In his essay on old age, Cicero described an image of an elderly farmer planting trees for another era he would not live to see. When asked why he labored for a harvest he would never see, the farmer answered without hesitation: for the generations to come. The image has endured because it expresses something fundamental. A good society is not only one that cares for its living citizens, but one that keeps making promises to a future that is not even here yet.

For much of modern history, many societies could assume the next generation would be larger. That is no longer true. By 2024, more than half of all countries had fertility rates below replacement level, and by the late 2070s the global population aged 65 and older is projected to surpass the number of children under 18. Most of the discussion of ageing societies treats the challenge as one of primarily money: How to fund pensions when fewer workers support each retiree; who will pay for the care older populations need; how far can the retirement age rise before the welfare state stops making sense. These pressures are real and immediate. But to frame demographic resilience only as a question of funding is to treat ageing as a budget problem, rather than a deeper test of what society stands for.

The Pull of the Present

As societies age, more public resources and political commitments become tied to needs that already exist. Pensions need to be paid. Health systems need to absorb the realities of longer lives. And social care must be organised. These commitments recognise a lifetime of contribution that older generations have given to society. In that sense, they form part of an unspoken promise between generations: that each generation supports the one before it, trusting that those who follow will one day do the same. This creates a form of social safety that can enable societies to think and plan beyond the short-term, for timescales that go beyond one lifetime.

That long-term promise becomes harder to maintain as societies age. As the share of older people rises relative to the working-age population, pensions, healthcare and long-term care place greater demands on public budgets. These needs are immediate and difficult to defer in a way that many long-term investments are not. For example, if a pension payment is late, it can affect whether an individual can pay rent, buy groceries or arrange the care they depend on.

Long-term investments create a different kind of pressure. If a school building is not maintained or climate adaptation infrastructure investment is postponed, the effects may not be felt immediately. The decision can look manageable in the moment. But over time, and repeated decisions, these delays shape the conditions future generations inherit. The costs land on people who were not at the table when the decisions were made.

In OECD economies, public spending on old-age benefits and healthcare alone amounts to roughly 15 percent of GDP on average, while pensions, healthcare and especially long-term care are projected to place increasing pressure on public budgets as populations age. At the same time, the IMF’s 2025 Fiscal Monitor finds that public investment has declined as a share of total spending over recent decades, and public education spending has either fallen or stagnated in most countries. Estimates suggest that shifting one percentage point of GDP from current spending to human-capital investment or research and development could raise GDP by more than three percent by 2050 in advanced economies.

This is the pull of the present. Existing commitments are easier to defend because their consequences are visible now. Future oriented investments are easier to delay because the costs of delay appear later. The potential risk is not that societies stop caring about the future, but that under pressure they leave too little room for the renewal that future resilience depends on.

Forecasts Are Not Fate

The pull of the present can make demographic change feel like a fixed future. If populations are ageing, fertility is falling and working-age populations are shrinking, it can seem as if the only task left is to manage decline. But every projection rests on assumptions about how people will live, move, work, age, have children and die. When those assumptions shift, the future shifts with them.

Population change is more predictable in the short and medium term than economic growth or technological change, which makes it important for policies that require a longer time horizon. At the same time, long-range projections remain uncertain, especially because future birth rates are difficult to anticipate. In its 2024 revision, the United Nations projected a global population peak of around 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, an earlier and lower peak than previous revisions had anticipated, driven in part by lower-than-expected fertility in some of the world’s largest countries.

The uncertainty does not weaken the value of projections; it changes how they should be interpreted. Fertility rates are shaped by conditions such as housing costs, childcare, gender equality, and economic security. Mortality assumptions depend on changes in medicine, inequality, public health and behaviour. Migration assumptions can shift with conflict, labour demand, policy and crisis. A population forecast is not a certainty, but it can be used as a starting point to identify where systems need to adapt.

The Politics of the Future

A forecast may show where systems need to adapt, but politics determines whether and how that adaptation happens. Governments decide how limited resources are spent, which commitments are protected, and what gets postponed. In ageing societies, those choices are shaped by a basic imbalance: the people most affected by long-term consequences are not always the people with the strongest voice today.

The political theorist Dennis Thompson calls this democracy’s “presentism”: a bias toward present citizens and present concerns. Democracies are designed around people who can vote, organise and hold leaders accountable. Future citizens cannot do any of those things, even when today’s decisions shape the conditions they will inherit.

