Am I too young to be working on ageing?

The other day, I had the rare good fortune of having a conversation with a fellow passenger on my train back from Leeds.

I'd been at the 'Making Leeds the Best City to Grow Old In' project board presenting on our thinking on being in fulfilling work in later life.

With all my later-life-related documents spread out on the table, the person opposite me struck up conversation to find out more about what I do. After a whistle-stop tour of issues around retirement, transport and keeping fit, we swiftly got onto the topic of age.

My age, to be precise.

As a millennial I've been asked, or received loaded comments, more times than I’d like to count about why someone 'my age' is working on the issue of ageing.

I find this a strange question to be asked, and one that betrays the fact that many of us don’t think very much about what will happen in our later years.

After all, we're all ageing – and what we should be talking about, and celebrating, is our longer lives, rather than ageing per se. My mum, my dad, my grandma, all of us are facing the issues and opportunities that I spend my days thinking about and working on at the Centre for Ageing Better.

I can't quite understand why someone 'my age' wouldn't be interested in working to make sure that we all have the chance of living a good later life.

In retrospect, I should have used the opportunity presented by this conversation to probe more into what was behind that question. Is it because we think later life isn't a 'sexy' topic to be starting off your career in? Is it because our later lives are something that we shouldn't think about until we're 'old', let alone when we're in our 20s? Is it a product of our 'othering' of our older, future selves? Perhaps some, none or all of the above.

When I'm going around the country talking to people about our later lives, I often find myself reminding others that we're not talking about a population of elderly aliens, we're simply talking about ourselves in 40, 30, 20 or even 10 years' time. Recognising this is one of the most powerful tools we have in helping to shift how we think about, and respond to, the opportunities presented by our longer lives.

At Ageing Better, we've launched our new strategy where – alongside a sharper focus on four key priority areas – we're focusing on people in mid-life (roughly 50-70 years of age).

Doing this is all about how we can support people entering later life to do so in good health, in the right home and in a strong community, with the financial security which will enable them to make the most of their later lives. It reflects the importance of thinking ahead and taking action as we approach, not simply once we’ve entered, our later lives.

It's never too early to think about our longer lives – if anything the earlier, the better. And it is something that really does matter to each and every one of us, now and in the future.