Sixty-years-old or about to be? Here Are Some Experience-based Suggestions for the Path Ahead.

As a 78-year-old I’ve been there and done the 60-year-old thing.

The experiences and decisions of my late 50s and early 60s played a big role in developing the roadmap I’m navigating for the rest of my life. I’m dedicated to sharing this experience in hopes that what I’ve learned will help others at this juncture to develop a roadmap for their own “third age” or “post-mid-life-transition” phase of life.

The late 50s, early 60s present us with opportunities to make some of the most critical and significant decisions we will make in our lives.

I’d like to share just three thoughts that may help pave a healthy and purposeful path for this “third age”.

1. Reject the conventional, decades-old cultural expectations for what lies ahead.

By that, I mean rejecting the view that this next phase is a time to “wind down and come in for a landing”. At 60, we are carrying forward decades of “retirement indoctrination” e.g. time to slow down, kick back, indulge ourselves.

With COVID, many more of us will join the growing number who are unprepared financially for traditional full-stop retirement – perhaps as high as 60% of us, according to some recent reports. With that may come the joint fear of running out of money and the subtle condemnation that our culture lays on us if we don’t retire on or before that sacred number 65.

Yes, there remains a significant number who are “financially prepared” and still anticipate a full-stop retirement convinced they have earned and are entitled to the self-indulgence it allows. Although declining, it’s still an attitude that persists with the help of a powerful but relatively unchanged financial-services industry. It’s a model with 85-year-old legs, conceived for political reasons in 1935 that established an artificial finish line of 65 when the average American didn’t make it past 62.

Facing 3–5 years of retirement, it made sense for your parents or grandparents to head to the beach, golf course, or Leisure World. Today, with us living 20–40 years longer, the model doesn’t fit. Thirty years of golf or bingo, bridge and boche ball, and the bulging waistline that accompanies it doesn’t make sense.

Whether you are financially prepared on not, my suggestion for this life juncture is to consider redefining retirement. Consider that you may be going forward with a mindset that is out of step with the world around you – not to mention your biology – if traditional retirement is the model you are pursuing for the balance of your life.

If you agree, or this interests you, here are three solid resources that you will find helpful:

There is considerable duplication across all three books but each also contains unique and powerful suggestions and preparatory activities.  Read all three, and you have the equivalent of a master’s degree in “non-financial retirement planning.”

FULL DISCLOSURE: Should you buy any of these by clicking on the live link, it will be at the regular price but I will earn an Amazon Affiliate commission – about enough to buy a quarter cup of Starbuck’s awful coffee.

2. Take some time to reflect, reassess, and resurrect.

Have you had questions like these bouncing around in your head? “Why am I here?” “Is this all there is?” “Is it too late to leave a footprint?”

Or the one that really stung me years ago: “Is it true that the number of people attending my funeral will largely depend on the weather?”

If so, you are at a healthy spot. This is the perfect time to respond to those healthy questions and carve out some time – alone or with a supportive partner – to reflect on what your life has amounted to. But, with an eye on the positive.

Then start asking yourself even tougher questions.

I’ll reuse the important quote I used in my 6/15/20 blog from author Laurence C. Boldt:

“All imaginative journeys are prompted by questions. The mind runs on questions. Questions form a kind of skeletal structure upon which your life is built. New questions, deeply asked, will shape a new life.”

Questions like:

  • Is there a story to my life?
  • Do I have a basic philosophy of life that is my own?
  • Do I have a purpose for the rest of my life?
  • What is my part in this grand play of life?
  • How can I make a difference?
  • What do I want to do?  What must I do?
  • What can I realistically achieve in the span of my life?

We don’t reach 60 without doing a lot of things right. We got there consciously or unconsciously using some skills that were wired into us at conception.

There is also a chance that some of those skills or talents were “barnacled over” as you dedicated yourself to “provision” rather than “aspiration” and helped build someone else’s dream with your career.

It’s a good time, if you haven’t, to consider doing some basic personality or strengths assessments (DISC, Strengthsfinders, Enneagram, etc.) to uncover or remind you of how you are wired up. Chances are fairly high that you have been operating outside of your core talents and strengths. We all do it in the interests of providing and meeting cultural expectations defined for us by the “big Ps” in our lives – parents, peers, and professors.

I finally had to acknowledge all this in my mid-sixties after leaving corporate life at 60, starting my own recruiting business and realizing that my corporate sales and marketing experience – although successful by monetary and title standards – was not ideal for how I was equipped.

