Should Your Retirement Include Continuing to Work? Only If Health and Longevity Are Important.

Working during retirement. Hmm. Isn’t that an anachronism?

Retire, by definition, means to  “retreat” or “seek a place of security and seclusion” or, as my Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it, “withdraw from use or service.”

Who wants to be useless?

Fewer and fewer are buying it.

It turns out working during retirement has been trending up steadily for some time.

Why does it make sense to continue to work, at some level, during retirement? Because we now know the importance of work and purpose in maintaining good mental and physical health as we age.

Work and longevity appear to be intrinsically linked.

We are buried in research confirming that work is a vital component of healthy longevity – contrary to what the traditional leisure-based retirement model has sold us for decades.

Few centenarians didn’t work until they couldn’t.

For decades now, we’ve been drinking the financial services industry Koolaid that sold us the idea that we’ve earned the opportunity to finish out in rest and relaxation. But the lights have come on and exposed this vocation-to-vacation, labor-to-leisure plan as a bit of a Trojan horse that leads people into a lifestyle that is not conducive to living a full, meaningful, healthy life.

A 2017 Rand Corp study confirmed that “return to work” by retirees is a definite trend:

  • 39 percent of Americans 65 and older who are currently employed had previously retired.
  • More than half of those 50 and older who are not working and not searching for work said they would work if the right opportunity came along

Chris Farrell, author and senior economics contributor for public radio, has been researching and writing about this topic for a few years. He authored a book entitled “Unretirement: How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Way We Think About Work, Community, and the Good Life” (paid link)

Farrell determined that what retirees miss most about their pre-retirement life is colleagues. In his book, he states:

“What’s constantly underestimated is that work is really a community. It turns out it’s much healthier and more satisfying to work for a bad boss than to sit on the couch and watch TV.”

This return-to-work is not always about needing the money, although it is a factor for many. The unfortunate reality is that most Americans are not financially prepared to enter a full-stop retirement and not generate some level of income. But even those who may not need the money find personal satisfaction in earning a paycheck doing something of value to others and society in general. And they appreciate the serendipity effect of knowing that continuing to earn an income stretches their retirement savings and reduces the stress of worrying about outliving their money.

I remain convinced that building work into one’s life plans for the “retirement years” is essential to living longer and healthier. Be it volunteer, for-pay, part-time, or full-time, work brings socialization, structure, meaning, purpose, a reason to get up in the morning.

And it obeys the basic rule of our biology – we either grow or we decay.

Work=useful=growth.

A full-stop, leisure-based retirement draws us away from those important life components.

Aware boomers, pre-boomers, and early GenXers are not excited about heading for the park bench or the lifestyle of retirees from previous generations.

Unretirement is here to stay and growing. As a career transition and retirement coach, I hear the stories of retirees who are unsettled and unhappy in their much-anticipated retired life. And I feel the angst of those approaching retirement age who express concerns about boredom, about leaving a legacy, about wanting to have meaning for the final chapters.

It’s a promising trend as we begin to realize that the talents, skills, and experiences of the 10,000 mid-lifers who are reaching 65 every day are terrible things to allow to go to waste pursuing a concept that has long outlived its usefulness.

What are your thoughts about “work in retirement.? We’d love to have your feedback. Drop down and leave a comment or email gary@makeagingwork.com. If you haven’t joined our reader list, visit www.makeagingwork.com, share your email address, and receive a new article every Monday. It’s all free, including the e-book we send when you join the list: “Achieve Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

Five Critical Steps to Thriving Within Your Longevity Bonus

You’ve heard it a thousand times.

We’re living longer. Yay!

We extended our average lifespan more in 110 years than we did in the previous 100,000 years. That’s quite a hockey-stick performance.

Makes you wonder why we waited so long. What was so magic about the 20th century? I guess you could say that a few folks woke up and started picking low-hanging fruit that was killing us early, and let it accelerate from there.

Like:

  • Washing hands before surgery. DUH!
  • Better sanitation.
  • Finding cures for most of the infectious diseases that dominated the early part of the century.
  • Improving education – availability, methods, and content.
  • Better food – quality and distribution.
  • Cleaner water.
  • Safer work environments and implements.

