Enough of this “Life Purpose” thing! Can’t We Get Over It?

Do me a favor. Google “life purpose.”

Go ahead – I’ll wait.

Did you come up with the same number I did: 5,680,000.

Is it really THAT important?

Some would say it’s in the “woo-woo”, “touchy-feely” category crafted to sell books, workshops, and coaching services.

Others would say it’s essential to a life well-lived.

I’ll go with the latter.

The former and latter are working well for Richard Leider, founder of Inventure – The Purpose Company. He’s written three books on the topic and is ranked by Forbes as one of the “Top 5” most respected executive coaches on the planet.

Influential Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan, maintains that people die early for three reasons:

    1. No money
    2. No friends
    3. No purpose

Having coached over 18,000 successful entrepreneurs to success over 40+ years, Dan has observed the power of purpose and knows of what he speaks.

There must be something to it.

What is it anyway?

The University of Minnesota website Taking Charge of Your Health and Wellbeing  describes it this way:

Purpose can guide life decisions, influence behavior, shape goals, offer a sense of direction, and create meaning. For some people, purpose is connected to vocation—meaningful, satisfying work. For others, their purpose lies in their responsibilities to their family or friends. Others seek meaning through spirituality or religious beliefs. Some people may find their purpose clearly expressed in all these aspects of life.

OK, if it’s that important, why do so few end up with one?

Approximately 45% of U.S. employees are not happy in their jobs, according to a 2019 survey by The Conference Board.  Maybe building somebody else’s dream isn’t the most fertile ground for finding a life purpose.

Some find it there – many don’t.

In this era of Bernie, Elizabeth, Peter, and AOC, we seem to be thinking there’s hope in having it found for us.   Just get in line – D.C has the solution to your angst.

Then again, maybe not.

This caption from P. 259 of the book “Younger Next Year” by co-author Dr. Henry Lodge unpacks some interesting insight into that solution (bolding is mine):

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, enormous numbers of Russian men lost the only structure they had known.  With nothing to replace it, many of them lost their sense of place, of belonging, of matter, of simply being needed or relevant to their families and to their society.  What happened? Within just a few years, life expectancy for Russian men plummeted from sixty-four years to fifty-seven years.  They died limbic deaths. Heart attack and cancer rates soared as did depression, alcoholism, suicide, accident and violent deaths – all cries of limbic agony.  In some ways, what happened in Russia is happening to many of us in retirement, and it’s scary as hell.”

Hmmm – a forced sense of purpose doesn’t seem to have legs.  And the loss, however shallow, is devastating.

We’re sandwiched in a no-sense-of-purpose system.

OK, I may be going off the rails here – please let me know if you think I am.

I’m thinking we lack a “front-end system” that comes anywhere close to broaching the topic of life purpose.

We’re plopped into a classroom with thirty others, told what to learn, how to learn within a system that hasn’t changed in a hundred years.  Conformity is paramount, originality is often unrecognized, stifled.

Harry Chapin – the greatest troubadour ever – picked up on this and put it together in one of his greatest songs: “Flowers Are Red” – enjoy and ponder it here. 

We carry the conformity forward into the 40-year phase of this 20th-century life-cycle model and getta job, getta wife, getta family, getta mortgage, fenced yard, 2 1/2 kids, two cars and a labrador retriever, getta title, getta 401K, and getta gold watch.

A sense of “life purpose” in there? Maybe – evidence says usually not.

Then we back-end it with a wrap-up system called retirement that’s fully encumbered with an 85-year-old process whose purpose is to move us out and into a purposeless life of leisure and self-indulgence.

And then we die young.

Lacking a beginning, middle, and end, life-purpose development doesn’t have much of a chance it seems.  So we “live too short and die too long” in our society.

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us:

“Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.”

It’s not too late!

I’m encouraged.  I believe we are beginning to see the emergence of a focus on “life purpose.”  From this seat, it seems to be coming from those at the mid-life point – that uneasy time of tough questions (Why am I here? Does anybody care?); of waning career interest or opportunity; of empty-nesting; of a deepening sense of life’s finite nature; of a sense of not wanting to waste the acquired wisdom, skills, talents, and experiences on a cruise ship,  beach, golf course or pickle-ball court.

Maybe even a sense of having better answers to the mess the country finds itself in.

We have the tools.

Permit me to link two phrases that we should be pondering in the face of the messiness around us:

“Life purpose” and “Active wisdom”

Unless terminally infected with the narcissism our current culture promotes, we are drawn to serve, to pass on what we know, to lighten a better path for those behind. It’s called “generativity.“  It seems to surface the drive for a life purpose.

It provides the “why.”

