This morning the conference officially kicked off with an opening keynote by Mary Catherine Bateson. Fitting for me, since Bateson (daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson) is a noted cultural anthropologist and I am here participating on an ethnography team.

Bateson, of Composing A Life fame, talked of how owe create our own lives, and how we should rethink our assumptions about a whole range of things, including work and the age at which we should stop working. Bateson noted that the age for Civil Service retirement was set at 65 at a time that, in terms of demographics and life expectation, people wouldn't have expected to live very much longer. She said that if you factored in advances in living conditions and life expectancy, the corresponding age now would be 92.

Said she: "We're trapped in the assumption that work is unpleasant and should be stopped at 65." She suggests that we all spend time thinking about how we can create our lives for the time when we are past "retirement" and before time when we might become incapacitated -- which, of course, won't happen to everyone.