The longevity society: long life is also a choice of sustainability

The point then is not just to live longer, but to do so in healthy and self-sufficient conditions, which at the moment is a privilege of Westerners and Asians, not Africans for example; in Chad and Nigeria average life expectancy stops at 53 years. But shifting the emphasis from old age to longevity also means realising that much of what is done, is done badly: 'I am not like my 14-year-old grandson, I need simplification,' Palmarini continues. "If a little while ago when we connected via Zoom we had some technical hiccups, it's not because we are classic boomers. It is not us that are obsolete for this society, it is this society that is badly designed in general, and not only for the over 60s. If a technology is not user-friendly enough, it means it is badly designed'.

The first step is therefore to get rid of stereotypes. For example, of the idea that old age is passivity, inability, that we are the ones who have to adapt to change. The perspective must be reversed. Not least because, 'as the Italian Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics points out, a 70-year-old today is more or less the same as a 55-year-old 30 years ago. Technically this is called equi valent age. There has been an evolution not only biological and cultural, but precisely neuronal, we have been exposed like everyone to information and technologies that have remapped our neuronal reactions.

There was a time when experience separated generations, today with digital this is no longer the case. Experience is no longer segregated into places and contexts, the school, the café or the office, it has become a single cauldron where exchange is continuous. Never before have five generations found themselves working in the same place, going to the same concerts, dressing the same brands, frequenting the same bars. Maybe we should try to think about one fluid macrogeneration. Where it is not the different ages but the individual that makes the difference'.

Beware though: preparing for longevity, warns Palmarini, does not mean simply changing lifestyle, 'deciding to start doing marathons, running at 60 or climbing Everest. Longevity is a process that begins even before we are conceived. It has to do with where our mother lives, it is deciding not to start smoking at 15, understanding that certain sugars are bad for us. We should not only focus on lifestyle, 'but on the exposome, which is the sum of a person's exposures over the course of their life: pollution, food, social mobility, stress, social aspects such as education and income. A classic example is Tower Hamlets and Chelsea, two neighbourhoods in London almost bordering each other, the former more working-class, the latter wealthier middle-class. A woman living in Chelsea has 11 years more healthy life expectancy than one in Tower Hamlets. Yet they live only a few metres from each other. In literature, the widest difference ever recorded is in Chicago where a white, affluent woman has a 30-year longer life expectancy than an unemployed woman from the black or Latino community'.

Improving living conditions for all is a fundamental prerequisite for the longevity economy, 'a sector of industry that we cannot even imagine yet. It is no coincidence that Bezos wants to invest 3 billion in this sector', and has already created Altos Labs, a biotech start-up that wants to restore cellular health to reverse age-related diseases and injuries. Who Wants To Live Forever? Big tech billionaires for sure. Yes, but where? Because we may be old people who arrive healthy and beautiful at 200 years old, but is the world around us suitable? We need to update the hardware - cities, public spaces, services - and the software - a culture of social inclusion, community living, political, social, behavioural systems that do not yet exist.

In 2008 the UN sanctioned a historic step: more people live in urban areas than in rural areas. Cities increasingly full of elderly people require a different conception of housing, spaces and policies "that break down inequalities, which limit access to healthy ageing, and with it isolation and exclusion". This was the starting point for the project The Republic of Longevity, by Nica, on show at the Milan Triennale until a few days ago: 'It is a project articulated in the conception of Five Ministries that respond to new needs and desires - the Ministry of Purpose, of Sleep Equality, of Food Democracy, of Physical Freedom and of Staying Together. Talking about ministries means one important thing, and that is that politics has to come into play, that the Planet cannot be saved just by appealing to individual responsibility. Design plays a central role. Objects designed to help us facilitate our activities and at the same time build relationships. This is what Jonathan Chapman, professor leading the PhD in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon University, calls Emotionally Durable Design (title of one of his 2005 papers). "It is design that by increasing durability reduces consumption, waste and consequently helps sustainability," Chapman explains, "and meanwhile also takes into account the durability of the relationships we establish with a product. There is a material longevity - I'm thinking of the Fairphone, the Dutch eco-sustainable mobile phone - and an emotional longevity that works on the relationship we have with things, the meanings we attribute to them, the reasons that may push us to discard or keep a certain thing".

Chapman has investigated the intersection of industrial design, human experience and sustainability in five essays, the most recent of which has an emblematic title: Meaningful Stuff: Design That Lasts. "Design often doesn't do a great job of celebrating the fullness and richness of the human experience. I tried to analyse how we continually form meaningful associations around objects. A coffee pot, a pair of shoes or a house, they are also memories, they are the stories we create around those things. I'm thinking of the circular economy, which is particularly effective in terms of sustainability because it keeps materials moving, things move, they change owners, they have a physical, tangible side and a more subjective side: their story'. This is where what Chapman calls psychological contamination comes into play. Some people struggle to buy something used because they feel it is 'dirty', 'contaminated' by its previous history. Who knows who used it before, who wore it. "Yet an hour after we've been to a vintage clothes shop we might go to lunch at a restaurant, and we don't stop to think that the fork we use has been used by hundreds of people before us".

In Meaningful Stuff, Chapman coined an expression: 'Experience heavy, material light, light materials for experience heavy, which is the opposite of, for example, fast fashion, made of heavy, unsustainable materials, while experience is light, insignificant, there is a continuous consumption that does not give things a chance to really build a story. I don't think people need new things all the time, they want new experiences. The challenge for design will be to learn to design things that evolve with us, therefore emotionally long-lived".