The OECD states that population ageing is decreasing the share of young voters, increasing pension obligations, and raising demand for healthcare and social care across OECD countries. At the same time, it finds that young people’s trust in public institutions and their sense of political influence and representation have stalled since the global financial crisis, even while young people remain motivated by challenges such as climate change, rising inequality, shrinking civic space and threats to democratic institutions.

A 2025 study using the European Social Survey found that, over the past two decades, people under fifty have become a minority within the voter population, a threshold first crossed in 2007. It also found that turnout among under-fifties has declined relative to older voters, and that political manifestos in faster-ageing countries have shifted toward topics more associated with older voters, especially retirement policy.

This is where the intergenerational promise becomes political. A society may value future generations in principle, while still making decisions through systems that give greater weight to citizens and claims already present. The OECD frames this as an intergenerational justice issue: population ageing decreases the share of young voters while increasing pension obligations and demand for health and social care.

Designing Against the Pull of the Present

If the future is weakly represented, resilience cannot depend on goodwill alone. It has to be built into how decisions are made. It requires institutions and processes to consider long-term consequences of a decision before they become difficult to reverse.

Some governments have started experimenting with ideas and policies to address intergenerational justice and obligations. The Netherlands has introduced a Generation Test that is designed to assess how the benefits and burdens of a policy are distributed across age groups, including those not yet born. New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework applies a similar logic to the budget process. It brings current well-being, future capital and distributional impacts into the assessment of public spending. In 2019, the framework was used to assess budget bids from government agencies, contributing to a budget that prioritised child poverty, mental health among young people and the transition to a low-emissions economy alongside conventional fiscal measures. These are still early experiments. Neither has a long track record to assess its impact, but they indicate that institutions are starting to adapt and design for a changing world.

Wales has gone further by putting long-term responsibility into law. The Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015 requires public bodies to demonstrate how their decisions will affect long-term well-being. It also created a Future Generations Commissioner with a mandate to advise public bodies, review how they take into account long-term impacts, and make recommendations. In OECD economies, public spending on old-age benefits and healthcare alone amounts to roughly 15 percent of GDP on average, while pensions, healthcare and especially long-term care are projected to place increasing pressure on public budgets as populations age. That single example does not prove that one law can make every decision future-proof. It shows that when long-term consequences are written into the rules of accountability, they become harder to ignore.

Finland chose a different approach: not an external commissioner, but a foresight built into the parliament itself. Since 1993, Finland's Committee for the Future has brought together members from across parties to examine long-term risks and opportunities that exceed any single electoral cycle, and the government is required to engage with its findings. The logic is simple: the pull of the present operates not just in budgets but in the attention of politicians. A committee whose explicit purpose is the long term creates a standing obligation to look further ahead than the next election.

These experiments differ in strength and design. What they share is more modest: each creates a moment in the policy process where the future has to be named, where deferring it becomes a choice that must be justified, rather than a habit that goes unnoticed.

Who Holds the Future?

The same question appears beyond government. Stewardship means managing something today on behalf of those who come after, and it appears at every scale. Families make choices between immediate needs and the education, care and security that will shape the next generation. Organisations decide whether to protect today’s profits or keep investing in skills, maintenance, research and succession. Pension funds, foundations, endowments and sovereign wealth funds exist because some responsibilities stretch beyond a single budget cycle, leadership term or lifetime. At every scale, the future depends on someone having reason to hold it in view.

Planting Trees Anyway

“A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.”

— D. Elton Trueblood, The Life We Prize

Cicero’s farmer understood something institutions often forget: the future is not in the room, but it is still owed something.

That is the test ageing societies now face. Not whether they will grow old, but whether they will keep choosing to act on behalf of lives that lie beyond their own horizon. The present is always easier to defend. Design is what tilts the balance back: systems that force long-horizon choices into view before their consequences become irreversible. Without that effort, the future does not lose in any single dramatic decision. It simply runs out of advocates.

Demographic resilience is not only about funding longer lives. It is about building the structures that keep the future visible, in budgets, in parliaments, in boardrooms, and families, before the costs of ignoring it become too large to reverse.

So let’s be the people who keep planting trees whose shade we may never sit beneath. Shall we?

This article is part of The Outside World, ftrprf’s very own research center.

As changemakers, we believe that what happens in the outside world is the most powerful force shaping organizational strategy – and also the most underestimated. To do well, organizations need to understand what’s happening in the outside world. To do significantly better, they need to be aware of what it means for their future, their relations, their strategy, and their impact. We serve as a bridge between society and tailored strategy by analysing societal dynamics, global trends, and shifting public expectations with a multidisciplinary team of international analysts, excellent tooling, sophisticated AI, and a systems approach. This article is part of our second trimester research focus, which centers on resilience.