What if “aging well” isn’t about squeezing more years out of life, but redesigning the life those years will hold? Through Kirsten Wolberg’s bold, practical vision, longevity becomes a question of how we live, work, and belong.
What if the way we’ve been taught to think about “aging well” is simply too small?
At a recent Athena salon, tech executive–turned–board leader Kirsten Wolberg joined Athena founder Coco Brown for a wide-ranging conversation on longevity, one that moved fluidly from bold vision (Kirsten is planning to live to 120) to surprisingly grounded, practical shifts many women could begin this year.
What made the conversation resonate wasn’t the ambition of that number, but the clarity behind it. Kirsten wasn’t chasing more years for their own sake. She was asking a deeper question: If we are likely to live longer than any generation before us, how do we design lives that stay meaningful, healthy, and connected all the way through?
Kirsten’s story doesn’t begin with supplements, gadgets, or wellness trends. It begins with transition, loss, and a realization many high-achieving women recognize: you can be enormously successful and still feel disoriented once work stops being the organizing force of your life.
After decades leading technology organizations at Charles Schwab, Salesforce (as CIO), PayPal, and DocuSign (as Chief Technology & Operations Officer), Kirsten began building a board portfolio. At one point, she served on eight boards simultaneously. Today she’s on five, still deeply engaged, still operating at a high level, but with a fundamentally different orientation.
Instead of optimizing for scale or prestige, she began optimizing for simplicity, sustainability, and connection. She started asking what she wanted her “last chapter” to look like and refused to accept the default cultural narrative of gradual decline.
That inquiry led her somewhere unexpected. She moved from San Francisco’s Market Street corridor to a 58-acre farm in North Carolina, trading density and speed for space and intentionality. There, she began building what she describes as a longevity-focused community and applying what she knows best as an operator: vision, plan, execute, to a new domain: health span.
Longevity conversations often fixate on living longer. Kirsten’s focus is more precise: living better for longer. She draws a clear distinction between life span (how long you’re alive) and health span (how long you’re healthy, mobile, clear-minded, and independent).
Coco framed why this distinction feels particularly urgent now. Many of us inherited a “retire at 65” mental model one designed for an era when life expectancy was shorter and retirement was often a brief, quieter period. Today, more people are reaching their 70s, 80s, and beyond with energy, curiosity, and capability intact.
The question is no longer, How long can I last? It’s How do I stay strong, connected, and purposeful for as long as possible?
That reframe has ripple effects. It changes how we think about our bodies, not as machines to push, but as systems to support. It changes how we approach work not as something to abruptly exit, but something to evolve. And it changes how we think about relationships, not as nice-to-haves, but as essential infrastructure for a long life.
Kirsten’s framework is refreshingly non-mystical. She’s skeptical of what she calls “longevity theater,” expensive, time-consuming, and often ego-driven optimization that few people can realistically sustain.
Instead, she centers four pillars that consistently show up in longevity research:
While these pillars are familiar, what surprised many attendees was Kirsten’s insistence on their relative importance.
While diet and exercise dominate most wellness conversations, Kirsten emphasized that research repeatedly points to something else as the strongest predictor of long-term health and happiness:
Community matters more than anything else.
The blue zones research and decades-long longitudinal studies don’t just tell us to eat well and stay active. They tell us that people embedded in strong, reciprocal relationships where they are needed and where they belong live longer, healthier, and more fulfilled lives.
For many high performers, especially those whose purpose and connection have been tightly routed through work, this can be the hardest pillar to build.
Kirsten’s own reckoning with community came amid grief, as she witnessed something that stayed with her: the extraordinary power of community showing up in consistent, tangible ways.
People organized care. They took shifts. They bore emotional weight together. There was beauty alongside devastation.
It sparked a simple, human thought: I want that too.
Not just more years, but love, care, and belonging, especially at the end. Not isolation masked by independence, but connection rooted in mutual responsibility.
True to form, Kirsten didn’t stop at insight. She turned it into action, approaching longevity the same way she once approached complex organizations: identify the leverage points, then build systems that support them.
Rather than chasing perfection, Kirsten emphasized a principle she learned in leadership and relearned in health: perfect is the enemy of good enough. Her goal isn’t to win at wellness. It’s to create systems she can sustain for decades.
Across nutrition, movement, and sleep, she favors simple, research-backed fundamentals over intensity or rigidity. What matters most isn’t heroic effort, it’s consistency, stress reduction, and listening to what your body actually responds to.
Sleep became an early focus when data revealed how little deep rest she was getting. Improving it required not more discipline, but more support: a darker, cooler environment, less alcohol, and a willingness to question popular advice that didn’t work for her physiology.
The broader insight resonated deeply: longevity isn’t about deprivation. For many women, especially later in life, it’s about giving the body enough safety and stability to restore itself.
In many ways, Kirsten’s farm is a community project disguised as a lifestyle change. She’s intentionally creating a place where people can gather, contribute, and age together, where usefulness and belonging don’t expire with a job title.
During the salon, participants reflected on how environment shapes well-being. Several noted that moving from high-pressure cities to smaller communities reduced stress and increased everyday connection. The pace softened. Interactions felt more human.
But relocation isn’t the prescription. The takeaway is far more accessible and more urgent:
If you want to live longer, don’t just optimize your biomarkers. Optimize your belonging.
Coco raised a practical and often uncomfortable question: longevity can be expensive. Time, health care, flexibility, and optionality all come with costs.
Kirsten’s response wasn’t “spend more.” It was “design differently.”
She’s been explicit with her children that they should not expect an inheritance. Instead, she invested heavily in education and is directing the rest of her resources toward the life she intends to live.
She’s building income streams aligned with her lifestyle, structuring her farm as an entrepreneurial ecosystem and continuing to work through boards and portfolio-style roles. Purpose and income, she argues, don’t need to stop at an arbitrary age.
The larger reframe is this: if you’re planning for a longer life, you may need a portfolio approach to work and income boards, advisory roles, consulting, fractional leadership, equity plus cash rather than reliance on a single employer model designed for a shorter career arc.
If all of this feels expansive, Kirsten offered reassurance. You don’t need a farm. You don’t need perfection. You need intention.
A simple place to begin:
Longevity isn’t about hacking your future self. It’s about treating her like someone worth planning for.
As Kirsten put it, the idea is both radical and simple: Plan for a long life. Then build the physical, social, and financial systems that make it a good one.
© Athena Alliance 2026
