Since the invention of the Methuselah Treatment, we at 80,000 Hours have updated our career planning framework to address extended lifespans. This guide presents our evidence-based recommendations for maximizing your impact over a 1000-year career.
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Consider Getting a Postpostpostgraduate Degree
Our previous advice considered a 40-year career payoff period, making advanced degrees a marginal investment. Now a PhD that takes 7 years to complete offers 993 years of application—suddenly even the most obscure specializations become financially viable.
The real challenge emerges around your 47th advanced degree, when you’ll need to start inventing new academic disciplines just to have something to study. Many successful methuselans report that their most valuable degree was the “Doctorate in Doctorate Studies” which taught them how to efficiently acquire doctorates.
Warning: Avoid the common trap of “perpetual student syndrome.” While it’s tempting to spend your entire first 200 years in academia, remember that by century 3, you’ll be older than most of the institutions you’re studying at. There’s also the practical consideration that student loan payments compound over centuries at alarming rates.
Plan your Mid-Life Crises
Longitudinal studies show that methuselans experience their first existential crisis around year 73, with subsequent crises occurring at accelerating intervals. By century 5, you’ll be having quarterly life crises.
Pre-schedule your breakdowns for maximum career benefit. Century 2 crisis: become a traveling bard. Century 4 crisis: invent a new religion. Century 7 crisis: attempt to become a professional butterfly whisperer. The key is ensuring each crisis builds transferable skills for your next inevitable career pivot.
Tip: Prime numbered intervals ensure your crises do not sync up with those of your colleagues.
Implement a “Grudge Portfolio”
With centuries to accumulate workplace grievances, the average methuselan maintains active feuds with approximately 2,847 former colleagues by year 500. This creates significant networking bottlenecks.
Maintain no more than 200 active professional enemies at any given time. Consider establishing a formal “Century of Forgiveness” every 100 years where you systematically reconcile with former adversaries. Assassination is only recommended after a thorough cost-benefit analysis of QUALYs saved.
The Mentorship Mountain
Your professional network will eventually include 400,000+ people across 40 generations. You’ll be simultaneously mentoring the great-great-grandchildren of people you once mentored, creating a recursive mentorship loop that may violate several laws of physics.
Implement a color-coded system to track which generation each contact belongs to. Invest in industrial-strength business card storage. For readers interested in the largest possible impact, consider founding a careers advice charity, an incubator for charities, a careers advice charity incubator or advisory charity on founding incubators for careers advice charities.
The Great Over-qualification Crisis
With 1000 years of working life, traditional hiring practices aren’t designed to handle the inevitable over-qualification problem that emerges after your first few centuries
We recommend deliberately sabotaging your own career every 150 years to remain hireable. Consider strategic amnesia or therapeutic brain damage to appear “fresh” to employers. Many successful methuselans maintain secret identities in 3-4 different centuries to avoid the “immortal hire” stigma.
Conclusion
A thousand-year career fundamentally changes the optimization problem from “how do I maximize impact in one lifetime?” to “how do I avoid becoming a completely insane hermit who speaks only in ancient languages and hoards bottle caps?” The key is recognizing that we’re all just making this up as we go along. You have plenty of time to make a few mistakes and figure out how you fit in later.
Thanks to the Methuselah Treatment, there is no pressing need to figure out what you should be doing right now.