Life once followed a familiar pattern. You’d go to school, get a job, build a family, and then, sometime in your 60s, retire , enjoying life for a few years until you grew too frail to live on your own. Then you might move in with family or check into a facility where you’d spend your “golden years.” A crucial part of that blueprint was an unsaid but universal assumption: that for the vast majority of people, life would not extend far beyond their 70s. That was based on the average lifespan