 years with one employer. In a recent 4 Quarter Lives conversation hosted by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, pension expert Richard Smith argues that pension dashboards can pull fragmented savings into a single view and translate abstract pots into the number people can actually plan around: expected monthly income.
Financial security across a longer life is not only a question of saving more. It is a question of visibility, and visibility is what converts a balance into agency. 
From age-segregated lives to age-integrated societies
Young leaders are not waiting to inherit the transition. Today's young people may live longer than any generation before them, and they are inheriting systems built for shorter lives. A World Economic Forum survey of more than 183 young leaders across 57 countries found financial insecurity to be the most consistently named longevity concern across regions, followed by loneliness. They are already responding: in Beijing, older adults are paired with international students for language exchange designed to reduce isolation and age stigma on both sides; in Harare, adults over 55 receive start-up capital and a young business companion, helping launch 30 micro-enterprises; and in Buenos Aires, women are matched with experienced STEM mentors to strengthen career opportunities and long-term financial resilience.
Notice the structure. Each of these solves a young person's problem and an older person's problem with a single intervention. That is not goodwill flowing in one direction. It is an efficiency our age-segregated systems have been leaving on the table.
Age segregation was designed. It can be designed away. In a new Ashoka Changemakers article, Samara Randhawa, Co-Lead of Ashoka New Longevity, traces how schools, workplaces, housing, and the learn–work–retire model systematically separated generations and how intergenerational housing, lifelong learning, and civic life point somewhere else.
The opportunity is not to run more intergenerational programs. It is to redesign ordinary life so connection, reciprocity, and contribution across generations are built into how we live, learn, and work.
Fellows in action
Alexandre Silva (Brazil) is helping bring community-rooted palliative care into national health policy. Drawing on the compassionate-care systems he built through Favela Compassiva, Alexandre contributed his expertise to the development of Brazil's National Palliative Care Policy with the Ministry of Health. Innovations built close to communities can shape the public systems that reach everyone else.
Ana Urrutia Beaskoa (Spain) is taking person-centered, restraint-free care across borders. Through Fundación Cuidados Dignos, Hogar Ave Fénix in Argentina became the first center in Latin America to implement the Libera-Care standard, moving away from physical and chemical restraints and toward dignity and autonomy. Changing care is not about adding services. It is about changing what an institution believes it is for.
Claudia Pinzón Sacristán (Colombia) is advancing digital inclusion as a precondition for participation in longer lives. Her organization, Fundación Percomputo, was selected from 629 applicants as one of six finalists in the Silver Innovation category of Premio Innova Mayor 2026. As services, information and opportunity keep moving online, digital inclusion stops being about learning to use technology and becomes the condition for staying autonomous, connected and present in public life. 
 
“If we, people lucky enough to be aging as well as serving aging humans, see and celebrate the strengths and contributions of older people, rather than fall prey to the fantasy of never dying, not aging, we can tackle these daunting challenges that our nation is facing.”
— Kerry Burnight, gerontologist, named to the 2026 TIME100 Health list
Your turn
Where does the learn–work–retire script still set the rules in your own work? Reply and tell us — we read every response, and the sharpest ones shape what we cover next.
Listen. What if universities were places we returned to across a lifetime, rather than places we left in our twenties? In the latest 4-Quarter Lives conversation, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox speaks with Anne Button and Rachel Cohen about CU Denver Change Makers, an accessible midlife transition program helping people design a purposeful next chapter — and about lifelong learning, career transitions, peer support and the role universities could play in aging societies. Listen to the full conversation →
Support. In 2026, Ashoka New Longevity aims to support 10 new Fellows and raise $1 million to identify, elect and scale their work. Donate →
Nominate. Do you know an exceptional social innovator driving systems change in longevity — across healthy living, lifelong contribution, caregiving, intergenerational connection or narrative change? Nominate an Ashoka Fellow →
The familiar version of this conversation asks how societies will afford so many old people. This month points at the more useful question, which runs the other way: what is it already costing us to assume contribution has an expiry date? That bill is not arriving in 2050. It is being paid now — by the eleven-year-old caregiver, by the millions who left work to care, by the 88-year-old whose best decade nobody thought to expect.