Most of the people who have reached the age of 65 are alive now. That was the text of the bank ad on the mall wall that accosted me when I came out of the subway. A startling statistic, but apparently true.

in 1881, when  Otto von Bismarck set the retirement age at 70, life expectancy in Europe and North America was in the low 60s – statistically few people were expected to survive to retire, even when retirement age was eventually lowered to 65.

Now it’s very different – in the western world life expectancy hovers around 80.

What to do with all those years?

(The title of this post is Alice’s question to the Cheshire cat in “Through the Looking Glass”)