Retirement, the First Law of Physics, and the Iron Oxide Risk

 

Isaac Newton was a great physicist.  Maybe not by today’s standards, but he helped us move forward with some pretty big leaps back in his day.  Like (1) deciphering gravity; (2) inventing calculus; (3) building the telescope.

He also introduced the “First Law of Physics”.

This law is sometimes referred to as the law of inertia and is often stated as:

 An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

The word “object” in the law would seem to reference a solid, physical object – like a rock, a car, a rocket ship, a human body.

I’ll bet, however, that you know a mind or two at rest that is impervious to any opposing view or unbalancing force.  I’ve encountered a few.  There seems to be quite a collection gathering daily along the Potomac.

Isaac’s law pits inertia against action.

My body and mind seem to favor the inertia and resist the action.  Like daily.  It’s so much easier, it seems, to be comfortable, inert.

Be honest.  You’ve been there.

 

I found myself thinking about the phases – or portals if you will – that we pass through in life and the “unbalancing forces” that move us through those portals, countering our tendency to be a perpetual “object at rest”.  Parents, peers, professors, cultural expectations/pressures.   Sometimes it takes a crisis or a calamity before an inertia-beset mind and body get moving.

Psychologists and marketers have brought us to where we now have seven life portals (P.S.  150 years ago, we had two: childhood and adulthood).  Each portal  (newborn – infancy – childhood  – adolescence – young adult  – middle age – old age)  has inertia and an unbalancing force to counter the inertia.

Aren’t you grateful you had some unbalancing forces in your life that moved you off your inertia-inclined butt at each phase?

Intentional inertia

I’m grateful I got moved off each portal.  I just regret that the unbalancing forces didn’t come along sooner and more forcefully, especially in the later stages.  But that’s a sob story for another article.  It will have “intentional inertia” in the title.

Speaking of  “intentional inertia”, as I scanned those life portals reminiscing on who and what the unbalancing forces were at each phase, it struck me that there is a phase where, culturally, we work somewhat feverishly to establish intentional inertia.  Between portal six and seven, middle age and old age.

It’s called (drum roll) – retirement.

Think about it.  We’re taking a body in motion, some fast, some slow, some half-fast  (sorry – old, tired joke) and we’re suggesting a return to inertia, or at least a measure of it.

We’re entitled to it, we’re told.  We’ve succumbed enough to the “unbalancing forces” in the earlier portals.  Time to stiff-arm those and experience a little or a lot of good ‘ol inertia.

Funny thing about inertia.  This may sound crazy, but my screwy mind went to my days spent on my grandfather’s and uncle’s farms.  Both farms had lots of “retired” farm equipment – tractors, combines, plows, various farm implements.   What did they do with them?  There was no convenient way to “recycle” in those days so they became inert, often at the spot where they quit working.

From there, nature’s payoff for inertia took over – rust.  Useless, inert, just taking up space and using up oxygen and moisture to form iron oxide.   It’s the sort of “farm junk” that you will see as you drive by any small farm in America.

I know some retirees that remind me of one of my Uncle Ray’s old retired Farmall tractors.  Taking up space, using oxygen, immobile and inert.

I’ll bet you know some too.

Between portal six and seven, which I refer to as our “third age”, there is great opportunity for self-imposed inertia.

Our financial planning industry, founded by insurance salespeople a half-century ago, has been hugely successful in convincing us that it’s a time to “wind down”, a time for a “landing”.

No more “take-offs” – you’re done with that.

How could a $60.4 billion industry that’s growing at a 5% pace annually with over 300,000 financial advisors possibly be dispensing bad advice?

Well, it’s really in the eye of the beholder.   It’s easy to think inertia when you are burned out doing something you didn’t fully enjoy so you could accumulate the cash to maybe do what you really wanted to do all along and then discover out you don’t have the motivation or the energy to do it.   All the while, your financial advisor is in your ear convincing you that there are “golden years” ahead and you deserve them.

Forget this striving business, they say – you’ve paid your dues.

I know it’s a hard truth, but you’ve been relinquishing a good chunk of your net worth to get a lesson in how to form iron oxide.

