Life Shift: A Wake-Up Call for New Life Style
Drop in any major bookstores, and you wouldn't miss stacks of a book titled "Life Shift: The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity". It's a sensational publication that's selling like hotcakes in Japan right now.
The book is co-authored by Prof. Linda Gratton of London Business School and Andrew Scott, an economist/ macro economy specialist, who is an authority on organization theory and human resources theory - a sort of multifunctional analysis on how to live and work through the years to come.
"Our paths in life are going to be much longer than we have ever imagined ...." - so goes its preface implying the messages the book holds to present to its readers.
Whereas conventional theses on aging problem tend to present more of its negative aspects, the authors of this book go as far as defining longevity as one of the greatest benefits.
"Life Shift" goes and point to ways to best benefit from longevity and shows how to build your life to that end.
In essence, the authors suggest you a multi-layered lifestyle whereby you can free yourself from the binds of the traditional three-stage life pattern of study-work-aging and stop working for longer periods to challenge others careers throughout your lifetime.
The authors thus urge you to change your own individuality and concurrently oblige companies, employers, society and eventually the state to drastically change.
Three hypothetical figures are brought in to draw three different patterns of 100-year life - Jack born in 1945, Jimmy 1971 and Jane 1998. The readers are to each image themselves to any of the three figures to "live" out respective life patterns.
Data show "Life Shift: The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity" is selling best in Japan. A sign of anxiety or comfort? （Nathan Shiga)
Source: Nikkei