The Third Age: The Crown of Life

The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker

Sit with an old poker player sometime and ask him about the players of his grandfather’s generation, and he will tell you something interesting: most of them never got to play a late game at all. They sat down at life’s table, worked their stack through the earning years, and were still working it — still owing the table their days — when their health gave out and the chair was pulled away. There was no stretch of hands played for pleasure after the must-win years. There was the game you had to play, and then, fairly soon after it ended, the end. What our generation has been handed, without much noticing it, is something those players never saw: a long run of extra hands, dealt after the obligations are finished, to people still strong enough to play them well.

The British historian Peter Laslett gave those extra hands a name. Writing in the late 1980s, he divided a human life into four ages. The first age is childhood and schooling. The second is the long age of work and raising a family — the age most of us have just completed. The fourth, at the very end, is the age of dependency and decline, when the body narrows our choices whether we like it or not. And between the second age and the fourth, Laslett placed a third: a season of life made possible only recently by longer and healthier lives, in which a person is free of the old obligations — no employer, no children at home — yet still healthy, capable, and in full possession of his powers. Laslett did not describe the third age as a wind-down. He called it, potentially, the crown of life.

Sit with the arithmetic for a moment, because it deserves a moment. For most of human history, the third age barely existed; the second age ran straight into the fourth, work into decline, with perhaps a brief and tired pause in between. Today a healthy sixty-five-year-old can reasonably expect the third age to last fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five years. That is not an epilogue. That is a span as long as the entire career many people spent in a single job — a second full act of adult life, except that this time nobody hands you the script. Your parents did not model it for you, because most of them never had it. You are among the first generations in history asked to decide what this season is for.

And a season that long deserves better than leftovers. I watched clients come into my office with meticulous plans for the second age — the savings, the insurance, the wills, all in order — and no plan at all for the third, beyond a vague hope that it would fill itself in. Mostly it did not, or it filled with whatever wandered by: the television, the errands, the slow drift of days that all look alike. Poker teaches the same lesson from the other side. A player who is dealt a deep stack and extra time at the table, with no idea what he is trying to accomplish, will not keep either for long. Chips without a plan leak away in small, unconsidered bets. Years do exactly the same.

What makes the third age a crown is not simply that it is free. It is that it is the first season of life that can be designed rather than inherited. The first age was arranged by your parents. The second was arranged, mostly, by necessity — the bills, the children, the mortgage had votes you could not override. The third age is the first one in which the honest question is not “What must I do?” but “What is this for?” Learning, travel, service, craft, family, faith — the menu is finally yours to choose from. That freedom is a genuine gift, and like most real gifts it asks something of the person who receives it: that he treat it as the main event it is, and not as a waiting room for the fourth age.

Here is the takeaway. This week, do two pieces of arithmetic and one piece of writing. First, subtract your age from eighty-five — or ninety, if your family runs long — and look honestly at how many third-age years you likely hold. Second, notice that you would never let a sum of money that size sit unplanned, yet most of us let exactly that many years sit. Then take one page and write the plan this season deserves: what it is for, what a good week inside it contains, and one thing from that page you will begin this month. Earlier generations were never dealt this hand. You have been. Play it like the crown it is.

The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker

Sit with an old poker player sometime and ask him about the players of his grandfather’s generation, and he will tell you something interesting: most of them never got to play a late game at all. They sat down at life’s table, worked their stack through the earning years, and were still working it — still owing the table their days — when their health gave out and the chair was pulled away. There was no stretch of hands played for pleasure after the must-win years. There was the game you had to play, and then, fairly soon after it ended, the end. What our generation has been handed, without much noticing it, is something those players never saw: a long run of extra hands, dealt after the obligations are finished, to people still strong enough to play them well.

The British historian Peter Laslett gave those extra hands a name. Writing in the late 1980s, he divided a human life into four ages. The first age is childhood and schooling. The second is the long age of work and raising a family — the age most of us have just completed. The fourth, at the very end, is the age of dependency and decline, when the body narrows our choices whether we like it or not. And between the second age and the fourth, Laslett placed a third: a season of life made possible only recently by longer and healthier lives, in which a person is free of the old obligations — no employer, no children at home — yet still healthy, capable, and in full possession of his powers. Laslett did not describe the third age as a wind-down. He called it, potentially, the crown of life.

Sit with the arithmetic for a moment, because it deserves a moment. For most of human history, the third age barely existed; the second age ran straight into the fourth, work into decline, with perhaps a brief and tired pause in between. Today a healthy sixty-five-year-old can reasonably expect the third age to last fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five years. That is not an epilogue. That is a span as long as the entire career many people spent in a single job — a second full act of adult life, except that this time nobody hands you the script. Your parents did not model it for you, because most of them never had it. You are among the first generations in history asked to decide what this season is for.

