OK, 24-Hour Fitness – Can the News!!

I have a couple of confessions.

First, I’ve fallen into a bad habit of reading the newspaper in the morning over breakfast. For me, it’s the Denver Post, a newspaper that has become a shadow of its former self, considered by some as best used for bird-cage bottoms instead of news.

Second, I always come away from the experience (a) having LEARNED NOTHING HELPFUL and (b) having set a marginal tone for the rest of the day.

My lizard brain/amygdala loves it.  That’s what it thrives on.  It’s looking for bad news – like the lion behind the bush – so as to enact my fight-or-flight mechanism for my protection.  But, I’m not hearing of too many lions-in-the-bushes here in suburban Denver, so it’s an unnecessary activation of cortisol injection into my system through largely unnecessary drivel that has virtually no impact on my life.

So why do I even have it delivered?   

Because it encases the sports page and the crossword puzzle and soduko my wife does every day.

I gotta have the sports page because I’m a Broncos/Rockies/Nuggets fan (in that order), plus I find that sportswriters are well above average writers – certainly better than the reporters at the news desk who are trained under the guiding light of “bad news sells” and “if it bleeds, it leads.”

I was reminded of the senselessness of this morning activity – and of tuning in the evening network news –  in an article by Ryan Holiday in Medium.com today: “Why Everyone Should Watch Less News.”

Holiday is a strategist and author with quite a cult following in the business and sports world.  As one might expect of an author, he suggests watching less news and reading more books because “just about anything bound between two covers will teach you something more than the latest headlines – and will do far more in regards to settling your soul.”

I recall doing a Toastmaster speech on the state of reading a number of years ago.  In my research, I discovered that the average number of books read in the U.S., at the time, was around 15 and the median (midpoint) number of books read was around 4.

That average is pulled up by the gonzo readers like myself.  I’ve averaged 60+ books/year for the last 10 years with only two novels in the mix.  Yes, I know – pretty weird.  It’s the way I’m wired and when the weirdness of it all starts nagging me, I remind myself that Bill Gates averages a book a week, Warren Buffett reads five hours a day, and Teddy Roosevelt reportedly read a book a day.

Think 60 books a year is overwhelming?

Not so much. Think on this formula

60 books x 50,000 words / book (avg size of a typical non-fiction book) = 3,000,000 words

3,000,000 words / 300 wpm (slightly above average reading speed) = 10,000 minutes

10,000 minutes / 60 = 167 hours

167 hours/52 weeks = 3.3 hours/week

Average time spent by Americans on (see this article by Charles Chu: “The Simple Truth Behind Reading 200 Books a Year):

Social media – 608 hours/yr = 11.7 hours/week

TV – 1642 hours/yr = 31.6 hours/week

I won’t insult you by going further and doing the math for you.

 

 

 

In that speech in 2013, I reported that reading is declining in this country.  No doubt, it hasn’t gotten better.  I parsed out some stats for that presentation that really caught my attention along with a couple of stats that are the consequences of this decline:

  1. % of U.S. adults who are unable to read at the eighth-grade level – 50%.
  2. % of U.S. high school students who will never read a book after high school – 33%
  3. % of college graduates who will never read another book after graduating from college – 42%
  4. % of families in the U.S. who did not buy a book in 2012 – 80%
  5. % of adults who had not been in a bookstore in the past five years – 70%
  6. According to the NEA, the average 15-24-year-old watches 2 hours of TV and does 7 minutes of leisurely reading each day.
  7. In a U.S. population of over 300 million, popular movie gems in 2013 such as “The Matrix” and “Fast and Furious” sold one million DVDs while the 2011 top-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel only sold 135,000 copies.

What about the consequences of all this.  Again, some revealing facts:

  1. 2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare.
  2. 80-85% of juveniles who face trial in the juvenile court system and over 60 % of prison inmates are functionally illiterate.
  3. Low literacy directly costs the healthcare industry $70 million every year.

Need more reasons to read?

Holiday continues (bolding is mine):

 “While research has shown that visually shocking and upsetting news can contribute to anxiety, sleeping trouble, raise cortisol levels and even trigger PTSD symptoms, a University of Sussex study found that just six minutes reading a book can reduce stress levels up to 68%. A study done by former journalist turned positive psychology researcher Michelle Geilan found that watching just a few minutes of negative news in the morning increases the chances of viewers reporting having had a bad day by 27%, while Barnes and Noble just reported soaring sales for books that help people deal with anxiety and find happiness. Life Time Fitness, a gym chain with locations in 27 states, recently decided that tuning their TVs to FOX News and CNN was antithetical to their mission of making people healthier, so they’ve banned the news from the gym.”

