[#17] The plan that time forgot
How AI and longevity science are rewriting the rules — and what that means for your plan
At the third stroke, it will be three o’clock precisely.
Beep — beep — beep!
If you’re not yet in your fifties, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve gone slightly mad opening an essay this way. Bear with me and I’ll explain.
Before Apple synced every device in your pocket to atomic precision without asking, clocks drifted. Not dramatically — a minute or two here and there, perhaps. And because everyone’s clock drifted slightly differently, we all ran on slightly different versions of time.
The solution was a phone number. You’d call it, a recorded voice would tell you the exact time to the second, and you’d set your watch. The speaking clock. Simple, reliable, and almost entirely forgotten.
The thing is, most people didn’t call it very often. Life is busy and the drift goes unnoticed most of the time. And so we went about our days running on time that was close to right, but not quite. It didn’t seem to matter most of the time, and then you’d miss a flight or run late for a critical meeting. Then, it mattered.
I’ve been thinking about this lately in relation to something more consequential than watches.
What you and I lost, without noticing
Most of the assumptions built into retirement planning — the age you expect to reach, the health you expect to carry there, the shape of your final decades — were set in an era that is now as gone as the speaking clock itself. Not dramatically wrong. Just drifted. Close enough to feel reasonable, far enough from reality to matter enormously over a thirty year planning horizon.
The force driving this shift is one you and I encounter daily, what we now call Ai. We know it’s transforming the world, sometimes in little, immediate ways (the ‘Ai’ option in a Google search is better than the way we used to use Google, for instance), and some of them in ways that are far more significant and have a much bigger impact on your future.
Take medicine, for instance, such as the fight against cancer, the early detection of disease, in understanding how individual bodies age. Let me give you one number that will make that real.
The Human Genome Project launched in 1990 with an audacious goal: map every one of the three billion base pairs that make up human DNA. It took thirteen years, cost nearly three billion dollars, and required twenty institutions across six countries to pull it off. When they finished in 2003, it was considered one of the greatest scientific achievements in history.
The cost to repeat that feat today? Around two hundred dollars. Some labs are doing it for less than one hundred.
That’s not an incremental improvement. That’s a different world. And the same pattern — cost collapsing, capability exploding — is repeating simultaneously across cancer research, drug discovery, diagnostics, and the science of how we age. We are not watching medicine incrementally improve our lifespan and healthspan, they’re going almost vertical.
The number that will quietly mislead you
A child born in Australia today has a life expectancy that would have seemed implausible to a planner working in 1990. But life expectancy — the average age at death for a given cohort — is actually the least useful number in this conversation, because it describes the middle of a distribution. Half the population will live longer, half won’t make it. Not useful.
What matters for planning purposes is the full spread of that range, and particularly its upper end.
If you are a healthy 60-year-old Australian today, the probability that you will reach your mid-eighties (in much better health than your parents were at that age) is not a remote possibility — it is something closer to a base case. If you have a spouse and you’re both in reasonable health today, the chance one of you will reach ninety is so likely that betting you won’t reach it is actually a silent and reckless gamble that the problem will sort itself out.
Plan or gamble?
And here is where the drift becomes dangerous. The planning tools most people are still using — straight-line forecasts, fixed return assumptions, a tidy end date — were built for a world that no longer exists. They were set, like a watch in 1995 that nobody ever updated, to a time that has since moved on without them.
The rate of change is the story, not just the direction of it. Lifespans are not just longer. They are growing longer faster. Healthspans — the years lived in genuine good health, with real capacity and independence intact — are improving alongside them. The years being added to the upper end of the distribution are not, in the main, years of managed decline. Many of them are years of real life. Which is precisely why they need to be planned for.
The missing insight most plans never account for
Here’s the tension – and the opportunity.
You’re more likely to have a much longer lifespan and a quality of life that outstrips what your parents experienced. The challenge, though, is that your life will contain far more uncertainty, more complexity, more volatility, more ways something can easily go wrong. The difference — and this matters — is that you’re living through this at exactly the moment when the tools to navigate it are just now starting to catch up.
The more useful insight is this: those who are thinking clearly about what lies ahead, and building their financial lives around a structure designed for it, are the ones who will navigate it with confidence rather than be ambushed by it.
WealthSpan — the length of time your wealth can sustainably support your ideal life — is the thinking built for this environment. Not for a tidy end date on a straight-line forecast, but for a real probability distribution: the range of futures you might actually inhabit, from the ones that close early to the ones that run deep into decades you haven’t yet imagined.
The speaking clock didn’t judge you for letting your watch drift. It just gave you the right time when you called.
The question isn’t whether your plan has drifted into obsolescence – at this point, that’s a real possibility. The question is what you’re going to do about it.