Interview with Ken Dychtwald on Midlife Crisis
February 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Ken Dychtwald
Ken Dychtwald, founding president and CEO of Age Wave

Due to high infant mortality, life expectancy at birth in India in 1900 was just 23. Today, India’s average life expectancy at birth has risen to 65.With longer lives and increased health and vitality in our later years, we have begun to postpone old age, and to create a new middle zone of life, which I have named “middlescence.” This isn’t the first time we have seen a new lifestage emerge. For example, the idea of adolescence didn’t exist until relatively recently. At the beginning of the 20th century, people would go from being children to being adults virtually overnight; there was nothing in between. Then, as we began instituting child labor laws and creating a fuller high school experience, adulthood was postponed. A sociologist named Stanley Hall identified this emerging new stage of life and called it “adolescence.” When the baby boom generation came along in the 1950s, we did it again, further postponing adulthood by creating another new stage of life called “young adulthood.”
Today, as people begin reaching their fiftieth birthdays, they are no longer turning the corner to old age as they had done in our grandparents' time. Instead, our “middlescent” years are becoming a time of continued vitality with an appetite for new beginnings, new careers, and productivity. So we’re not simply living longer, we’ve invented a new life stage – with more to come. People tend to assume that living longer simply means being old longer. Instead, I’m convinced that our entire concept of how we live our lives is shifting. This is an entirely new landscape that we’ve never charted before.
Our research into the attitudes and experiences of today’s workers began with the recognition of the growing numbers, importance, and influence of middlescent workers. Today, employers are experiencing an unprecedented shift in the age distribution of the labor force. This phenomenon is driven by the following three demographic realities – the disproportionate size of the baby boom generation, increasing longevity, and declining birthrates – that no organization can ignore.

1. The baby boom
   Nearly one-third of all Americans–76 million people- were born between 1946 and 1964. That’s a daily average of over 10,000 births in the US, with 1,000 in Canada, and comparable numbers across other major economies. This fertile period was sandwiched between the baby busts of the Depression and World War II and the Viet Nam era. At such numbers, the boomer generation has repeatedly reshaped American life and fueled much of the productivity of the last several decades. As boomers reach traditional retirement age, how will corporations survive themassive exodus of skills, experience, customer relationships, and knowledge – a real brain drain?

2. The longevity boom
   Throughout most of human history, the average life expectancy was less than eighteen. A hundred years ago, only 4% of the US population was over sixty-five; now its 14% and rising. Thanks to breakthroughs in health care and other quality-of-life advances, more people are living longer. Consequently, all the milestones of life are shifting upward. When are we old? When are workers no longer productive? At what age do employees stop learning or seeking new challenges?

3. The birth dearth
   After peaking at 3.7 in the mid-1950s, the average number of children per woman in the US has declined to 2. Nearly 20% of baby boomers will have no children, and another 25% will have only one child. Declining birthrates across industrialized nations guarantee a recurrent shortage of native-born young workers. Countries with birthrates such as Italy’s (1.2), Germany’s (1.3), and Japan’s (1.4) are well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. In India, the birthrate has halved from almost six children in the 1950s to three children per family today.
   These three factors drive what I call the “age wave,” a massive shift in the size and age distribution of the population. As a result of this age wave, major economies such as Japan, Italy, Germany, China, France, and the UK will begin to experience shrinking working age populations in about a decade. Unless birthrates or immigration rates change radically, the German workforce will decline by 25% in 2050, the Italian by 30%, and the Japanese by 38% in the first half of this century. Throughout most of Europe, including Russia and most of the former Eastern Bloc, the pattern is much the same. The age wave is destined to reshape theworkforce and redefine how organizations must recruit and engage their employees. Howcan organizations better engage a growing number of middlescent workers? How can they stem the “brain drain” as massive numbers of baby boomers prepare for retirement? What are the unique motivations, needs, worries, and hopes of the different generations of workers? How can employees better appeal to and motivate each generation? How can organizations create and manage an effectivemulti-generationalworkforce in an era of unprecedented age diversity?

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