I ignored the results of multiple assessments that consistently suggested that I was at my best in a learning and teaching mode. My career in sales and marketing wasn’t ideally aligned with that. Yet I forged on, yielding to cultural expectations and rejecting the input of the assessments.

For instance, I took the Strengthsfinder assessment THREE times, refusing to accept the results, which, BTW, were always consistent.  I just knew that the Gallup organization would have come to their senses by the time I took it the third time.

My venture into the recruiting business gradually moved me in the direction of these core talents and strengths to where now I feel that I am achieving the intersection of what I’m best equipped to do, what I’m good at, and a need that exists in the marketplace.

The Japanese have a term  “ikigai” – a reason for being. Or a reason to get up in the morning. I’m getting closer to “ikigai” day-by-day. But I had to shed some deep-seated cultural influences.

Based on experience and feedback from others, I’ve learned that the process of reflecting, assessing, acknowledging, and resurrecting latent talents and strengths can effectively put one on a path that will turn this extended period of life into the most productive, fulfilling and purposeful time of your life.

3. Get serious about, and take control, of your health.

Quick reality check: have you done your body and brain a lot of favors up to this point?  I didn’t think so.

I hadn’t, despite being a gym rat for 25 by the time I hit 60.  The statistics on length of life and the level of extended morbidity and early frailty amongst our general population in this third age bears out the fact that we generally do a pretty crappy job of taking care of ourselves – especially through those grinding years of accumulating stuff, titles, image.  You know what I mean – that period where we let a culture that isn’t friendly to good health dictate our lifestyles.

We can make all the grand plans we want for this new period of extended longevity. It will be meaningless if we don’t feel good.

Dr. Mario Martinez, in his book “The Mindbody Self: How Longevity is Culturally Learned and the Causes of Health Are Inherited” makes an important point when he says:

“We inherit millennia of wisdom on how to achieve optimal health. Rather than mechanical products of our genes, we are the coauthors of their expression. With few exceptions, illnesses are only genetic propensities, not inevitable disruptions waiting their time to unfold.”

In other words, we start life with a birthright of good health. Our bodies are a collection of 35 trillion cells, or thereabouts, that have somehow been kludged together into this amazing 24×7 immune system that works its butt off to keep us healthy. That’s our inheritance.

Through our culturally-influenced lifestyles, we choose to screw that up.

 

Excuse the brashness, but collectively we are very health care illiterate. We don’t know how our bodies work and what they need to carry us through life optimally.

We succumb to a lifetime of seeking comfort. convenience, and conformity. We view good health as the absence of sickness and have turned healthcare into a $35 copay experience with our doc when things skid off the tracks, within a healthcare system that only dispenses medical advice, not health advice.

Rather than adopting a lifestyle of “proactive prevention” we turn to a system designed to provide “reactive cure.”

Over 60% of early death in our culture is due to an inappropriate diet. Early death due to poor diet just passed smoking as the #1 cause of premature death!!

Yet, doctors receive no training in nutrition. So we are functioning within a healthcare system that doesn’t care much about what we eat. Or doesn’t seem to because you won’t get nutrition counseling in our “drug it or cut-it-out” system.

Couple that with a profit-driven food industry that doesn’t give a rip about our health, we are fighting countervailing forces to maintain optimal health.

That’s why, regardless of age –  and especially at 60 and beyond –  it’s important to become the CEO of your health, become literate about how your body works at the cellular level, take charge, and change to habits that will support you with good health going forward.

It’s never too late to start. It’s always too early to quit.

The five top killers in our culture – heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, dementia – have not changed in decades. These are all lifestyle diseases and all are preventable.

We have a “whole-life potential” benchmark already establish for us. We know that the body is capable of lasting 122 years and 164 days because Jeanne Calment of Paris lived that long – the longest living human on record.

Yet, on average, we fall seriously short of that benchmark, achieving only 66% of it on average.

The gap is lifestyle.

I was heavily influenced, in my 60s, by two books that helped me deepen my commitment to protecting my health, although I have been a strong health advocate and avid exerciser for over four decades. You may find them enlightening as well.

“Dare to Be 100” by Dr. Walter Bortz, semi-retired Stanford geriatric physician helped me understand why “there is no biological reason that I shouldn’t live to 100 or beyond” and what I can do to enhance my chances of getting there.

The other was “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond.” This perennial best-seller helped me understand how my body works at the cellular level and what those cells need to support me with good health.

