We Get to Be Here: A Thanksgiving Reflection on Longevity and Attitude

We’re living through one of the most extraordinary periods in human history, and most of us probably don’t realize just how much is changing around us. Every day, there are breakthroughs in medicine, robotics, transportation, and space that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago, and we’re watching them happen in real time. The political noise and the crisis news fill the screens. The bigger picture gets missed.

I sat here this morning doing my work with seven different “robots” out running tasks for me simultaneously while I was on conference calls. Stop and think about that for a second. mRNA technology from the COVID-19 response is already showing promise against melanoma, with cancer-vaccine applications in the pipeline. Autonomous vehicles are moving from idea to street. SpaceX is building at a scale that’s difficult to comprehend until you see the images. By the time you're reading this, many other rockets will have launched.

I’m writing all of that in my consumer newsletter this month. For my peers reading this article, there’s a professional read on the same material that I don’t put in front of consumers — and it’s worth sitting with as we head into Thanksgiving and the planning conversations we’re running between now and year-end.

The first read is a question about an assumption.

Nearly every retirement plan we build runs on an implicit longevity assumption — age 90, age 95, maybe age 100 for a healthy household. Those numbers were calibrated against the medicine of the last 20 years. The medicine of the next 20 years is being written now. If the mRNA cancer-vaccine work matures the way it looks like it might, if cardiovascular interventions keep compounding, if the metabolic-health work on GLP-1-class molecules keeps extending, the planning tail doesn’t just move — the median moves. The client who makes it to 100 stops being a tail scenario and becomes a planning case we need to serve by design, not by hoping the math holds.

That shift is already in motion in the plans we’re writing this quarter. Whether we’ve named it or not, every PILOT build, every income-step design, every Roth conversion ladder we lay down this November is being asked to hold up across a longevity window the plan’s assumptions may not fully price in. Worth naming, worth modeling, worth stress-testing. Not next year. In the plans in draft on your desk right now.

The second read is a question about posture.

Our clients watch the same news. Many of them land in our meetings afraid — of the markets, of the political environment, of the technological acceleration they can’t quite place themselves inside of. They don’t tell us they’re afraid; they ask about return assumptions and tax law and whether they should move to cash. The underlying question is the same.

The job on our side of the desk, more often than it gets named, is to carry a posture the client can borrow. The households that sit across from a planner who chose awe over fear leave the meeting less afraid than they came in. The households that sit across from a planner who’s absorbed the same fear they walked in with leave worse off. Not because the planner lied to them. Because the posture was contagious either way.

I’m not pretending that’s easy. The news cycle is designed to pull the posture in one direction. The planners who sustain long careers in this work — the ones still showing up at 70, at 75, at 80 — have a gratitude muscle they’ve built on purpose, not inherited. The clients who sustain plans through long retirements usually have one too, and the correlation is not accidental.

That’s the Thanksgiving read for peers, and it’s the one I’ll close on. We get to be here, in this work, in this year, with the households that trust us to walk them through it. The markets will do what the markets do. The political ramifications are unknowable. The technological acceleration is going to keep accelerating. None of that is ours to control. The posture we bring into the room and the longevity assumption we price into the plan — those are both ours.

Happy Thanksgiving.