One-hundred-fifty years ago, we had no one telling us that we’ve earned the right to become a body at rest.  The incentive to keep moving was called survival and work was the engine.   We flipped all that upside down with the Industrial Revolution and intensified the incentive to become inert as we’ve moved through an evolving revolution in the way we work and live.

The word “work” for a mid-to-late-lifer seems to have become a bad word.  Something to get away from because, well, just because that’s the way it’s now done.  We’ve been hearing that mantra for six or seven decades so it’s not surprising that it’s not going to be dislodged any time soon.

But I see a glimmer of rational thought emerging.  There are those amongst the pre-boomer, boomer, and early GenX’ers that are questioning this iron oxide option.

  • Maybe they’ve seen too many human equivalents to my uncle’s rusted Farmall.
  • Maybe there is a growing realization that 65 doesn’t mean “done”.
  • Maybe more of us are through buying the outdated bull**** from a “drug it or cut-it-out” medical community that says cellular senescence is automatic and that we should “learn to live with it.”
  • Maybe we’ve seen enough Warren Buffetts, William Shatners and other high energy octogenarian and nonagenarian types that are still kicking butt to convince us that unretirement/non-retirement has merit.
  • Maybe we are giving up hope that government and corporations will come to their senses about their disrespect for mid- and late-lifers and have decided to do our own thing.
  • Maybe we’ve finally learned that ageism starts with us, with how we think and talk about ourselves and how we tolerate how others think and talk about us.
  • Maybe we are finally acknowledging that continuing to deploy our accumulated talents, skills, and experiences into the third age will overcome the deterioration that our culture expects us to experience.

I’m not prepared to call it a full-on revolution yet, but something’s fermenting.  If you’ve read this far, you might be part of that fermentation.  I hope so.

I hope you literally get pi**** off about the prevailing negative cultural attitudes toward those beyond 55 or 60 and mount your own personal campaign against the forces that encourage us to succumb to Uncle Isaac’s “First Law of Physics”.

Let me know what you think about all this with a comment below.  Also, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a free e-book “Achieving Your Full-life Potential” as a thank you.

Be Part of the “Modern Elder” Movement

Photo by Esther Ann on Unsplash

A couple of years ago, while one with my now-deceased iPod Classic during a workout,  I listened to a very stimulating podcast interview with Chip Conley, who, at the time, was a few years into an executive management position with Airbnb.

His is a very intriguing story of how he came into Airbnb, at age 52, as “an award-winning hospitality veteran with a disruptive entrepreneurial streak” and ended up as “an intern surrounded by smart, passionate employees half his age, with twice the digital smarts.”

He was both humbled and inspired by the experience.

From it, he coined two new terms for himself at Airbnb:  “modern elder” and “mentern” (part mentor, part intern).

The Airbnb experience appears to have inspired Chip in yet another interesting direction, further igniting his entrepreneurial fires, but this time applying them in more of a not-for-profit, social activist vein.

Conley was recently selected as one of the top 12 “2019 Influencers In Aging” by NextAvenue.org, a subsidiary of the Public Broadcasting System.  He is amongst an elite group of “advocates, researchers, thought leaders, innovators, writers, and experts that continue to push beyond traditional boundaries and change our understanding of what it means to grow older.”

Mr. Conley popped up on my radar screen again this week via another interview, this time published in Forbes and conducted by Next Avenue Managing Editor Richard Eisenberg (who I had the good fortune to meet and spend some time with last month at a Retirement Coaches conference in Detroit.)

I encourage you to link to the interview here.

Middlescence – a new cultural portal

In just the last year, Conley has released a new book “Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder”  and founded a “boutique resort for midlife leaning and reflection” in Mexico called the Modern Elder Academy.

Tagged as the “ first midlife wisdom school”, it has already been attended by 500 students from 17 countries.

Conley’s efforts are inspiring to me, on several levels.

From it, a new and better “cultural portal” classification has emerged – middlescence.

On 7/2/18, I published an article Time For a New Cultural Portal  that spoke to how we have, with the help of creative social scientists and enterprising capitalists, expanded from two cultural portals 150 years ago (childhood – adulthood) to seven today (newborn, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, and old age).