So, I’m going public. 

I’m giving up the morning newspaper (except for the sports page) and avoiding TV news altogether.

You are welcome to hold my feet to the fire on this.  Stop by for breakfast or an evening beer anytime to check me out.

And since I work out there 5-6 days a week, I’m going to suggest to 24-Hour Fitness that they block Fox and CNN just like Lifetime Fitness.  I’m not sure the Lululemon or the tattoo, tank top, and tiny-testicle crowd pays all that much attention, much-preferring mirror-viewing.  But I think it would be a good symbolic gesture, don’t you?

Maybe they could upgrade their equipment and replace all the burned out overhead lights while they are at it.

Help Wanted: Revolutionaries

 

I’m hanging out a “Help Wanted” sign.

Position?  Revolutionary – or rebel will do.

Pay? Don’t inquire – there isn’t any.

Benefits?  Intangible, personal, internal, mental.

Qualifications?  Middle age or later; mostly pissed-off at our culture; contrarian-by-nature/nurture; thick-skinned; immune to derision; Master degree or Ph.D. in toe-stubbing; audacious ager.

Requirements:  Stand in the breach; take a stand and some serious body blows in exchange for promoting a culture change.

Mission: Help straighten out a world that is “out of whack!”

In 2017, the 50-85+ age demographic in the U.S. reached 32% of the population.  That’s the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population.

You’d think a group that large and growing would deserve a little more respect.

Not happening!  Have you noticed?

So I’m up for seeing if we can turn that around.  Wanna join me?

Oh, you’re not feeling disrespected?

Great!  You are either already a revolutionary – or you’re in the waiting line for the disrespect – or maybe you’ve never felt any other way and don’t recognize it.

What’s the disrespect?  Our culture disrespects (or ignores) our biology i.e. our natural life processes.

That’s an argument posed by neuropsychologist Dr. Mario Martinez in his book “The Mindbody Self.”  His research is debunking the myths that view human biology “as mechanistic processes void of cultural influence in the causes of health and longevity.”

He advocates that it’s possible to “reweave our cultural fabric to release what no longer serves you and reclaim the personal excellence you were taught to ignore.”

He refers to the work in this area done by anthropologist Margaret Clark who advocates that anthropology and gerontology would benefit by working together.

Specifically, she proposes: “—that aging is a series of adaptations to the social systems embedded in cultures.  In other words, aging is strongly affected by how we adjust (adapt) to the constraints of our cultures.”

Some of the constraints that Martinez and Clark refer to that are present in our culture today are:

  • Defined retirement age
  • Age limits for hiring
  • Gender restrictions
  • Family authority and expectations
  • Medical biases
  • Rites of passage to elderly status

Martinez goes on further to remind us of other cultural influences, most of which can go either way in terms of benefit or detriment to our health and longevity:

  • What we eat
  • Our level of activity based on age
  • Where we live
  • How much risk we take in our lives
  • Life expectancy
  • Rituals that enhance or diminish our immune system’s defense against foreign bodies

We’ve had many “cultural editors” and “cultural co-authors” to help us down this path of cultural captivity – parents, peers, professors, pundits, politicians, policies – to name a few.

Martinez makes this seminal statement elsewhere in the book:

“Growing older is the passage of time; aging is what you do with your time based on your cultural beliefs.  (my underline).  Middle-age is one of those portals where culture will tell you how to behave, dress and what to expect – all without biological evidence to support that stage of your life.”

Centenarians are revolutionaries

Martinez’ research has included extensive study of centenarians worldwide.   There were a number of things about centenarians that stood out which he refers to it as the “centenarian consciousness”:

  1. The so-called “longevity gene” was found in only 35% of centenarians and there was only a 25% correlation between their advanced age and their parent’s longevity. In other words, a genetics mindset went out the window.
  2. They are contrarian in their view of what their culture expects of them.
  3. Resilience is a core attribute. Setbacks, major illnesses, losses of loved ones and other major challenges are common with nearly all centenarians.
  4. They are devoid of envy, replacing it with an attitude of appreciation and gratitude.
  5. Very few of them retire.

Although Martinez doesn’t allude to this, I suspect that centenarians had adopted this contrarian attitude early in life in response to an awareness of the restrictive nature of many of our cultural influences.

It needs to be our time

– before we are completely run over.