Medicine and technology teamed up and hockey-sticked it for us.

Then we hit a wall. It turns out that the progress stopped – and that longer doesn’t always mean better. The average lifespan in the U.S. has turned down each year since 2016.

It’s self-inflicted!

There’s only so much that medical science can do to maintain the acceleration. The fruit is now high in the tree and hard to get to.

We know that longer isn’t always better because Americans spend an average of ten years in ill-health, more than any other developed country. That’s a long time to feel bad – and it’s incredibly expensive.

It appears that it can only get worse as our population continues to shift to a higher concentration of over-65:

Source: AgeWave

As I wrote about last week, many of us get to the back-nine of life having double- or triple-bogeyed the front-nine with our marginal lifestyle habits and facing an accelerating downward slope that results in “living too short and dying too long.”

What’s the lifespan downturn telling us?

Could it be that we don’t give a darn about this gift of potential healthy longevity brought on by research, science, medicine?

Do we still buy the 20th-century myths, models, and messages about automatic senescence, fate versus choice, genetics versus habits?

Maybe. Probably.

But the scoreboard doesn’t lie. We still seem to choose not to flatten the back-nine slope and live longer in health and shorter in chronicity. Rather, we seem to be given to waiting and hoping for government, science, big pharma to find more miracle life-extenders when the best life-extenders have been around forever and are free.

But inconvenient. And sometimes uncomfortable.

Here are five things to consider while you wait for the next scientific/pharma miracle.

You’ll feel and look better while you wait. Oh, and BTW, you might save yourself and our society a lot of money.

  • Adopt WFPB instead of CRAP. Yes, my needle is stuck on the record – and you’re tired of hearing it. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is killing us slowly – and now, more and more of the world. It’s simple in concept, tough in practice. But we know moving to a Whole-Food-Plant-Based diet and away from Calorie-Rich-and-Processed will slow the slope.
  • Cancel Netflix. Or Hulu. Or Prime. Or whatever may have you, along with the average “down-sloper/retiree”, watching 49 hours of TV a week. Divert 15% of the 49 hours to getting your heart rate up and your muscles stronger. That’s only an hour a day of slope-flattening activity.

  • Get connected – and care. Don’t be a hermit.

Here’s an untold secret of longevity. Mary Zaraska spells it out in her powerful new book “Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100.” (paid link). It’s called having a strong network of family and friends as we age.

Zaraska states that what she learned through research and personal experience is:

” – building a strong support network of family and friends lowers mortality risk by about 45 percent. Exercise, on the other hand, can lower that risk by 23 to 33 percent. Eating six servings of fruit and veg per day can cut the danger of dying early by 26 percent while following the Mediterranean diet by 21 percent. For volunteering, it’s 22 to 44 percent.”

We already know that social isolation is a significant killer, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to AARP.

  • Renew your library card.

Did you know that 40% of college grads never open another book after graduation? It seems still too many of us have decided that those first 20 years of learning were enough, failing to acknowledge that our brains are like a muscle that we’ll lose if we don’t use.

Research is making a direct connection between continued learning and dementia. Curiosity is important for mental health. We’re fully capable of high levels of creativity during the “retirement” years. Never stop learning. Stretch your brain.

  • Unretire. It’s happening a lot. Many who bought the “full-stop retirement” Koolaid are experiencing the downsides and altering their retirement lives back to something more than relaxation and rest. Leisure-based, self-indulgent retirement has exposed itself as detrimental to long-term physical and mental health – a definite “slope accelerator.”

Simple, but not easy. The jury has returned with a verdict that our lifestyles are guilty for the deep slope and the big pile at the bottom of the hill. For us “back-niners” it’s a choice between a fence at the top of the slope or an ambulance at the bottom of the hill. We can wait for government, science, or big pharma to build a fence or we can be knowledgeable about our biology, team with our doc, and take charge.

And then that curve just might start turning back up.