Now, with Conley’s help, we have a better term for that clumsy portal called middle-age and its offspring, the “mid-life crisis” with its sexist, trophy-wife, bling, sports car symptoms.

I think – I hope – Conley and The Modern Elder Academy and the response to it is a sign that we are starting to acknowledge that this phase of life – i.e. elderhood – is beginning a comeback where ageism diminishes and elders are once again held in respect and their wisdom leveraged back into our culture.

Middlescence makes sense in its more definitive description of this (now) extended period of our lives – what I have been calling and will continue to call, the third age.

As the article points out, it generally happens in the fifties and is a time we move from:

  • Accumulating to editing
  • Less ego, more soul
  • Less interesting, more interested
  • Less achieving and attaining, more creating a legacy and attuning.

Chip Conley is singing my tune.

I hope he is singing yours.  I wish I had thought all this up.  But I’m OK just being a courier.

I’m a late-stage septuagenarian with a middlescence mindset.  Without it, I haven’t got a prayer of getting to my target of living to 112 ½.

My wife of 49 years is, and always has been, a trophy in so many ways; I look terrible with bling and an open shirt collar;  a convertible in Colorado just makes an ego trip way too obvious.

“Middlescence” is just what the doctor ordered for my quest.

Are you a “comeback elder”?

How are you preparing for elderhood?

How will you stay relevant?

How will you survive your new longevity?  Drifting? Or with purpose?

Important questions for us all as we break through as “modern elders”.

 

Alzheimer’s Disease and What We Eat

It’s two weeks since attending the funeral service for a dear friend whose battle with Alzheimer’s ended as her body gave in to the complications from the disease.

Our friend Judy’s Alzheimer’s experience was the first with this disease for my wife and me.  We shouldn’t be surprised by that since statistically the disease only affects about 1.8% of the American population.

I know it would seem to be so much more prevalent than it is because of the attention it gets.  The attention is deserved because it truly is a devastating and costly experience for those close to the victim and to our society.

We can confirm that the impact hugely outweighs its relatively low level of occurrence.

For Judy, her transition from a quiet, warm, giving, serving mom, wife, sister, aunt, grandmother, and friend into a world none of us can comprehend was shockingly quick.   Her signs manifested quickly and progressed rapidly.

At least it seemed so for us, but probably not for her husband and two sons who we suspect saw the signs much earlier and protected her, and us, by not revealing those until an official diagnosis was made and the signs too obvious to conceal.

It seemed like almost overnight that our relationship moved from energy-filled golfing trips, card-playing evenings, countless dinners together, years of Bible-study to one where she was a mere incoherent, bewildered body in the room, unable to connect and communicate.

We observed the truth that the disease is much harder on the caregiver than on the victim.  Her husband was extraordinary in his love and caring for her to the point where a memory care facility was necessary.  The devastating toll on him physically and emotionally was and is palpable.  We reached a point in the progression where we realized our focus needed to be on watching and trying to help him get through it.

That continues as a focus for us.  They were exceptionally close – he needs and deserves a strong support group going forward to help cope with this void.

No cure in sight.

It’s discouraging, with our awareness of the devastating impact of the disease, that virtually no progress has been made in finding a cure or treatment, despite billions poured into research.  It seems to be a classic case of trying to catch a racehorse after it has left the barn.

We know enough about the disease to realize that it is very insidious in nature with the symptoms developing gradually years before the disease noticeably manifests itself.  So as we try to attack the disease, our reductionist system of medicine looks more to a cure and less to a cause.  My sense is that once the symptoms are apparent, there is nothing at this point in our medical knowledge that can fix it.

It begs the question then why do we not talk and spend more on prevention than on chasing what appears to be an incredibly elusive and perhaps unfixable condition once contracted.

With that thought in mind, an article recently published by the Blue Zones organization entitled “The 2 Foods That Combat Alzheimer’s Disease (& Other Lifestyle Factors to Reduce Your Risk of Cognitive Decline)” caught my eye.

I encourage you to read the article.  It’s an interview by “The Blue Zones” author Dan Buettner with a husband and wife team, Drs Dean and Ayesha Sherzai, who are “combating the disease with a comprehensive approach that includes prevention and treatment.”  Their book “The Alzheimer’s Solution” espouses Alzheimer’s prevention through a healthy lifestyle.