Let me quote the late Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author:

“The simple fact is that we know perfectly well what to do. Some 70 percent of premature death and aging are lifestyle-related. Heart attacks, strokes, the common cancers, diabetes, most falls, fractures, and serious injuries, and many more illnesses are primarily caused by the way we live. If we had the will to do it, we could eliminate more than half of all disease in men and women over fifty. Not delay it, eliminate it.”

I’ll leave you with this guideline, also from Dr. Lodge. It’s called “Harry’s Rules” and it is a simple, hard-hitting set of rules that will enable good health and successful aging.

Harry’s Rules

Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.

Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.

Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.

Spend less than you make.

Quit eating crap!

Care.

Connect and commit.

Good luck on your journey. You are about to step into the most exciting, most exhilarating, most impactful, and fulfilling time of life.

If you so choose.

Agree or disagree? We’d love to know. Scroll down and leave a comment or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com. If you aren’t on our weekly email list, you can join at www.makeagingwork.com.  It’s free – we publish a new article every Monday.

The Idea of Retirement Has Stolen Our Inner Magician. Let’s Get It Back!

“We all know that nature abhors a vacuum. The same is true of our imaginations. The Magician makes this principle work for him. Drawing a magic circle, he creates an empty space in which to work his magic. You can think of your goals as providing the boundaries of this inner circle. Within the empty spaces of this circle, your imagination or inner magician works to create the outcomes you desire. On the other hand, if we don’t give our imaginations constructive things to do, they tend to fill up with junk and recycle images of negativity and doubt. It’s up to the Hero to supply the inner Magician with challenging creative demands that will keep it constructively engaged and out of mischief. Because our imaginations abhor a vacuum, they are our best friends or our worst enemies. The true Magician makes her imagination her friend.”

Laurence G. Boldt, “Zen and the Art of Making a Living”

Where is our imagination?

I guess you can tell I like this book since I quoted Mr. Boldt extensively last week. I find it to be one of those “hidden gem” books loaded with “contrarian common-sense” applicable to my purpose (READ: it’s not for everybody) that comes more alive with each reading.

I pondered and meditated on Boldt’s paragraph this morning after allowing myself to do a mental swim in all the junk and crap that is going on around me.

I’ll bet you’ve been there. Perhaps still there. Doing that type of mental swim is never a good idea. It’s really easy to do, isn’t it?

I’m realizing I’m not being very “imaginative” when it comes to filters. How imaginative is it to flip back and forth between Fox News and MSNBC?  Which I’ve been guilty of so that I can say that I am “considerate of both sides” of the insanity that they both peddle.

Or to scan through the Denver Post over my oatmeal fully aware that I’ve just wasted 30 minutes swimming in more junk.

As I wrote about last week, while in this unimaginative channel, do I fret over riots or respirators? COVID or cops? Conspiracy theory A or conspiracy theory B? The stock market or the wet market?

This is as crazy a mash-up of insanity as ever in my eight decades on this mudball. A media field day, nirvana. And energy-sapper extraordinaire!

Nobody is coming to save us!!

Except our imagination. A sense of purpose. Undying principles.

Last week, I posed the question “Is COVID a Cataclysm or a Catalyst?” I suggested that COVID, in many ways, may be a catalyst in the form of a receding tide revealing our “nakedness.”

What is that nakedness?

  1. That we are rudderless with the loudest voices and knee-jerk decisions guiding the ship instead of common sense and a true sense of community.
  2. That a larger-than-self-purpose or spiritual quest has given way to societal conditioning, conformity, to “get-mine-now” consumerism, to “garage-door- up, garage-door-down” sense of community, to “us” versus “them” at every turn.
  3. We’ve come to expect “big government” or “big business” to save us, both of which have proven themselves deeply skilled at altruism head-fakes.
  4. That some long-standing practices have been exposed as harmful and/or fraudulent. As in a consumerist lifestyle. As in retirement!

“Anxiety is the hand-maiden of creativity”

I wish I knew who to attribute that quote to since it is so timely.

COVID-spawned anxiety is very real and ubiquitous. We can be creative within that anxiety or be crushed by it.

Here’s a dose of anxiety: fully one-third of Americans now feel they will never be able to retire. According to Yahoo Money, seven in 10 Americans expect the pandemic to hurt their retirement savings, with a fifth predicting a severe impact.