“Active wisdom” is a term coined by anthropologist, activist, and writer Mary Catherine Bateson.  She calls it a “new stage” where “wisdom is reaped from years of experience and living.”  She calls it the “most acceptable and positive trait associated with longevity.”

“Active wisdom” brings the “what.”

Not as I did.

I’ll be your poster-child for the wrong path.  I drank the 20th-century Koolaid and barnacled-over my innate talents or any chance for life-purpose immersion for 6 1/2 decades.

But it came, gradually, grudgingly – slowly removing the last vestiges of conformity and the cultural expectations and beliefs that were in the way. It feels right to try to bring forward the mere modicum of my life’s accomplishments and acquired wisdom, season it with legions of mistakes, challenges, and trials and to share it as a light for somebody.

Is there certainty in it all? Not even.

But neither was there on the other path.

I’ll confirm that there’s lots of room on this “road less traveled”  – and that the need is great.

Hop on – you’re wired to make a difference.

Your thoughts, criticisms, compliments, complaints all mean a lot. Leave any or all below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this 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.”

 

What Do Retirement and the Internal Combustion Engine Have In Common? Read On!

I’ve read Fortune magazine cover-to-cover for over 30 years.

It’s bathroom reading and I usually get through each issue about the time the next one arrives.

Sorry – that’s more than you wanted to know. Here’s the point.

I appreciate the thoroughness of their reporting and the professional writing style. I need it to have at least a modicum of awareness of what is going on in the business world globally.

I was intrigued by a small article in this months’ issue which features “20 Ideas That Will Shape the 2020s.”

It’s an article by Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Whew!)

Ms. Figueres headlines her article:

“We’ll witness the end of the internal combustion engine era.”

The cliff notes of the article are that we will see an explosion of electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles because of the drive for climate change and, more significantly, the tremendous amount of investment in this new industry.  She claims that “the demand for low- or no-emission vehicles is increasing exponentially.”

As she predicts this demise, she says: “That is quite remarkable because the entirety of our economic growth over the last 150 years has come on the back of this technology and the fossil fuels that feed it.”

Perhaps a bit of climate-change-advocate hyperbole. But think about the significance, if true.

I suspect she doesn’t relate to geezers like me whose greatest automotive thrill was my new 1969 Olds 442 380 hp, 6-mile/gallon monster that won a few drag races at the impromptu Coors-fueled (us, not the cars) Midnight Winternationals on I-25 north of Cheyenne, WY.

Or for my brother-in-law, whose gem of a restored ‘67 Chevrolet muscle-car rattles neighbor’s windows at each startup.

Thing is – I believe Ms. Figueres is right.

Hard as it is to imagine, I believe the internal combustion engine is beginning to die a slow death.

Maybe it’s time.  Hard to argue against an electric vehicle (EV) that performs as well with less maintenance while helping Denver’s air be less of the brown, stinky daily occurrence it has become.

I know this is weird, but as I read the article, my one-track mind drew a parallel.

The internal combustion engine is about 150 years old and dying.

The concept of retirement is about 125 years old.  (Otto Von Bismark kick-started it in Germany in the mid-1890s.)

Is it time for it to die also?

I’m no Christiana Figueres and advice is worth what you pay for it, but I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that traditional retirement is dying a slow – and timely – death.

By “traditional” I mean the off-the-cliff, labor-to-leisure, vocation-to-vacation, no-work, golden-years-into-the-sunset type of retirement that still dominates mid-life dreams.

Timely?  Yeah.

Here in the U.S., we still hang on doggedly to an 85-year old relic that was established in 1935 to move older people out of the workforce to make room for the younger folks who were demonstrating in the streets.  We hung an arbitrary, artificial finish line of 65 on it at a time when the average American didn’t make it to 62.

Irrelevant then.  More irrelevant now with average life spans 18 years longer.

We’ve entrenched the number 65 in our minds like a road sign in concrete.   We’re hailed if we retire before it and scorned as an “unfortunate” if we miss it, despite its irrelevance.

How many other 85-year old concepts do you still have operating in your life? (OK – maybe you still play Monopoly which was also introduced in 1935.)

Traditional retirement should die.

Here are a few things that predict it’s demise:

  • A 2016 GAO report estimated that 48% of those over 55 had zero put away in a 401K.  With the demise of corporate pension plans, well over half of the American population are financially unprepared to retire. Some form of post-career work for many is inevitable.
  • We’re living longer – by a bunch.  The prospect of Leisure World and thirty years of bingo, bridge and boche ball isn’t resonating.
  • It’s an unnatural act that’s counter to our biology.  We either grow or decay.  Retire translates from a Middle French verb that means “retreat, go backward.”  That sounds like decay.
  • We’ve learned that work and continued learning are keys to longevity, that “winding down” comes with few rewards.
  • We’ve seen enough of the extended morbidity and early frailty visited on generations before us.
  • We want to finish out with more meaning having left a footprint that lives beyond us. We’re beginning to seek roadmaps to make that happen.

