Do you really care if you live to old age or not?

Please forgive me for taking a shortcut this week. We have spent an exhausting week moving to another home and I haven’t had the energy or bandwidth to push any creative content buttons.

 

 

I’m reposting an article I submitted a few weeks ago to a question on Quora.com that has been garnering some attention. Hope you find some value in these ramblings.

The question was:

” Do you really care if you live to old age or not?”

My response:

Sure I care if I live to old age, whatever that is. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve been given the gift of life, so why not try to take it to the max. I’m 79, intend to live past 100, and try to gear my lifestyle to doing the things that will enhance my chances of getting there.

Will I get there? I don’t know. My “front nine” lifestyle would say that getting there on my “back nine” might make it tough. Nonetheless, what I do know is that I’ve got today and I’ll live it out and do the same tomorrow. One day at a time trying to do the right things to and for my biology and moving forward with a mission and a sense of purpose.

What is old age?

Can you define it for me? Is it 60 or older as most people would still be inclined to say? Is it 79, like me? To a 50- or 60-year old, I suppose I would be considered old. But to a centenarian, I’m still a “young adult.”

My point is, age is a mindset. It can be either chronological – which is where most people come from – or it can be functional, which is a much healthier perspective.

For most folks, the prospect of getting old is fearful and disturbing. Theirs is a vision of nursing homes, walkers, oxygen tubes, wheelchairs, and drool cups. For others – a minority still – it’s a time of continued growth, vitality, creativity, and contribution, up to the point of true old age where we do a 180 back to total dependence.

Fate vs choice.

There was a time, not long ago, when we considered our lifespan a matter of “fate”, God’s will. We knew little about how to do the things that could affect our longevity. We now know that it’s no longer “fate” but “choice” that can play a big role in determining both the years in our life and the life in our years.

So, I’m going on this ride as long as I can. I know I will need resilience along the way because there will be setbacks, be those losses of loved ones, illnesses, or other calamities. But I know that continued engagement in the form of work will contribute mightily to how well I live out the final chapters.

I started a business at age 60 and am starting another and different one at age 79. I’m truly inspired to get up each morning and, frankly, don’t dedicate any mental bandwidth to thinking about whether I’m old or not. I’m having too much fun.

I’m On My Next-to-Last Mattress – How ’bout You?

In 2019, we moved from our golf-course home of 19 years to a smaller home, deciding to rent for a while. It became a major purging event, including getting rid of our saggy 20-year-old Sleep Comfort mattress. I believe the mattress we slept on before that one lasted about 15+ years.

The other day, I completed the “Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator” that was developed years ago by Dr. Thomas Perls, MD. It’s a pretty “cool tool” and it’s free. Click on the link above and your there. It asks 40 questions, takes about 10 minutes to complete, and in a matter of minutes returns a prediction of how long you will live based on the information you provide.  I recall stumbling across it and completing the questionnaire a few years ago but couldn’t recall how I had scored.

Dr. Perls is no slouch. He’s a professor of Medicine and Geriatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine and is a geriatrician at Boston Medical Center. He also is among the international leaders in the field of human exceptional longevity and the founder and director of the New England Centenarian Study, the largest study of centenarians and their families in the world.

I’m pretty sure I took the calculator before I went public with my hare-brained goal of living to 112 1/2 so I decided to take it again. Not surprisingly, I came up 17 years short of that number with a prediction that I’ve got 17 years left to get to the endpoint of 95 that the calculator predicted. Considering that 112 1/2 is classified as “super-centenarian” terrain and that there are less than a thousand of them worldwide, I guess I shouldn’t expect it to come real close to my goal.

Oh, yes – about the mattress.

I’m now using this as my answer when someone asks my age:

“I’m on my next-to-last mattress.”

The facial expressions are worth the risk of being permanently cast as deranged.

But, wait, Dr. Perl’s tool says I’m on my last mattress.

I refuse to accept it. There’s that denial thing again.

On one hand, I guess I could take some pride in being told I’ll beat the average lifespan for the American male (78.9) by 20%. But that’s not good enough.

I’m holding out for at least 100 which would validate my insolent response. That makes the current mattress my “next-to-last.”

Dr. Perl’s calculator sends a report with a list of suggested lifestyle changes that may help you beat its prediction. (No, choosing healthy parents and grandparents isn’t one of them – he’s serious).