Marc Freedman, in his excellent book “The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife”, articulates well what we are facing.  He humorously references the orthodoxy that has developed and continues to mount, helped along by the media, academia, youth movement, et.al:

“America (and much of the developed world) is hurtling toward a situation in which tens of millions of people, arguably the biggest group in society, and a mighty political force to boot, are about to dominate the scene.  At somewhere around age sixty, they will, pretty much overnight, become the elderly, pass out of the “working-age population,” become incompetent and incontinent, bankrupt the health care system, vote for hefty increases in public spending on their retirement at the expense of everyone else, turn the Sun Belt into a giant golf course, and ignite a war that will, in the subtitle of the 2010 book ‘Shock of Gray’, pit ‘Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival, and Nation Against Nation.’”

His conclusion – which I agree with and which underscores my posting a Help Wanted appeal – is this:

We’re becoming “ – a nation in which the largest segment of society is at loose ends and under-engaged –  consigned to a kind of identity oblivion, fighting age discrimination, facing foreclosed opportunities, mired in personal stagnation, and bereft of purpose.”

Ouch!  Count me out!!

Ready to sign on?

I hope all this p_____s you off just a little.  I hope being viewed as “incompetent and incontinent” at any age stirs you up a little.  I hope you are concerned that going forward from middle-age that your accumulated skills, talents, and dreams are underappreciated and expected to go to the sidelines.

Short on revolutionary experience?

No marches, no signs, no confrontations for this role.

Training manual?  Yes – see above: centenarian consciousness

Slow?  You bet!

Sticks and stones? Yep!  Your culture-infused friends, family, and co-workers will be viewing you skeptically from their cultural fishbowl and may be unkind in their attitudes and/or comments.

Gratifying?  Absolutely, especially if you like going against the grain.

We best affect change in others through our own example.  That’s the route to a cultural change.  Gandhi provides a guidepost: “Be the change you want to see in others.”

I look forward to having you in the revolution.  Scroll down and leave us your thoughts.  Are you a contrarian, swimming upstream with your aspirations and goals?  How do you deal with the resistance?  What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced?

If You Don’t Take Care of Your Body, Where Will You Live?

 I just went through my annual physical check-up with my PCP (If you don’t know what that stands for, we really should talk).  He’s been doing the stethoscope, pointy thing up the nose and in the ears, rubber hammer and rubber-gloved, “roll over on your side” exam on me for 20+ years.

I’m lucky – I usually get 30-40 minutes with him.  For two reasons, I guess.

One, with my 16 years as a healthcare recruiter, he and I invariably end up spending a little time “talking shop” about the challenges he faces running a very busy primary care practice.

Yes, he’s frustrated with the bureaucracy, the electronic medical record requirements, the constantly changing rules, the dropping reimbursement, the paperwork, the patient complacency. He truly loves what he does and just wants to be a doctor.  But, as with all primary care physicians, that’s harder and harder to do

Second, I know I ask more and deeper questions than he normally gets because I’m more tuned into my biology than most of the patients he sees.  I decided over ten years ago to become a student of how this 24 x 7 immune system of 35 trillion cells that I walk around in is designed to work.

Well, the exam went quite well – except for one small glitch.

Elimination of meat and dairy and a 12-lb weight loss have lowered my total cholesterol 15 points to 135 in a year. (P.S. Below 150 is the truly safe range, not just below 200 despite what your pharma-company-influenced PCP will tell you.)  Blood pressure safe – almost too low.   All components of the blood panel safely within range.

All systems go.

Then the glitch.  He said: “You are a very healthy 76-year old – more like a 65-year old.”

Whaa????  65?  How ‘bout 55?

OK.  Ego aside – I’ll take it. Thanks, Doc!

I intend to live to 112 ½ so this body is what I’ll be living in for another 35  34 ½ years.

I know – that’s nuts.  Some of the people I know hope to be taken out back and shot if they get to 90.

If I don’t pay attention to this cellular house I live in, maintain it, help it do its thing – well, I guess where I end up living could get sort of ugly for a long time. My intent is for that “ugly” period to be real short – perhaps like a finger snap.  But certainly no longer than a season.  My progeny don’t deserve a protracted period of needles, nursing homes or neurological nonsense.

I’ll get old and die, just like you.  But, that’s different than aging.  Getting old and dying is immutable – how I choose to age is optional.

No warranty, no trade-in, no owner’s manual

At current chemical prices, you can trade your body in for $3.50.