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You’re Over 50 and On The Back-Nine. How Are You Going to Play It?

For the last few summers, I’ve been playing golf in a senior men’s league at a local muni. It’s a mid-week event, so this group is mostly retirees mixed with a few business owners who can step away from their businesses for a day.

This is truly a geriatric bunch – the average age is probably mid-70’s.

I help raise the average.

I truly believe, on any given Wednesday morning, it is the biggest concentration of 50″ waistlines and artificial knees and hips in the Denver metro area. Oh, and perhaps, the highest overall golf handicap average on any given golf course in the area at that time of the week.

A few of us walk the course.  Most of the fellas ride, turning a non-aerobic experience into a deep non-aerobic experience.

It definitely is a collection of guys well into the back-nine of life.

Since the groups change each week, there isn’t an opportunity to get to know individuals on a deep level. Plus, COVID prevents us from the 19th hole experience where a personal connection can develop. So, I’ve gotten only a few snippets of front-nine stories from weekly playing partners.

Can I please have my front-nine back?

This week I found myself thinking about life as two nines. I was helped along with the idea after a one-on-one Zoom conversation with exercise physiologist and author Dan Zeman and while reading his book “You Are Too Old to Die Young: A Wake-up Call for the Male Baby Boomer on How to Age with Dignity.” (paid link).

Dan was on the front edge of the exercise physiology profession, an early pioneer in the world of health, fitness, and sports medicine.  He has worked with notable athletes and sports organizations, including Tour de France winner Greg LeMond, the Minnesota Vikings and Timberwolves, and with professional athletes in the National Hockey League.

Dan aims his book at MBBs – male baby boomers. He’s on a life quest to raise the awareness amongst male boomers of the health and wellness impact of decisions made in the back-nine or second half of life, reminding us that we don’t get to play our front nine over.

His “front nine” reminder was poignant for me. I’ve shared in previous writings about my “wake up call” in 2015 at age 73 when I had my first-ever heart scan that revealed I was in the high-risk category for cardiovascular disease (CVD) despite having been a gym-rat and avid aerobic and strength-training exerciser for 3 1/2 decades.

I’m very lucky. Following normal nuclear- and echo-stress tests, we concluded that the calcium build-up in my arteries is spread around so I don’t have any significant blockage and can continue my aggressive exercise regimen.

That changed my back-nine choices.

My doc made it clear that the CVD was likely the result of front-nine choices. He didn’t use those terms but that was the message. My front-nine was pretty deplorable from a health and wellness perspective. As a child of the 40’s and 50’s, I grew up in a world void of health and wellness knowledge and interest.

Doctors, athletes, and celebrities advocated and advertised smoking. I started smoking seriously the minute high school sports were done (truth be known, I smoked the same day I competed in the half-mile run at the state championship track meet – I came in 16th out of 16). DUH!

Diet back then was pretty much what you killed and grew so it was meat and potato fare. Exercise stopped once high school was over.

My smoking habit continued for 18 years until age 37 and then gave way to the gym rat. But the diet didn’t evolve except to take full advantage of the more ubiquitous, tasty, junk-style C-R-A-P (calorie-rich-and-processed) food. The diet didn’t shift to plant-based until the heart scan wake-up call.

Call me “Dan’s Poster Child”!

I’m the poster child for Dan’s message.

The back-nine begins the down-slope as age accelerates its processes. The decisions during the front-nine highly impact the type and intensity of the decisions that need to be made during the back nine. We can’t stop the slope, but we can do a lot to slow it and reduce the severity.

Dan reminds us:

“It is never too late to change an unhealthy habit because the human body is capable of recovering from self-imposed trauma.”

My equivalent to “self-imposed trauma” showed up on that heart scan report.

My decisions to change to a more plant-based diet and to further intensify my exercise with increased emphasis on strength-training, along with continuing to stretch myself intellectually through my work, is my slope-flattening strategy.

Is it fun? Not so much. It’s about awareness of the importance of the upside of action and dread of the downsides of inaction.

