When an older person starts giving money away in earnest, funding a grandchild’s deposit, signing large cheques to a cause, the reaction around them is often unease. The worry is that they are being imprudent, or that someone is steering them, and that they are spending down something meant to last.
Sometimes the worry is warranted. Often it misreads what is happening. For people who have enough, choosing to give while they are alive is usually not a lapse of judgement but a deliberate use of it. They are choosing to be present for the help, rather than leave it to a will they will never see carried out.
Why later life tilts towards meaning
There is a well-documented shift in what people want as they get older, and it turns out to be less about age itself than about how much time a person feels they have left.
The Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen built a body of work, known as socioemotional selectivity theory, around exactly this. When the horizon feels open, people pursue open-ended goals: acquiring, building, banking knowledge and resources for a future that still feels large. When the horizon feels short, the same people turn towards emotionally meaningful goals, towards relationships, and towards things that pay off now rather than later. Giving, and giving in a way you can witness, sits squarely in that second category. It is not a softening of judgement so much as a change in what the judgement is for.
The difference between a gift and a bequest
This is the distinction the whole thing rests on. A bequest is something the giver never experiences, while a gift made while alive can be watched as it works.
You see the deposit become a house, the scholarship become a graduation, the clinic actually open. There is decent evidence that spending on others lifts wellbeing more than spending on yourself, from work by Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton first published in 2008, though later registered replications suggest the effect is real but modest and leans heavily on circumstances. The point is not that giving is a dependable route to happiness. It is that being there for the result is something a will, by its nature, can never offer.
The approach has a name
The clearest example is also the source of the phrase. Chuck Feeney, who built a fortune in duty-free retail, quietly moved almost all of it into a foundation and spent the rest of his life giving it away, more than eight billion dollars, dying in 2023 with comparatively little. He called the approach “giving while living,” and saw little reason to delay good that could be done now.
Feeney is the figure Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have named as a model, and the same instinct runs through the Giving Pledge and a good deal of the philanthropy the technology industry likes to discuss. The harder question, the one that separates the pledge from the practice, has always been timing: give now and see it, or leave it in an estate. Feeney’s answer was to see it.
What the defence does and does not cover
It is worth being careful here, because the case is narrower than it can sound. This is a choice available only to people who have enough; for most older people the money is not surplus, and giving it away really would be the recklessness the worry imagines. The pattern is a privilege before it is anything else, and nothing in it is a suggestion that anyone part with money they may need.
The motives are also mixed. Giving while living carries tax advantages, and it lets the giver keep a hand on how the money is used, with conditions a bequest could not enforce as easily. A gift you are present for is not always a gift without strings.
But none of that changes the basic point. For someone who can afford it, deciding to give now rather than later is a considered act, and treating it as suspect by default says more about the people around the giver than the giver.
What is actually being chosen
The cliché treats early giving as a warning sign, a thing for families and advisers to guard against. The reflex is so automatic it is rarely examined: an older person opening their hands is read as decline, while the same person tightening their grip is read as sound.
That asymmetry is worth sitting with. We have built a quiet consensus that the autonomy of older adults is provisional, to be respected when they choose what we would choose and questioned the moment they don’t. Pathologising generosity is one way that consensus shows itself, and it costs the giver something real: the chance to spend down what they have on terms they set, while they are still here to set them.
They are not failing to think about the future. They have thought about it, and decided the rest of us are the ones who haven’t.