They state:

“We believe 90% of Alzheimer’s can be prevented through a healthy lifestyle. Despite the resistance towards lifestyle intervention as a tool for dementia prevention, the most recent consensus statement from Alzheimer’s Association is that 60% of Alzheimer’s can be prevented through a comprehensive lifestyle. This number is based on a recent study by Rush University and was highlighted in the media. But we think that they are still understating the influence lifestyle has on Alzheimer’s risk, because their idea of intensive/comprehensive intervention is a watered-down version of what we consider healthy. If people truly live a healthy lifestyle, 90% should be able to avoid Alzheimer’s within their normal lifespan.”

They coined an acronym to help us remember the components of this lifestyle:  NEURO

N – Nutrition

E – Exercise

U – Unwind

R – Restorative sleep

O – Optimizing cognitive and social activity

It’s appropriate that N-nutrition is the first letter of the acronym because they come down on nutrition as the most significant Alzheimer’s risk reducer.

That makes sense because that’s consistent with what I noted in my September 30, 2019 article  that “our diet is both the number-one cause of death and the number-one cause of disability in the United States.”

This Blue Zones article covers a lot of ground and concludes with the selection of two foods that are best for brain health.

Pretty simple: beans and greens.

How tough can it be to adopt these two natural foods into our nutrition plan?

Well, tougher than we demonstrate.  These are not popular components of the fare you will find in fast food places or restaurants in general.

Since we now spend more money eating out than we do to purchase food to eat at home, our current lifestyles are not the venue where we are likely to feed our brains optimally.

I don’t expect that “beans and greens” will ever supplant the pervasive “burger and fries”, “steak and potatoes”, “milk and cookies”, “beer and brat”, “bacon and eggs” American nutrition mindset.  But then, life is really nothing more than a series of choices and this is one in which current research is bringing us encouraging news to combat one of the worst debilitations a human can experience.

I dedicate this article to Judy, thanking her for the example of love, sweetness, calmness, and service that exemplified her life.  And to her husband whose endurance, dedication, and sacrifice during this very difficult time has been far beyond the pale.

Extend Your Healthy Longevity – Twelve Things That May Be Accelerating Your Aging – Part Three of a Three-part Series.

It’s been a challenge selecting four more topics to wrap up this three-part series on age accelerators to avoid.  Not because there is a scarcity of accelerators but rather having so many possible topics to bring forth.

So here’s my final selection of age accelerators to avoid – I hope you find these last four helpful.

1. Holding on to disempowering cultural beliefs.  Dr. Mario Martinez, in his books “The Mindbody Code” and “The Mindbody Self”, introduces us to the new language of biocognition – how our culture affects our biology.  This language provides a basis for many insights into health or the lack of it.  Our cultural beliefs are extremely potent when it comes to our health.  They can promote wellness and lead us to joy and happiness or they can cause us to cling to patterns of behavior that are known to be harmful and life-shortening.

Dr. Martinez points out:

“Based on the latest scientific studies of healthy brains, healthy longevity, and a strong sense of self worth, biocognition debunks some very persistent myths: that we are victims of our genetics; that aging is an inevitable process of deterioration; and that the life sciences can simply choose to ignore the influence of culture on human health and well-being”.

Through his extensive global study of centenarians, Dr. Martinez uncovers the empowering and disempowering effect of cultural beliefs and argues that ” – healthy longevity is learned rather than inherited and that the causes of health are inherited rather than learned.”  For instance, he uses the term cultural portal to argue that growing older is the passage of time, whereas aging is what we do with time based on our cultural beliefs.

Dr. Martinez uses this example (bolding is mine):

“Middle age is one of the cultural portals.  When it begins, your culture will tell you how to behave and dress and what to expect – all without any biological evidence to support that stage of your life.  But if you’re not aware that you are in a cultural fishbowl, you will age according to what your culture tells you rather than your biology.  Fortunately, there are ways to come out of the portals, as healthy centenarians and other outliers are able to do.”