Organ donation or giving it up to a cadaver lab for aspiring PCP’s to probe is the closest thing we’ve got to a trade-in.

Health insurance isn’t exactly a warranty, although we seem to think of it that way. Oh, look, Mabel – I can get that fixed for a $35 co-pay!!

And still no owner’s manual accompanying dismissal from the newborn nursery.

A century ago, we didn’t know enough about our biology to write an effective owner’s manual.  Today we do, but I suspect it would be soon ignored if it were written.

Suppose we did have a warranty, or a trade-in, or an owner’s manual.  Would that change our tendency to know more about how our Ford Explorer’s catalytic converter works than how our endocrinology can lengthen or shorten our lives?   Or how our digestive system impacts our thinking ability?  Or how – well just about anything about our biology?

Color me skeptical.

The owner’s manual for my wife’s aging Acura MDX is 298 pages.  I can replace the engine in that car for about $2,000.

An easy-to-follow owner’s manual for good health could probably be contained in a half-dozen pages – in large, double-spaced type.  To replace my heart in the U.S. can approach $1.4 million, my liver $813,000.

We know to put good oil in the pan and good gas in the tank of our car.  Yet we persistently dump junk food and bad chemicals into the most expensive transport system on the planet to repair, pound for pound.

Maybe an owner’s manual would change that, but I doubt it.  Our taste buds are held captive by a food industry that knows and cares little about our health. And our commitment to really simple health and wellness habits have succumbed to comfort, convenience, and co-pays.

What a way to treat the most magnificent machine ever developed.

So, for many of us, a protracted period of frailty is in the forecast.  Oh yes, we are living longer.  A 65-year-old today has a 50% chance of reaching 90.  What that stat doesn’t reveal is that for far too many of us, this extended longevity that we rave about is lived in technology-supported agony, isolation, and immobility.

We have the option to be “Younger Next Year” regardless of age.  The book by that same name is a great place to start to understand why and how.  Or “The Roadmap to 100” and his earlier book “Dare to Be 100” by retired Stanford geriatric physician, Dr. Walter Bortz are tremendous no-holds-barred, easy to read “owner’s manuals” for longer, healthier living.

You can also pick up a few wellness pearls from my free e-book: “Achieving Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”  Click here to download it.

Thanks for being a loyal reader.  If you like the articles, tell a friend about us.   Your opinion and insight counts, so leave us a comment below.

 

You Are Likely Committing Murder Everyday

I’m going public and confess to murder.

Fortunately, I won’t be jailed for this murder, although one could argue that I should be.  A physical jail isn’t needed because the penalty I pay for this murder is tougher than an actual jail cell.

My jail time is mental.

The murder victim in my crime is time.

My commission of the crime is relentless – weekly, daily, hourly.  My most serious jail time comes at the end of a day or week when I look back in wonder at where it went and how absent or non-productive I was.  That’s when I realize I’ve been guilty of a crime – a murder of the most valuable, but unreplenishable, resource I have – time.

Tony Robbins in his book “Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny” asks: “How do you define your use of time?  Are you spending it, wasting it, or killing it? It’s been said that killing time isn’t murder, it’s suicide.”

The mental jail I put myself into is for murder, not suicide, thankfully.  But Tony’s rant resonates.  Time has taken on greater significance each day as the number of days ahead of me narrow relative to those behind.

My sensitivity to this shrinking horizon took on increasing influence a quarter-century ago as I moved into my fifties – and it hasn’t let up.

There are no filling stations for time

In a look back in one of my journals recently, I came across a quote about time that I had captured from author MJ DeMarco in a book entitled “The Millionaire Fastlane”.  He says: “We are born rich (with a full tank of gas) and will die broke. Time is the great equalizer. There are no filling stations for time – your one fill-up occurred the moment you took your first breath.”

That makes us kinda like that Visa gift card we got at Christmas – someone pumps in a number you can invest, waste or kill, depending on how you choose to use it.  And once it’s empty, no value.  It occurred to me that we probably give much more thought to how we spend a Visa gift card than we do to how we are spending our time.

You’ve heard it said that we spend more time planning a backyard BBQ than we do planning our lives.

Retirement murders time

As a devoted non-retiree and unretirement activist, I’m usually the odd-man-out in any discussion about the merits of retirement.  Part of my argument against traditional retirement involves time and the distorted use of it as we prepare for and experience full retirement.