Dan raises a global concern that we all should take seriously. Our devotion to seeking conveniences that make our lives easier and more comfortable and sedentary come with a price.  Have I mentioned Netflix, voice-activated remotes, and the fact that retirees now watch 49 hours of TV per week? Combine that sedentary, convenience-seeking lifestyle with poor diet, the #1 cause of early death, and we have a country headed for a financial calamity.

Over 60 million boomers are on the back nine, many carrying forward a really bad front-nine wellness score. Graphically, it looks like the “live short, die long” graphic I’ve included in articles before.

Suppose you are 45,50,60. An important question to ask yourself is: “How steep do I want that slope and how long do I want to stay at the bottom of the hill?” With chronic-illness treatment costs skyrocketing and assisted living/nursing home care already at $120,000 per year on average, it’s a question that merits early back-nine consideration.

Recent research by the AgeWave organization on post-retirement healthcare costs revealed this sobering news:

The evidence is already upon us. That same AgeWave research report revealed that the World Health Organization has flagged the U.S. with the longest average years in poor health of any developed country, despite spending more per capita than any other country.

That all validate’s Dan’s message and his encouragement to consider that our decisions at mid-life can flatten that slope and minimize – or eliminate – that time piled up at the bottom of the hill in the care of $13/hour orderlies.

Team this book with “Younger Next Year.”

As I’ve shared repeatedly, I have been heavily influenced by the book “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond” (paid link). I believe Dan’s book is a great extension and supplement to the YNY book. Dan provides a solid 12-step “dirty dozen” plan for avoiding an extended and expensive time at the bottom of the hill. It’s no-fluff, deeply-experience-based advice that every MBB should be taking seriously. Check it out at www.iamdanzeman.com.

Consider adding both books to your library. It could lead to this:

To my many female readers: thanks for listening and tolerating this male-oriented message. If you have one of those MBBs in your life, I sympathize with your having to deal with a fragile ego.

Buy him both books and be patient with his slow understanding of the consequences of his front-nine lifestyle decisions – and his unwillingness to admit to them. Please understand that it’s hard for us to admit that you get it and we don’t and that until we do, you will always live at least 5 years longer than we do.

We welcome your comments – leave us one below or drop us a note to gary@makeagingwork.com. Oh, BTW, you’ll see “paid link” with each book mentioned. I have an Amazon Affiliate account and earn a paltry sum if you buy the book – or anything – after clicking on that link. It doesn’t change the price to you, it just earns me about 5% of the cost of a cup of Starbuck’s awful coffee.

 

Work Yourself to Death? Not a Bad Idea!

I happened across an old article recently about “the oldest working CEO in the United States.” It was about Jack A. Weill, founder and CEO of Rockmount Ranchwear, a Denver-based manufacturer of western wear. Jack died in 2008 at 109. He was working as the CEO of Rockmount at 106, showing up daily for four hours and then retiring home to watch Andy Griffith reruns. He was admired and respected for his philanthropy and service to his community and became a Denver institution with a street named after him.

It reminded me that there may be something to this research telling us that work is a major factor in longevity – and that not all careers give in to a culturally-dictated endpoint.

I wrote about this idea almost three years ago when my subscriber list was mostly friends and family – with only 1/3 of them paying attention. I still think it’s a pretty good article so I’m reprinting it this week, with a few tweaks.

George Burns was guilty of some really fabulous quotes, most of them quite funny, some deadly serious. Many had to do with his advancing age (he died in 1996 at age 100).  Here are a few:

  • Retire? I’m going to stay in show business until I’m the only one left.
  • People are always asking me when I’m going to retire. Why should I?  I’ve got it two ways – I’m still making movies, and I’m a senior citizen, so I can see myself at half price.
  • How can I die? I’m booked.
  • As long as you’re working, you stay young.

Michelangelo died at 89 – at a time when the average lifespan was less than half that – still working as the architect for the replacement of a 4th-century Constantinian basilica that became St. Peter’s Basilica, called by some as the “greatest creation of the Renaissance.”  He also worked on a sculpture (the Rondani Peita) up until six days before his death.

