By Pieter Taute

We are drawn to the possibility of a longer, healthier life. Books such as Ikigai invite us to imagine growing older with purpose, connection and a reason to get up in the morning. Research into brain health adds another hopeful possibility: that we may retain more of the mental capability needed to enjoy those years.

Yet a question keeps troubling me. Are we giving the financial conditions of that longer life the same attention we give its possibilities?

We can picture ourselves remaining curious, learning new things and contributing to the lives of others. It is less comfortable to imagine being mentally capable of doing all of this while having too little income to sustain an independent life. A longer future becomes a different proposition when we consider what it will require from us today.

The science deserves both interest and perspective. In the 2025 US POINTER trial, involving 2,111 older adults at risk of cognitive decline, a structured programme combining exercise, diet, cognitive and social activity, and cardiovascular monitoring produced a modest but statistically significant additional improvement in overall cognitive performance compared with a less intensive, self-guided programme over two years (Baker et al., 2025). These findings are encouraging, but they do not establish that the programme prevents dementia or that its cognitive benefits persist beyond the study period.

Nevertheless, the possibility raises a question we cannot leave to medical science to answer: if we gain more years of capability, what will support our choices during those years?

Michael Hodin’s work on ageing science and wealth management describes how longevity challenges established assumptions about working, saving and spending. Andrew Scott similarly argues that turning longer lives into better ones requires changes in education, employment and financial products. The Milken Institute’s The Longevity Equation brings healthspan and wealthspan into the same discussion. These are frameworks for thinking about the relationship, rather than guarantees about anyone’s future, but they remind us that the conditions supporting a longer life extend well beyond health.

What interests me is how that relationship translates into everyday decisions. Research on longevity literacy suggests that many people do not adequately understand how long retirement could last, so better information matters. But recognising a future need still leaves us with the task of doing something about it.

My interpretation is that healthy ageing offers an attractive picture of who we could become. Financial preparation asks us to engage with uncertainty, competing demands and sometimes uncomfortable evidence about where we stand. Imagining a purposeful future can feel considerably better than opening the statement intended to help fund it.

It is also worth noticing how the conversation about the brain reaches us. Brain health has become a staple of popular media, and the vocabulary of neuroscience, dopamine above all, is now applied to almost every habit, often as a casual “dopamine addiction”. The research is more nuanced. Dopamine contributes to learning, motivation and the pursuit of rewards, and it is not simply a pleasure chemical (Bromberg-Martin et al., 2010). Repeatedly choosing something immediately appealing is also insufficient grounds for calling it an addiction. The popular version compresses a complicated picture into a single explanation.

The risk is that a neat explanation makes it too easy to treat financial postponement as a problem of the brain, when it is often a problem of circumstances, priorities and difficult choices.

Consider the person who intends to review their retirement arrangements over the weekend. The review involves finding documents, confronting uncertainty and perhaps discovering that something needs to change. Buying something online offers a more immediate experience. So does watching another video about living well into old age.

The weekend ends with the intention intact and the review untouched.

This example does not establish a particular neurological mechanism. It illustrates a familiar difficulty: activities that feel rewarding now can repeatedly displace decisions intended to support us later.

Of course, postponement has different explanations. For someone with little money left after essentials, another savings message may offer no usable answer. For someone with room to act, the obstacle may be uncertainty about where to begin, fear of making the wrong choice or embarrassment about having left it so long.

Those situations require different responses. Treating them all as failures of discipline helps us understand very little.

There are also two gaps to consider. Understanding a financial issue does not necessarily mean we have decided to address it. Even after forming a sincere intention, we may struggle to follow through, a pattern psychologists call the intention–behaviour gap (Sheeran & Webb, 2016). We can recognise the possibility of a long retirement and want financial independence, but those intentions still have to survive the conditions of an ordinary Tuesday.

My forthcoming book, Your money has other plans,explores these difficulties through neuroscience, behavioural economics and money. Its practical purpose is to help readers recognise the pressures shaping their financial choices and identify changes that make useful action easier to sustain.

A good place to begin is with one decision you already know you have postponed.

Write down the decision and name what makes it difficult to face. Is it missing information, insufficient money, uncertainty, embarrassment or a conversation you would rather avoid? Then choose one feasible next step and decide when and where you will take it, because planning the time and place in advance is one of the better-studied ways of narrowing the gap (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). That might mean locating a statement, requesting information or arranging a conversation.

Choose a step that fits your circumstances. Even an action that costs nothing can require time, confidence and emotional effort.

You do not have to resolve your financial future in one sitting. You can begin by making one unresolved part of it clearer.

This is a behavioural reflection, rather than personalised financial advice. A fuller version of the exercise, and a note when the book is available, will go to those who join the list: [sign-up link].

The prospect of a longer, purposeful life deserves our enthusiasm. It also deserves preparation that gives our future selves a reasonable chance to participate in it.

Sources

Baker, L. D., et al. (2025). Structured vs self-guided multidomain lifestyle interventions for global cognitive function: The US POINTER randomized clinical trial. JAMA. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12305445/

Bromberg-Martin, E. S., Matsumoto, M., & Hikosaka, O. (2010). Dopamine in motivational control: Rewarding, aversive, and alerting. Neuron, 68(5), 815–834. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3032992/

Carpenter, D. M. (2025). The longevity equation: How healthspan and wealthspan intersect. Milken Institute.

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.

Hodin, M. (2023). Influence of aging science on global wealth management. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine, 13(6), a041207. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36987585/

Scott, A. J. (2021). The longevity economy. The Lancet Healthy Longevity, 2(12), e828–e835.

Sheeran, P., & Webb, T. L. (2016). The intention–behavior gap. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(9), 503–518.

Yakoboski, P. J., Lusardi, A., & Sticha, A. (2023). An unrecognized barrier to retirement income security: Poor longevity literacy. TIAA Institute–GFLEC. https://www.tiaa.org/public/institute/publication/2023/an-unrecognized-barrier-to-retirement-income-security-poor-longevity-literacy