 

That’s what reality and research are telling us.  Fewer can do it; fewer want to do it; we’re beginning to concede that it’s not the smartest thing to do if we want our biology to do its job for as long as it’s designed to do it.

The alternative to the internal combustion engine has been defined. The alternative to traditional retirement is evolving.

Encumbered by tradition, the pressure of cultural expectations, old “bad ideas, myths, messages, and models,” and biological naivete, the roadmap to the alternative to traditional retirement is still fuzzy.

But a roadmap is developing.

Personally, I’m encouraged to see the emergence of two terms in the dialog about this changing retirement scene: unretirement and semi-retirement.

For many, the first is leading to the second as the lights come on to the downsides of retirement. Some step straight into the second as they enter the third age of life with the realization that they don’t have a time-stamp on the back of their neck and that there is still much to do.

Either way, it’s a trend line with culture-changing, nation-saving power and implications.

The death of the internal combustion engine will help save the planet.

The death of traditional retirement can help save a deteriorating culture and a divided nation.  In its place, we can resurrect what anthropologist, author, and activist Mary Catherine Bateson calls “active wisdom.”  Wisdom “reaped from years of experience and living.”  She calls it “the most acceptable and positive trait associated with longevity.”

What’s your plan for your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s?  It will likely involve an EV.  But will it involve AW – active wisdom?

I’m a small voice in a vital revolution. Come add your voice – help needed and there’s lots of room!

We value your opinions and feedback. Leave a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this 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.”

 

 

 

 

 

We Aren’t Made for the Life We Are Living.  Here’s why.

Do you remember your biology class in high school?

Considering that I’ll be celebrating my 60th high school reunion this year – assuming one of those remaining from my class of 12 has the inclination to organize it – you’ll forgive me if I don’t recall much from the class.

I remember Mr. Parsons, the most-liked teacher in our high school of 95 students.  And I do recall dissecting a frog amidst the smell of the formaldehyde from which it was extracted.

But I have a hunch, with adolescent hormones at play, my mind was probably elsewhere – more likely on Maureen and what the weekend might hold.

We probably talked about cell structure but I doubt we applied it to how it affects our own biology.  I don’t remember any discussion of the brain.  If there was, it was soon lost in favor or basketball or football practice – or Maureen.

The message we didn’t get – or missed – is that the very cells found in that frog are fundamentally the same as the 35 trillion or so we all have in our bodies – cell membrane, nucleus,  cytoplasm, ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi vesicles, mitochondria, plus some other stuff.

Cells that have been doing their thing for billions and billions of years. Cells that are organized into an amazingly complex 24×7 immune system that’s working its butt off to compensate for our biological naivete and the gazillion nefarious villains that want to attack.

However it happened, that kluged-up assembly enabled us to inherit a birthright of good health, a biological fortune.

Unfortunately, our lifestyles don’t honor that birthright. 

We seem to be hoping our birthright will catch up with our lifestyle rather than adapting our lifestyle to our birthright.  It’s like: if we watch enough TV and eat enough Carl’s Junior and biggie fries, our biological fortune will eventually adapt and honor our lifestyle.

OK – sorry – that was insulting.

But, think about it.  For multi-billions of years, cells – fundamentally the same ones you and I have a few dozen trillion of – haven’t changed in how they produce energy, divide, decay, and die.

Regardless of whether you believe we evolved onto the savannah some 300 million years ago or that we started as we are in a garden some mystical number of years ago, the fact is our cells work with a functional design that doesn’t work well with a twenty-first-century lifestyle.

I lean toward the savannah theory, with famine and saber-tooths the norm.  Cells interpreted the infrequent surfeit – of a feast on an animal kill – as a chance to prepare for the inevitable winter, famine or the need to escape the saber-tooth.  They dutifully stored the bounty as fat to burn when those conditions arose.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century.  No winters, no famine, no saber-tooths.  Our lifestyles ran away from our biology. Our cells haven’t caught up. And won’t.

So, they just do their thing and store that fat. And store that fat. And store that fat.

Waiting for a winter – or a saber-tooth to run away from.

And then they decay and die early.

Alas, we thus dishonor our biological fortune and “live too short and die too long.”

On this 21-st century journey, we’re 20 pounds heavier than 30 years ago on average but we’re no taller.