Steve Jobs was widely reported to have worked up to the last day, yelling about something not being exactly perfectly correct.

 

Einstein never stopped.

 

Revisiting vocāre

Today we treat folks who choose to “work themselves until death” as some sort of wunderkinds or anomalies when a mere 150 years ago that was the norm.  That was before the Industrial Revolution changed the landscape of work and injected the concept of the artificial finish line called retirement.

In the process, it seems we’ve redefined, convoluted, and distorted an important word.

That word is “vocation.”

Vocation is rooted in the Latin vocāre, meaning to call, which suggests listening for something that calls out to you, a voice telling you what you are.

Today, we relate vocation to specialized training into a “career track” or a “job” via a vocational or trade school. Not likely the pursuit of a “higher calling” but more a decision based on need and what may be trending in the “job” market.

Grammarist.com defines a vocation as:

 “a calling, an occupation, or a large undertaking for which one is especially suited. It can be roughly synonymous with career or profession, though vocation connotes a seriousness or a commitment that these words don’t always bear.” 

Today, we tend to mix vocation in with two other words – career and job – when their distinctions are quite different.

Career

A quick look at the definition of “career” shows a big difference. Career has its origin in the Latin word “carrus” or “wheeled vehicle” denoting a “cart” and then later from the French word “carrier” denoting a road or racecourse. The dictionary defines career, as a verb, to mean “move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.”

Careers for many are just that – a mad rush for a long time that ends up going nowhere with that disappointment coming late in life. Or maybe it’s going somewhere in terms of provision and accumulation, but not in a way that fits the definition of a “calling”.

The checkered flag at the end of this racecourse is that coveted pot of gold called retirement, a finish line the desire for which may have impeded pursuit of a true calling.

Job

A job is the most immediate and relatable term as it’s what we do every day to produce income, the fuel that keeps us on the aforementioned racecourse. The dictionary defines job as “a lump, chore or duty.”  For some, that lump is a “lump of coal.” Consider that the average job is around 3.2 years and that during the average lifespan, most of us will have had a dozen or more “jobs.”

 

Does sound like a racetrack doesn’t it?  Perhaps that old word denoting a calling is what is missing.  As we zip past mid-life into our second half, it would be a good time to re-evaluate, resurrect, and reapply vocation in its true, traditional meaning.

 

But I’m passing 50 – isn’t it too late to find my “calling?”

It’s a pretty common question amongst mid-lifers. There’s that uneasy stirring going on deep in the gut. More days behind than ahead; lost enthusiasm for the chosen “racetrack”; a growing sense of aimlessness and emptiness; accumulation no longer important; the “who am I and why am I here”, “is it too late to make a difference?” questions that won’t go away.

It’s a critical fork-in-the-road time of life. One road gives in to the “social self” that has indoctrinated us into an artificial age-related culture and encourages us to remain a part of the crowd and stay-the-course to a landing called retirement.

The other road acknowledges a long-suppressed “essential self” that is insensitive to age and puts us on a trail that can enable a new takeoff rather than a landing.  Only this time the takeoff is launched through a re-discovery and resurrection of our deepest dreams and desires but applied using our deepest talents and acquired skills.

Warning!

The second fork may mean you could willingly work yourself to (until) death.

Second warning!

You may:

Evidence has been in for a long time. Work is necessary for longer, healthier living.

Polls of centenarians have revealed that an astonishingly high percentage of them continue to work and that they rank working alongside being able to walk as one of the keys to their longevity.

The universe doesn’t want your parts back yet

I’m a fan and follower of Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach,  considered to be the most successful entrepreneurial coach on the planet. In a  podcast from a series entitled “Exponential Wisdom” that he does with Peter Diamandis, Dan stated that he feels he has successfully “disenfranchised” most of the 18,000 entrepreneurs he has trained from the idea of retirement.

He and Diamandis have tagged retirement as the “ultimate casualty.”

Together, they emphatically emphasize that “stopping and retirement means you are ready to retire your bits back to the universe.”

Not sure about you. I’m in no hurry.