Dear Friends,
When I explain why my work exists, I almost always start with a number.
In 1950, an American who reached 65 could expect to live about fourteen more years. A man, a little less than thirteen.
That was retirement. Roughly a decade after a working life ended. Most people didn’t plan for it beyond the money, and they didn’t really need to. The time was short enough to improvise.
The numbers look very different now. The CDC’s final data for 2024 put life expectancy at birth at 79, the highest ever recorded in this country. A 65-year-old today can expect close to twenty more years. Women, a little more than that.
And for anyone who steps away in their fifties, thirty years is a realistic horizon.
That isn’t a longer version of the old retirement. It’s a different thing entirely. Twenty or thirty years is long enough to build something. Long enough to grow into a life that actually fits you. And long enough, if nobody asks who you want to be, to drift for a decade before you notice.
This is why I say longevity has changed everything about this work. When the time was short, the identity question could wait. Now it can’t.
But there’s a second number I keep coming back to, and it complicates the first.
A Mayo Clinic analysis of 183 countries found that the US has the widest gap of any of them between how long people live and how long they live in good health. Americans spend, on average, about twelve years living with disease or disability. Last month, the World Health Organization reported the same pattern worldwide: healthy years are recovering more slowly than lived ones.
I’m not a doctor, and this isn’t a health newsletter. But I can’t look at those two numbers side by side without seeing what they mean for timing.
The years ahead aren’t all the same. The healthiest ones tend to come first.
That means the stretch right after you leave a long career isn’t a waiting room. It isn’t the part you get through before the real chapter starts. For a lot of people, it may be the best part of the whole stretch.
I understand the instinct to decompress first and figure out the rest later. I’ve felt that pull myself. But “later” is carrying more weight than most of us realize.
A study published last month asked older adults how they think about life expectancy, the number itself. Their answers split. For some, it read as a countdown, a measure of how close the end might be. For others, the same number described a range of possibility, the life still available to them.
More than half brought up something on their own: the number says nothing about quality of life. The researchers put it right in the title: “Life Expectancy Means More Than Just Your Heart Beating.”
Same number. Two completely different orientations.
That distinction matters more than it looks, because how you read the years ahead shapes what you do with them. If they look like a countdown, you protect. You conserve. You wait to see what happens. If they look like a range, you start asking what you want to put in it.
Neither reading is wrong. But only one of them invites you to design anything.
Seventy-five years ago, nobody needed help figuring out who to be for fourteen years. Twenty or thirty is a different question. It’s long enough to become more fully yourself, or to stay someone you’ve outgrown.
So when you look at the years ahead, what do you see? A countdown, or a range?
Warmly,
Cara
P.S. If you want a clearer read on where you stand right now, before deciding what those years should hold, the Future Identity Snapshot is built for exactly that. https://www.goodmorningfreedom.com/future-identity-snapshot
Next May, I’ll be back on the main stage at the Exit Planning Summit in San Diego, my second year in a row. The room is full of advisors who help owners plan the exit. I’m there to make sure someone also asks who they’ll be after it. I bring that same conversation to firms, associations, and leadership groups. If you’re planning something where it belongs, reply to this email.