When I was on vacation last summer in Italy, my country of origin, I was surprised to find two of my best friends telling me what I myself had been thinking about – and what Civic Ventures and Marc Freedman have been talking about.

I call it the third life. As I start the second half of my 50s, I suddenly realized that I was starting to take the years ahead of me as “dealing with the tail of my life,” as if I did not have much time to change things.

I also realized that we are the first generation that has a good chance at the end of their 50s to have 20 years of active life ahead of us. I realized that my generation had gained an “extra life.” Maybe it is because of “Internet-years.” Maybe it is because I have lived 20 years in the States, a culture much more prone to change that my Italian one.

Around May I started circulating a very rough manifesto to my friends. Here it is:

“We baby boomers, at the end of the 50s or beginning of the 60s, and everyone else with our spirit (we do not age discriminate) are the most powerful generation in this moment in our Western World and we are again, once more, ready to give.

“With the same generosity and idealism we had when we were in our 20s or teens, or whatever age we were when we shared the spirit of the ’60s, we are ready for our third life. We are the ones that have arrived at this age having for the first time in history a strong possibility of living 20 or so years of full active life.

“We have been there, done that, and we are ready to be old while “forever young”, or at least young enough for the next 20 years to do finally whatever we want – which is not ‘retire’ and ‘do nothing,’ but rather: give back and feed our souls.”

I couldn’t believe it when my two Italian friends spelled out their thoughts exactly as if they were quoting from Marc Freedman’s book, Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life. They are both very successful professionals and entrepreneurs, and I would have never suspected that they were thinking about a deep reorientation of their life. After all, they have lived in our very slow changing city, Milan, all their precious lives.

With my friends, we have used the words terzavitosi and terzavitaioli to define people with our attitude. Terza is third and the vitosi suffix in Italian is added to define gang members, so I think it sounds like The Third Lifers’ Gang and the suffix vitaioli is really like vitelloni, people that enjoy life a little bit a la James Dean – the Third Life beau vivants!

The feeling of coming together in a movement toward something good has never been as strong as in the 1960s. Then we were thinking about revolution on a political level, many in an utopian way. Now we have a different idea of revolution but I feel that the desire to get down to work at a civic level has increased tremendously. As a sociologist friend says, we are individually thinking about it, but not yet connecting. I feel that it is bound to happen.

The Encore experience is for me very thrilling and I hope to expand it to Italy. As we start connecting and thinking about third-life issues, it would be great to get comments from other Terzavitosi or Terzavitaioli!