What have I learned from a summer of conversations about longer lives?

Looking back over this season of the 4-Quarter Lives podcast, I realised that my guests – despite coming from very different worlds – kept circling around three big themes: identity, agency and experience.

Together, they offer a surprisingly coherent map of the New Q3: the 25 or so years between roughly 50 and 75 that are emerging as a distinct new quarter of life.

In this solo episode, I draw together some of the ideas that stayed with me from the season.

Charlie Rogers introduced me to the idea of becoming “undefinable” and finding the golden thread connecting the different parts of a life. Jane Moffatt and Denise Taylor explored what happens when professional identities begin to loosen and achievement gives way to questions of meaning. Jane Duncan Rogers offered another beautiful description of this process: unmasking.

But freedom alone isn’t enough. Anne Button and Rachel Cohen’s Change Makers programme points towards the kind of midlife learning infrastructure longer lives will require. Richard Smith explains why financial clarity is really about agency – and why what many of us need is a “pensions hug”. Briana Gilmore reframes accessibility as something much bigger: longevity design.

Finally, there is experience. Alastair Greener argues that rather than separating generations at work, we should “tangle” them. And Victoria Tomlinson, author of Expiry Date Never, asks why organisations continue to filter out experienced people just as demographic change and AI may be making human judgement, context and pattern recognition more valuable.

Different conversations. One emerging map.Longer lives don’t simply add years. They change who we can become, the choices available to us, and the value of everything we accumulate along the way. Perhaps the New Q3 is where we finally start figuring out what all those extra years are for.

IN THIS EPISODE

I explore:

* Why becoming less definable may be one of the freedoms of Q3

* The difference between purpose and meaning

* Why longer lives require us to become better at transitions

* Why education shouldn’t stop after Q1

* How money becomes a source of agency in Q3

* Why accessibility is really longevity design

* The difference between generational differences and life-stage differences

* Why organisations should tangle the generations

* How AI may increase rather than diminish the value of human experience

* Why the “50-plus” category has outlived its usefulness

* What identity, agency and experience tell us about the emerging New Q3

GUESTS REFERENCED

Charlie Rogers – Undefinable Community and the idea of the “golden thread”

Jane Moffatt – identity, transition, meaning and life after full-time work

Dr Denise Taylor – ThriveSpan, Jung and the inward turn in the second half of life

Anne Button & Rachel Cohen – Change Makers at the University of Colorado Denver and new models of midlife learning

Richard Smith – pensions, financial clarity and the “pensions hug”

Briana Gilmore – accessibility as innovation and longevity design

Alastair Greener – Generationally Speaking and “tangling the generations”

Jane Duncan Rogers – Gifted by Grief, mortality and ageing as “unmasking”

Victoria Tomlinson – Expiry Date Never, ageism, experience and the future of work

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Victoria Tomlinson, founder and CEO of Next-Up, to talk about her new book, Expiry Date Never, and the systems quietly pushing experienced people out of work. Tomlinson argues the problem is not age but obsolete workplace design, and that the first thing to fix is recruitment, where candidates are screened out at 50 and increasingly at 40. She makes the case for scrapping the 50-plus label, which collapses 66 years of life into one category.

The conversation turns to AI, where hallucinated reports and expensive mistakes are, she argues, raising rather than lowering the value of experienced judgment. They close on money, purpose, and what a good transition looks like when it starts a decade early rather than a year out.

Victoria Tomlinson is the founder and CEO of Next-Up, helping professional services firms and boards turn partner/leadership retirement and succession into an advantage rather than a risk. She was previously a director at EY and ran her own communications agency for thirty years. She is an international keynote speaker, TEDx speaker (‘A Generation of Wasted Talent’), Amazon bestselling author, a Teaching Fellow at Lancaster University and a Fellow of the RSA. Her new book, Expiry Date Never, written with co-author Louise Ballard, is published by Pearson in September 2026.

Useful Links:

* Expiry Date Never – Age is the New Superpower

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Jane Duncan Rogers, author and end-of-life planning pioneer, for a wide-ranging conversation about facing mortality with honesty and even joy. Jane makes the case that end-of-life planning is a form of emotional liberation, freeing the energy we tie up in avoidance. They explore grief and widowhood, the ‘after-self’ that emerges from loss, and Jane’s image of the heart as a flowing stream with gates that open and close. The conversation ranges across assisted dying, ageing without children, the power of micro-communities, and the confidence and voice that can emerge in Q3. Above all, Jane reframes ageing as an unmasking — an invitation to meet the person you never expected to become, and to greet later life with what she calls quiet joy.

Jane Duncan Rogers is a writer, speaker, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life planning. She is the author of Gifted by Grief, written in the years following the death of her first husband, and the creator of the Substack Embracing Age, recently recognised at the Advantage of Age Awards. In 2016 she founded an end-of-life planning organisation, which she led for eight years before passing it on. Now in her late sixties, she writes and speaks candidly about grief, widowhood, ageing without children, and the emotional liberation that comes from planning honestly for the end of life.