And a season that long deserves better than leftovers. I watched clients come into my office with meticulous plans for the second age — the savings, the insurance, the wills, all in order — and no plan at all for the third, beyond a vague hope that it would fill itself in. Mostly it did not, or it filled with whatever wandered by: the television, the errands, the slow drift of days that all look alike. Poker teaches the same lesson from the other side. A player who is dealt a deep stack and extra time at the table, with no idea what he is trying to accomplish, will not keep either for long. Chips without a plan leak away in small, unconsidered bets. Years do exactly the same.

What makes the third age a crown is not simply that it is free. It is that it is the first season of life that can be designed rather than inherited. The first age was arranged by your parents. The second was arranged, mostly, by necessity — the bills, the children, the mortgage had votes you could not override. The third age is the first one in which the honest question is not “What must I do?” but “What is this for?” Learning, travel, service, craft, family, faith — the menu is finally yours to choose from. That freedom is a genuine gift, and like most real gifts it asks something of the person who receives it: that he treat it as the main event it is, and not as a waiting room for the fourth age.

Here is the takeaway. This week, do two pieces of arithmetic and one piece of writing. First, subtract your age from eighty-five — or ninety, if your family runs long — and look honestly at how many third-age years you likely hold. Second, notice that you would never let a sum of money that size sit unplanned, yet most of us let exactly that many years sit. Then take one page and write the plan this season deserves: what it is for, what a good week inside it contains, and one thing from that page you will begin this month. Earlier generations were never dealt this hand. You have been. Play it like the crown it is.

The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker

Sit with an old poker player sometime and ask him about the players of his grandfather’s generation, and he will tell you something interesting: most of them never got to play a late game at all. They sat down at life’s table, worked their stack through the earning years, and were still working it — still owing the table their days — when their health gave out and the chair was pulled away. There was no stretch of hands played for pleasure after the must-win years. There was the game you had to play, and then, fairly soon after it ended, the end. What our generation has been handed, without much noticing it, is something those players never saw: a long run of extra hands, dealt after the obligations are finished, to people still strong enough to play them well.

The British historian Peter Laslett gave those extra hands a name. Writing in the late 1980s, he divided a human life into four ages. The first age is childhood and schooling. The second is the long age of work and raising a family — the age most of us have just completed. The fourth, at the very end, is the age of dependency and decline, when the body narrows our choices whether we like it or not. And between the second age and the fourth, Laslett placed a third: a season of life made possible only recently by longer and healthier lives, in which a person is free of the old obligations — no employer, no children at home — yet still healthy, capable, and in full possession of his powers. Laslett did not describe the third age as a wind-down. He called it, potentially, the crown of life.

Sit with the arithmetic for a moment, because it deserves a moment. For most of human history, the third age barely existed; the second age ran straight into the fourth, work into decline, with perhaps a brief and tired pause in between. Today a healthy sixty-five-year-old can reasonably expect the third age to last fifteen, twenty, even twenty-five years. That is not an epilogue. That is a span as long as the entire career many people spent in a single job — a second full act of adult life, except that this time nobody hands you the script. Your parents did not model it for you, because most of them never had it. You are among the first generations in history asked to decide what this season is for.

And a season that long deserves better than leftovers. I watched clients come into my office with meticulous plans for the second age — the savings, the insurance, the wills, all in order — and no plan at all for the third, beyond a vague hope that it would fill itself in. Mostly it did not, or it filled with whatever wandered by: the television, the errands, the slow drift of days that all look alike. Poker teaches the same lesson from the other side. A player who is dealt a deep stack and extra time at the table, with no idea what he is trying to accomplish, will not keep either for long. Chips without a plan leak away in small, unconsidered bets. Years do exactly the same.

What makes the third age a crown is not simply that it is free. It is that it is the first season of life that can be designed rather than inherited. The first age was arranged by your parents. The second was arranged, mostly, by necessity — the bills, the children, the mortgage had votes you could not override. The third age is the first one in which the honest question is not “What must I do?” but “What is this for?” Learning, travel, service, craft, family, faith — the menu is finally yours to choose from. That freedom is a genuine gift, and like most real gifts it asks something of the person who receives it: that he treat it as the main event it is, and not as a waiting room for the fourth age.

Here is the takeaway. This week, do two pieces of arithmetic and one piece of writing. First, subtract your age from eighty-five — or ninety, if your family runs long — and look honestly at how many third-age years you likely hold. Second, notice that you would never let a sum of money that size sit unplanned, yet most of us let exactly that many years sit. Then take one page and write the plan this season deserves: what it is for, what a good week inside it contains, and one thing from that page you will begin this month. Earlier generations were never dealt this hand. You have been. Play it like the crown it is.

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