La Voz de Galicia – February 24, 2023 →
An article from The Wall Street Journal talked about the idea that millennials have to be prepared for a professional career sixty years long (instead of the forty years of the previous generation), because it is supposed that they will live a longer, healthier life. And I thought: I am a millennial, I am forty-two years old, I have been working since I was eighteen, and I still have an additional thirty-six years of professional career? Well, the truth is that I don’t know whether I have quite so many designed chapters in my personal cartography…
And then I began to think about what a sixty-year long career means because there are many ways of being in life, and many conditions that don’t depend on one. On the one hand, there is privilege: there are people who know who have a job for the rest of their lives, a unique and stable career. There are also people who can afford to make the decision to change directions in the middle of their lives, even taking the time to think about what it is they want and can do in their next stage. And there are people who cannot afford to make a decision about what they want to be and they have to focus on what they can do to survive. And the truth is that nowadays it is possible for someone to go through these two phases at some moment in their life, just as it is possible for them to never have the chance to choose. It all depends on each person’s circumstances, and unfortunately we can’t always control them.
A sixty-year career can also mean sixty years of uncertainty, and looking to the future one can’t stop asking if the system is prepared for this. We know that, if we are lucky, we will bet to be quite old, but under what conditions?