My argument starts with the fact that our culture, helped along with our deeply-entrenched retirement entitlement mindset, puts a “use-by stamp” on us as our years pile up. An artificial finish line – retirement at 65 – drawn over 80 years ago still guides much of our thinking and our time use. We distort our use of time from young adulthood into middle-age to strive for that coveted retirement goal where we can then further intensify our misuse of time.  Our culture infers that our time, in our later years, is less valuable. It’s time to go to the sidelines, the park bench, the elder warehouse – where idle time is the expectation on the part of our culture and often the goal of the retiree.

Those committed to achieving a traditional retirement sacrifice their time in the present to try to dig out of the savings gap between where they are and what they feel they will need to achieve their retirement financial goals.

In the U.S., we’ve built a $1 trillion dollar financial planning industry around treating people as a math number and capitalizing on their fear or dread of not reaching that nirvana called retirement.

That is what Roger Whitney calls the “savings gap trap.”  Whitney is a highly experienced Certified Financial Planner and author of a wonderful book on this topic entitled “Rock Retirement: A Simple Guide to Help You Take Control and be More Optimistic About the Future.”

He points out that the savings needed to cover the cost of a 30-40 year retirement – a growing possibility today – is an insurmountable number.  Yet the financial planning industry persists in using the “save more, invest more” equation to guide their clients, often with recommendations that call for “sacrificing life today in order to save or sacrificing your life tomorrow, or a bit of both.”

But really, what choice do these planners have?  They are salespeople trained to sell insurance and investment products.  Non-financial life issues weren’t in their training manuals and don’t pay commissions.  One can hardly blame them for being somewhat blind to the time use issue that their recommendations can generate.

So, what’s your point?

Sorry, it would be so easy to go off into the weeds at this point, if I haven’t already.  Let me cut to the chase by saying that our cultural “entitlement” called retirement promotes a leapfrogging from a productive middle age to a non-productive, often aimless old age and compresses the time in which that transition takes place.  To me, that is murdering precious, creative, productive, life-changing time by throwing it to the wind and saying “I’m done.”

We have lots of evidence of this murderous process.

  • As recently as 1995, the Social Security system determined that the average number of social security checks issued was 29 – hardly a nirvana.
  • A generation ago, IBM did a study of its pensioners and found that the average number of pension checks issued before demise was 24.
  • Extensive studies of cultures worldwide with unusually high levels of centenarians (reference Dan Buettner’s book, “Blue Zones”) find that traditional retirement rarely exists and that gratitude for each day (time consciousness) prevails. Okinawans, for instance, can claim one of the highest concentrations of centenarians of any culture on the planet. Yet, they do not have a word equivalent to retirement in their language and no retirement homes in their culture.
  • A study called the RP 2000 Mortality Study of men 50-70 confirms the importance of time usage by revealing that the death rates of those still working were roughly half the death rates of men the same age who were not working.

It’s not easy being an outlier

Centenarians are outliers. Where our culture tells us that our intellectual and physical functions diminish with the passing of time, healthy centenarians have largely rejected that notion by accepting the fact that they will grow old and die but choosing how they will age.  Most take each day as a timeless gift and demonstrate amazing resilience in overcoming adversity.

Yet, in the face of this evidence of the possibility of a fruitful, healthy life to 100 or beyond, to suggest living to that age as a personal goal invites a culturally-conditioned rejection and categorization as kooky, weird, out-of-touch with reality, etc., etc.

How are you going to deal with your longevity bonus?

If I were to ask you how you would use a 30-40 year, post-middle-age time span, what would your culturally-influenced instincts tell you?  Would they say “wind down” or “rewind?”  Would it say “takeoff” or “landing?”  Would it say “crescendo” or “diminuendo?”   Would it say “I’m done” or “I’m inspired?”

I’m hoping that there will be a realization of the fact that this third-age period between middle-age and true old age is rife with the potential for murderous, culturally-induced time abuse.

  • Will it be movies or mentoring?
  • Will it be TV or teaching?
  • Will it Lazy-boy or learning?
  • Will it be bingo or biking?
  • Will it be conformist or contrarian?
  • Will it be vacation or vocation?

Life is a series of choices, each taking a chunk of time.  Our culture does much to show us how to waste it, lose it, abuse it.  But we can all be outliers and reject cultural perceptions.  And nowhere is that more important or potentially more impactful than in this period between our middle age and true old age – our “third age.”

What are your thoughts about all this?  Are you an outlier?  Are you an “audacious ager?”  If you are, I’d like to meet you, talk with you.   Leave a comment below.  Email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.  Subscribe to these weekly articles at www.makeagingwork.com