Does this paragraph make you stop and think?  What cultural beliefs might we be carrying forward into the third age that are sub-consciously disempowering us and keeping us from realizing the tremendous potential that remains for us in this period?  A few come to my mind:

    • The expectation and necessity of retirement.  We are often tagged as a “fool” or “unfortunate” if we don’t capitulate to retirement.  The cultural editors that have instilled this cultural belief have been tremendously effective in taking a flawed, unnatural concept and turning it into an entitled withdrawal by appealing to the more hedonistic side of our personalities and away from our instinctive need for meaning and purpose.
    • The belief that our DNA is our destiny.  We’re learning, according to Dr. Martinez,  to challenge genetic sentencing in family illness and that “we are not the mechanical products of our genes, we are the coauthors of their expression.  With few exceptions, illnesses are only genetic propensities, not inevitable disruptions waiting for their time to unfold.”  We are born with a gift of health but allow cultural beliefs to roadblock our opportunity to express and benefit from the gift.   We thus view health as the absence of illness rather than understand and pursue the concept of wellness, the optimal expression of health.
    • Old age is to be dreaded. When I mention to someone my intention to live to 112 1/2, the reaction is immediate repulsion.  Not toward me personally, but to their mind’s eye – wheelchairs, dementia, Depends, bent-over immobility.  Yet we hear more and more stories of centenarians who replace dread with resilience in the face of age-related setbacks and combine it with two robust causes of health:  passion and meaning.  Above all, they continue to work, refusing to retire from what they love.

2.  Act your age.  Here an interesting infographic from SeniorLiving.org from a survey of more than 1,100 Americans about the upper limit age for many behaviors.  It pulls together quite a list of cultural activites and how we view adherence to them as we age.

I’m all in on not acting your age.

Spend 3 minutes to view this video by Dr. Roger Landry, former Air Force flight surgeon and respected author of “Live Long, Die Short”.  He introduces a new concept called the “dignity of risk.”  It says all that needs to be said about not acting our age.

3.  Stop being courageous.  The dying have a message.  Australian hospice nurse, Bronnie Ware, for many years spent time with patients who were in the last few weeks of their lives and who had gone home to die.  In her article “Regrets of the Dying, she shares the five most common regrets that they expressed in their final days:

    • I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
    • I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
    • I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
    • I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
    • I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Regret #1 was by far the most common.

For many, being courageous and heeding the call to break out and be true to oneself while progressing into the second half/third stage of life intensifies and, at the same time, becomes increasingly difficult.

4.  Losing a sense of purpose and meaning.  Dr. Robert Butler was a world-renowned gerontologist, psychiatrist, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning activist and aging pioneer who coined the terms “ageism” and “longevity revolution.  The Blue Zones website reports that Dr. Butler and his collaborators led an NIH-funded study that looked at the correlation between having a sense of purpose and longevity. His 11-year study followed healthy people between the ages of 65 and 92 and showed that those who expressed having clear goals or purpose lived longer and lived better than those who did not. This is because individuals who understand what brings them joy and happiness tend to have what we like to call the Right Outlook. They are engulfed in activities and communities that allow them to immerse themselves in a rewarding and gratifying environment.

In Okinawa, where we find one of the highest percentages of people living to 100 or beyond, they have a term for sense of purpose – ikigai.  It stands for “why I wake up in the morning”.

 

In an interview for the book “Boundless Potential”, Shep Nuland, retired surgeon/author (now deceased) offered this answer to the question: “Is there purpose in the second half of life?” (bolding is mine).
“Absolutely. The purpose is to continue to develop your real humanity. I think our real humanity often gets stunted by our occupational years. All of your energies are devoted to that. And you become something less than your full potential.
Unlike most other animals, the human species lives long beyond its reproductive years, and it is the only animal with the ability to continue developing in these later stages of life. I think we should consider that a gift.
The years of midlife and beyond are simply a new developmental period.  The key word here is ‘developmental.’  You have to look for something that is in continuity with the previous 10, 15, 20 years of your life. That choice exists for each of us.”
If you’ve got to this sentence, thanks for making the journey through this three-part series and for your feedback along the way.  I’ve learned a lot from assembling the content.  I hope there has been a pearl or two over the last three weeks that helped physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.
Please leave your feedback with a comment below.  Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at  www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”