I can think of few things that can create more anxiety – aside from severe health issues – than something that futzes with our ability to retire. It would seem that there isn’t much that can dump more cortisol/adrenaline/norepinephrine into our increasingly fragile immune system than the prospect of not being able to achieve that pseudo-entitlement and to have to – oh, horrors!! – continue to work.

This should be music to our ears!

I heard you say it: What, are you nuts? Risk your readership with a direct frontal assault on this revered institution?

Nothing new here – for three years, I’ve been part of the growing crowd that is exposing traditional retirement for what it really is – a trojan horse with few upsides and a plethora of downsides.

I’m encouraged that one of the greatest catalytic impacts of COVID may be to finally put traditional self-indulgent, leisure-based retirement on life-support.

Name something less imaginative than retirement.

Let me help as you ponder the question.

  • The word came from the French verb “retirer” which means to “withdraw, go backward, retreat to a place of seclusion.”  Will you find that in your DNA? Only if you’ve tabled your imagination.
  • It’s an 85-year old concept, designed for political purposes with an arbitrary, “artificial finish line” of 65 at a time when people rarely lived to 62. Let’s spell it together:  i-r-r-e-l-e-v-a-n-t.
  • With help from the media and the product-peddling financial services industry, we’ve been convinced that “work” is a dirty four-letter word and something to jettison when in fact it turns out to be a central tenet of good mental and physical health.
  • It exploits the myth that senescence is automatic and unalterable when in fact the opposite is true.
  • Some of its most identifiable fruits are boredom, sedentary living, withdrawal from continuous learning, and ultimately “living too short and dying too long.”  Kinda like this life-model that still persists today:
  • Retirement doesn’t exist in nature and didn’t exist anywhere on the planet 150 years ago. It’s yet another manipulative tool designed by man for political advantage that morphed into an “entitlement” that appeals to and exploits our decadent, lazy nature.
  • How imaginative is it to suggest one pack up their accumulated skills, talents, and experiences and trade them in for bingo, bridge, boche ball, and beach bungalows while denying society the power of that accumulated wisdom and common sense?

End of rant. The list can go on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imaginative would be to say:

I was created with unique skills and talents that I choose to continue to make available to humanity until I can no longer.

How can that not be healthy for our sagging culture?

How can that not be better for a personal biology that offers only two options – growth or decay?

How can that not be better for those behind us who are so uncertain of what lies ahead?

Wisdom and experience redeployed and not wasted, common sense resurfaced, timeless principles resurrected – somehow it just sounds more imaginative.

A “New Retirementality”, a “Victory Lap”, and a “REWIRE!”

COVID is accelerating the much-needed redefinition of what post-career, post-parenting life can be.

If you are at that life juncture, here are three books you may want to check out that do a great job of delivering imaginative “redefinition” messages along with actionable ideas to assist in the transition:

Let ‘s refind our inner magician and imaginatively reinvent our way out of this chaos.

Because no one is coming to save us!

I appreciate you and thank you for reading. I also appreciate and benefit from your feedback.  Let me know what you think with a comment below.

If you are not on the list, it’s free and easy to do so at www.makeagingwork.com.  Come join the growing tribe.

 

 

Is COVID a Cataclysm? Or a Catalyst? I’m Going With the Latter

 

 

How’s your whiplash going? Mine sucks!!

I’m coming off a bad week. Actually, two weeks of funk.

Last week was the first time in over two years that I missed a Monday 5 p.m. blog post.

Couldn’t do it. The draft that I ran by my first-level “copyeditor” (my roommate of 49 1/2 years) got me a diplomatic groin kick.

As in: “Are you serious?”  “Who are you trying to be?” “Reel it in, Bucko!” “I don’t know you!”

Seems the article was a tad political and wholly judgmental – from an old dude who is in no position to be judging anybody on anything.

It had to be the whiplash.

I’m blaming COVID whiplash for resurrecting my arrogance, thinking my poison pen would move the societal needle. Never has, never will. Always backfires.

Which WHO/CDC directive do I believe or follow this week?

One rogue cop = elimination of police departments.  Whaaa?

A death in Minneapolis = free big-screen TVs at Walmart in California.

Stock market or wet market?

Hannity or Maddow? (Both are nuts!)

Open, don’t open.

Return to work, don’t return to work.

Retire, don’t retire.

All but the last two will fade away from our immediate consciousness. I’m guessing the last two represent a couple of the most pressing and lingering questions facing us going forward, especially in the 50-55+ demographic I enjoy working with as a life transition coach.

Emergence from adolescence?

