SUNDAY, JUNE 21, 2000 - TODAY 3
By ERICA LEVY
Until recently, we all walked a similar line in life: school, maybe marriage and a career, a few kids, and then, if we were lucky, a retirement cruise. Not any more, says Maddy Kent Dychtwald, an American futurist making a visit to Melbourne.
Fifty-year-olds go to fertility clinics, and high-school kids own start-ups. The modern average Joe may begin and end life at any spot on the imaginary line, jumping from point to point in between. Dychtwald has no reservations about predicting the lifestyle of tomorrow: all of her ideas come from the trends of today.
ìThe opportunity is out there for people to put together strange and interesting lives that work for them,î Dychtwald says.
The key to the new cyclical lifestyle is simple: choice. Which group is among the first to do away with linear life? Who better than career mums to teach the world how to balance and rearrange?
Life-long careers
It is old news that women have entered the job market. But as gender numbers even out in many companies, Dychtwald says, women are entering professions they had not before, and it is all because of a change in lifestyle.
The medical profession is including more women every year, and not just as nurses. Likewise, fields that were traditionally female - advertising and public relations - are welcoming more men.
The old vertical model - entering a company and slowly getting promoted within - is disappearing. Instead, professionals are comfortable switching companies and even careers several times in their lives. According to Dychtwald, the frequency of technological advancements often requires this jumping around.
She says finding jobs is becoming easier, too. The Internet provides professionals with a forum to post and search for jobs.
Life-long learning
Real estate agents, travel agents and stock brokers will not be needed soon, she warns. Who will take their place? The average Joe, of course. Independence is the trend. This is, after all, the information age, and information is at ìJoeísî fingertips.
The concept centres around education. If Joe needs to organise his own finances, he will have to learn about the stock market. That means an evolving education system - one that includes lifestyle courses.
ìPractical financial planning is more appropriate to learn in school than trigonometry and calculus,î Dychtwald says. However, she doubts traditional education will ever change completely - conventional courses will simply be taught alongside self-help seminars.
But school may not always look the way it does now. Dychtwald says she has heard debate over the necessity of a minimum four-year high school period. Perhaps it could be taught in smaller increments, with alternating years of travel or work.
Likewise, university training need not be set in its normal chronology, she says. As people begin to deviate from the linear lifestyle, education can occur at different intervals in life, according to more personalised career choices. There is also the prospect of distance learning - online courses and course-refreshers - making it even easier to pick up new knowledge at any point in life, from anywhere in the world. Dychtwald calls this and other forms of extended education life-long learning and says it will soon be essential.
Healing v healthcare
Life-long learning and independence includes healthcare, Dychtwald says. We have a responsibility to take our bodies into our own hands. Since there are so many medicines available, illness does not mean what it used to.
ìWeíre moving away from the age of acute infectious disease and toward more chronic, degenerative disorders,î she says. We can help prevent, diagnose, and treat these ailments ourselves. It means maintaining a healthier lifestyle and reading more about medicine.
And alternative forms of medicine are not anathema any more. She says there is a growing interest in non-traditional remedies such as chiropractic medicine, acupuncture, and aromatherapy. These treatments have long been at odds with Western medicine, and while most doctors would still not advise them, Dychtwald thinks that will change.
She says lifestyle drugs will become more popular, too. Prozac, Viagra - you name it, she says itís about ìbetter living through chemistry.î
And what about nips, tuck and plastic surgeons? Dychtwald recalls the punchline of an old TV commercial for hair dye: Does she, or doesnít she (dye her hair)?
ìNobody even asks that any more. They just assume she does.î
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