Sixty-five percent of U.S. males are overweight; twenty percent are obese.

Fifty percent of our population is pre-diabetic and seventy percent of those don’t know it.

We unconsciously accept that we will “get old and die” and then most of us find out that we will “get old and live”, enduring a sad life of extended morbidity and early frailty  In bodies that believe they are in the grip of famine.

Aging is up to nature; decay is up to us.

It’s pretty simple.  Our biology only knows growth or decay. Biologically, there is no retirement or aging – only growth or decay.  So we have a binary choice – a road to good health by promoting growth or a road to frailty through lifestyle choices.

Our cellular biology is still poised to prepare for winter, famine, and saber tooths while we wallow in an eternal summer of plenty romancing our remotes.

Dr. Henry Lodge said in the book “Younger Next Year”:

“Your brain has no care for your happiness, no thought about your retirement.  It is a ceaseless machine, in relentless pursuit of the perfect match between input and output – between growth and decay. With that thought in mind, think about what your physical brain learned from the way you lived today, and think about whether it told your body to grow or decay.”

We mistakenly assume that we are made for this life which has become a nightmarish mix of bad food, sedentary lifestyle, stress, loneliness, and chronic diseases.  Then we cap it all off with the “ultimate casualty” called retirement that ensures that we continue on the path called “decay” and off the path called “growth.”

Our take-home message? What we do physically, what we eat, what we think, what we feel affects our body with processes refined on the savannah.

Our biological fortune is ignored and abused.

There is no famine or saber-tooth coming to save us from the stored fat and its adverse effects.  We need only to gain an appreciation for the birthright and find suitable substitutes.

And that starts with a mindset that acknowledges we weren’t designed to live the way we do.

And that’s hard because how we live “feels so good” and the alternative is a direct assault on the comfort, convenience, and conformity we strive for.

While it kills us early.

Let us know what your thoughts are on this. Leave a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this 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.”

Beware the Accidental Leap into Your Third Age

“Restless, nearly retired, discarded, and bewildered.”

I found that phrase in Barbara Hagerty’s book, “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife.”  It describes many in the baby-boomer generation and the tone of numerous conversations I’ve had with prospective career or retirement coaching clients.

If you are at that mid-life point, you’ll be an outlier (or just plain liar) if you haven’t had some or all of these feelings.

 

Marc Freedman is CEO and founder of Encore.org, an organization that created the Encore movement linking middle-aged and older people with meaningful work that serves the social good.  He refers to it as “passion, purpose, and a paycheck.”  He has his arms around the challenges boomers face as they move into and through mid-life.

One of his core messages is “that we have not passed our expiration date.”

I became a Freedman fan  in 2014 after reading his book “The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife.”  He offers a lifeline to the many who find themselves in an “identity free fall” on a dispassionate career path full of uncertainty, wrestling with the question “what’s next.”

Ms. Hagerty quotes Freedman in her book, saying:

“A lot of people have identity very much tied up in their working lives beforehand and then they find themselves in an identity free fall. Society treats them as if they are a ‘step away from being the walking dead.'”

I relate to this life phase and the awareness that there are fewer days ahead than behind.  I hit that wall in my mid-fifties. It was the start of an agonizingly slow pivot to finding my life quest, resulting in three changes in career direction.

So far, that is.

I’m probably not done and may not be until it’s time to send my parts back to the universe.

I relate to Freedman when he says we reach “the realization that there’s probably enough time ahead to do something significant, and in many cases, it’s an imperative.”  We’re dealing with longevity bonuses of 20-30 years that previous generations didn’t have.  That’s almost two generations of time.  Think back to what you have seen develop, even in just one generation.

Two generations are a lifetime of potential growth, development, and contribution.

That is unless we buy the retirement schtick where we’re inclined to let decay take the front seat and put growth in the back.

But I’ll get off that soapbox early- I admit to being grindingly guilty of whipping that horse dead.

How to avoid becoming a bored (or trapped) Boomer

I decided against “remaking the wheel” this week and am providing links to a three-part series I posted in June 2018 entitled “How to Avoid Becoming a Bored Boomer.”

The series speaks to this topic and offers up nine suggestions for avoiding this bewildering phase.  It has been one of my most popular posts and was the top post on PBS’s Next Avenue popular blog site for several weeks running.

How to Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part One

How to Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part Two

How To Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part Three

I hope the series brings you value.  Let me know your thoughts by scrolling down and leaving a comment.

Thanks for your consistent support and for spreading the word.  If you haven’t joined, trip on over to www.makeagingwork.com, join the list and receive a copy of my free ebook “Achieving Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”