Some have suggested that COVID may be a catalyst, perhaps the last vestiges and the most painful growing pains of us growing out of “adolescence” and maturing into “adulthood” as a society.

Surely, you’d think over two-and-a-half centuries would be long enough to mature into adulthood.

But then, maybe we need a few more adolescent tantrums to get there, to fully expose how we’ve lost our way culturally.

As much as anything our uncertainty reminds us that we have less control over life than we think we do, especially as we navigate through pervasive risk which may be the new normal as we get more globally interdependent, get sicker environmentally, and less healthy as individuals.

We’ve been swimming naked.

Warren Buffet famously said:

“It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked.”

I know – he was talking about the scamming that goes on in the financial services industry. But, something in my gut tells me COVID is a receding tide and much of what we’ve become culturally is standing naked.

As in, what work has become for many.

As in our pre-occupation with retirement.

Are we finally beginning to drive a stake through the heart of meaningless employment and traditional retirement?

Let me extract some stats from this Forbes article that would say maybe we have at least bought the stake and the hammer when it comes to employment:

  • A recent study by CareerBuilder.com shows that a whopping 58 percent of managers said they didn’t receive any management training.
  • Fifty-eight percent of people say they trust strangers more than their own boss.
  • Seventy-nine percent of people who quit their jobs cite ‘lack of appreciation’ as their reason for leaving.
  • American workers forfeited nearly 50 percent of their paid vacation in 2017. The fear of falling behind is the number one reason people aren’t using their vacation time.
  • The Conference Board reports that 53 percent of Americans are currently unhappy at work.

Do we really want to continue to mix the above with one-hour commutes, drab-towers of cubicles, stupidly-high parking fees to pay for ecologically destructive lots, bad fast food at our desks, stress?

Better questions = better lives.

It’s a good time to remember that the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of the questions we ask of ourselves.

I was reminded of that this week trudging through a re-read of “Zen and the Art of Making a Living” in which author Laurence C. Boldt states:

“All imaginative journeys are prompted by questions. The mind runs on questions. Questions form a kind of skeletal structure upon which your life is built. New questions, deeply asked, will shape a new life.”

If nothing else, COVID is at least shaking trees and raising quality, transformational questions at a time when the quality of our health, relationships, and ecology are declining.  The quality of the questions starts getting really good and deep at mid-life and beyond for many.

I’m confident that COVID and the cousins that follow will move us down a path of more wholesome, purposeful, less-materialistic, planet-replenishing ways of life. We’re finding out quickly how we can do without what we thought we couldn’t do without that we busted our humps to avoid being without.

Aren’t we getting a big gulp of the shallowness of accumulation? Are we realizing that all this “getting” has an endpoint that we are approaching rapidly?  What if, instead of a $75,000 Beemer, I bought a $35,000 Honda Accord and two used Hondas for two families in need?

Are we finally going to acknowledge that retirement and the fast-track, at age 62, to a 1,000 unit high-rise retirement community – advertised as “cruises without the motion” but in actuality, cleverly-disguised virus petri-dishes  – might not be the wisest decision?

What is the story of your life?  Is there a “Quest?”

Your life – my life – is a story. And they are changing, this time in pretty big chunks.

Chances are if you are at or beyond midlife, you are asking these types of questions (Sourced from “Zen and the Art of Making a Living”)

  • Is there a story to my life?
  • What am I doing here?
  • Do I have a basic philosophy of life that is my own?
  • What is my part in this grand play of life?
  • How can I make a difference?
  • What do I want to do?  What must I do?
  • What can I realistically achieve in the span of my life?

Big, important questions, all accelerated by something we can’t even see.

Let me wrap with more from Laurence C. Boldt as he writes about crafting the story of your life:

“If I could look at it objectively, would I want to read the story of my life? Does it grab and hold my attention? Does it have the elements of a good story: challenges to overcome, growth, direction, confidence, a larger-than-self purpose? If the answer is no, then perhaps the main character needs development; the plot needs to be clarified, expanded, sharpened: or excitement needs to get generated by increasing the tension between what could be and what is. If you can honestly answer yes, then – where is your next chapter going?”

Be safe. Stay with the “guidance” despite the whiplash,

Crank up the intensity of the questions!

I, for one, have determined the main character in my story needs serious development. That’s why I write. You, as a reader, are a player in that development. I appreciate you and thank you for joining the list. And especially for your comments.  If this resonates – or not – let me know what you think with a comment below.

If you are not on the list, scoot over to www.makeagingwork.com and hop on.