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Our society is getting older.
Demographic trends, in other words the drop in the birth rate, push the average age upwards. Above all, progress in medicine and preventive health care lead to humans aging - or, more aptly put, staying young longer.
The great grandfather of modern medicine, Hippocrates, died at age 56. He was convinced that people were old at 42. Today, the average life expectancy of a man in Germany is 75.6 years and a woman can expect to live to 81.3 years of age. The typical 50-year-old is healthier today than a 40-year-old a few generations ago.
The media spread horror scenarios of a new class struggle between hordes of aged people vegetating along on crutches, eating up more and more resources, and an overstressed younger generation in their income-producing years, who cannot and do not wish to generate these resources.
Reality looks different. Our life simply arranges itself differently than during the industrial age, when it was characterized by three eras - youth and education, earning and family, retirement and death. In today's knowledge society we commit ourselves later, if ever, and the family phase is often preceded by a phase of self-discovery, where we travel, experiment, and find our place in the world. At age 50 or 60, we will often re-orient ourselves. Many companies are started at this age by people who come with a broad spectrum of experience and a more solid financial base and whose chances of success, therefore, exceed those of younger start-up entrepreneurs.
The more proactive lifestyle and the shift of traditional power structures towards women result in different forms of partner ties. More and more, our society practices a form of "serial monogamy", characterized by several partner changes during a lifetime. Ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his foreign minister Joschka Fischer set the example - at the time this article was composed, each was in at least their fourth marriage or partnership. The type of partnership suited to the phase of self-discovery may not meet the needs of the time of second beginning.
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