Foresight at 75

Many people are now formulating their New Year’s resolutions. But one year is not enough of a runway to make significant redirections in our lives.

Most people my age are told to plan for retirement. Save more. Spend carefully. Leave something behind. The advice is not wrong—but it is incomplete.

What it does not ask is the more unsettling question: What, exactly, are we preparing for?

I am 75 years old. I am healthy enough, busy enough, and still curious enough to realize that the remaining years of life are not a blank extension of the past. They are a different phase altogether. And yet many seniors continue doing what they have always done—working, saving, accumulating, postponing—without ever stepping back to ask whether the logic that governed their 40s or 50s still applies.

Recently, I tried something different. Instead of thinking in terms of retirement or bucket lists, I applied foresight—the same futures thinking used in long-term planning to my own life.

In futures thinking, a simple rule applies: if the horizon is less than 10 years, it is not really futures thinking. Ten years is the minimum span in which uncertainty, thresholds, and choices matter. So I asked myself: What does my next decade look like if I treat it as a future to be shaped, rather than as time to be filled?

The first step in foresight is to identify the core goal. Not activities, not targets—but the essence. For me, the goal was not longevity or productivity. It was this: to remain a thinking, choosing, meaning-making person for as long as possible, and to leave behind clarity rather than confusion.

Once that was clear, two uncertainties stood out as decisive.

The first was cognitive and narrative agency—whether I would retain the ability to think clearly, write meaningfully, and make my own decisions. Many of us fear physical decline, but for those whose identity is tied to judgment, memory, and voice, cognitive erosion is the deeper concern.

The second uncertainty was relational and governance clarity—whether my relationships, affairs, and end-of-life decisions would be clear or contested. Families today are complex. Many seniors, myself included, live with arrangements that do not fit neat categories. Ambiguity may feel tolerable while we are alive, but it multiplies suffering after we are gone.

Placing these two uncertainties on a simple matrix produced four possible futures.

In the best scenario, cognitive agency remains strong, and relationships are governed by clarity. One continues to write, decide, and explain—while having settled legal and emotional matters early. This is a life that remains authored until the end.

A second scenario is more common than we admit: mental clarity remains, but relational issues are postponed. The person stays brilliant and active but avoids difficult conversations. When death comes, what was left unresolved becomes contested—turning memory into argument.

A third scenario involves declining cognitive capacity but strong prior preparation. Here, others step in as stewards rather than rivals. The person is cared for, interpreted fairly, and protected by earlier clarity.

The final scenario—the one to avoid—is when cognitive decline meets unresolved ambiguity. In that case, others decide loudly and imperfectly. The person’s silence is filled by competing narratives.

What struck me was this: we cannot fully control whether our minds will remain sharp, but we can control whether our affairs and intentions are clear. That is where foresight becomes practical.

Many seniors continue accumulating wealth long after comfort is assured, convinced that leaving more behind is the ultimate act of responsibility. But money without clarity does not prevent conflict. Comfort without intention does not guarantee meaning. Saving without asking what the years are for is not prudence—it is inertia.

Foresight invites a different posture. It asks us to act early on what we can influence, before thresholds are crossed. To shift from accumulation to alignment. From postponement to authorship.

The last decade of life—however long or short it turns out to be—is not an afterthought. It is a future with its own structure, risks, and possibilities. We owe it more than habit.

Perhaps the real inheritance we leave is not wealth alone, but the absence of confusion. Not just comfort, but coherence. Not just longevity, but a life that remained deliberate to the end.

That, at least, is the future I am now planning for.

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doyromero@gmail.com