My list of recommendations was pretty short and included a few things that don’t fit for me. Such as:

  1. Try to work fewer hours. The tool doesn’t understand that when you are pretty much a hermit and work and play mostly intersect, a 60 hour week isn’t a threat. His recommendation speaks to the fact that most people don’t like what they do and do it too much and too long for the wrong reasons.
  2. Less caffeine. Really? I believe that coffee-as-a-problem has been solidly debunked. Coffee and I are one until noon at least.
  3. More dairy to fight osteoporosis. NOT! I don’t do dairy and get enough calcium elsewhere.

Try the quiz. There may be a pearl or two in the suggestions that come back with the report. On the other hand, if you are in the large majority that considers the idea of living to 100 as repugnant, maybe just stick with Netflix or Facebook. This won’t light you up.

I’d love to hear how you respond when someone asks your age (NOTE: the mattress response does not work well at the DMV). Who out there has the most creative non-number response? Leave us a note below with your creative (insolent) response.

WARNING! New Virus Alert for Over-50 Adults

It’s Sunday, I’m sitting in my home office, it’s snowing like crazy – and I’m pissed.

At this moment, I’ve become the “grumpy, immobile, smelly ‘ol fart I swore I’d never become.” (That’s the subtitle to a book I wrote several years ago that seems to be stuck in eternal unpublished mode).

We’re in the middle of a two-day major snow dump – probably around two feet by the time it passes through. It’s heavy spring stuff that draws out lots of “heart attack” warnings about dragging out the snow shovel.

My 20- and 30-something nieces and nephews have offered to come over and shovel my driveway and sidewalk “because they love us and want to help.” Then before they could arrive, my next-door neighbor, James, attacks my walk and driveway, unsolicited, with his Toro, making quick work of the first 7″ of the snowfall. Yes, James knows how old I am but not much beyond that.

Mine was the only driveway other than his own that he plowed.

I thanked him, biting my tongue as I did so.

I gave it another hour or so and went out and hand-shoveled the next 6″, extracting a warning from my bride “not to overdo it.”

What am I – an invalid?

Does 79 guarantee a myocardial infarction when at the end of a snow shovel?

So, I’m sitting here feeling put-upon because I’ve reached a certain number.

I’ll go back out again in a couple of hours and attack the next 6″ –  maybe even twice if the front persists.

I’m sworn to never own a snowblower for two reasons: (1) they are, alongside lawnmowers, one of the worst polluters on the planet, and (2) I view snow shoveling as a great aerobic and anaerobic exercise and an excellent back-and core-strengthening event.

C’mon, mother nature just served up a great exercise opportunity and a break from my boring treadmill, Bowflex, and upright bike routine.

Somehow that idea falls on a lot of deaf ears. Because you see, I’m 79.

So, yeah, I’m sitting here in my “cave” selfish, indignant, disgustingly self-centered, ungrateful, grumpy, pouting, and (add your own here_________). I was born with all of those talents.

As fate, the muse, luck, or whatever would have it, as I pout, I end up with my nose into an article on Medium.com entitled “Age is a Mental Virus.” You can read it here.

I have followed the author, Julia Hubbel, for some time. She’s a prolific, profane, Type-A, late-60-something with an edge, especially when it comes to aging. I’ve learned, from her writings, that she’s particularly sensitive about the “your number is your age” syndrome that most of us buy into, saying in the article that “the absolute belief that you deteriorate swiftly with age is, in fact, genuinely deadly.”

Hubbel references a highly-touted research paper by Yale School of Health Professor Becca Levy. In it, Levy says (the bolding is mine):

Exposure to negative and positive age stereotypes over time plays a crucial role in whether people develop signs of dementia in their later years. The central message of the theory, and the research supporting it, is that the aging process is, in part, a social construct.

She goes on to say:

How you and I see ourselves, and how society treats us as aging human beings, has more to do with our quality of life than age itself.

The study is worth reading if for no other reason than it punches missile-sized holes in the notion society shoves at us that age=deterioration, decrepitude, despondency, and depression.

In sum, if we believe it sucks to be older, it will suck to get older. In fact, Prof. Levy’s research showed that those who bought into negative aging stereotypes are far more likely to suffer a cardiovascular event ( congestive heart failures, heart attacks, and strokes) in the next few decades.

There’s the virus. The mental virus. Sneaky. Subtle. Insidious. Self-inflicted.

There’s no Pfizer or Moderna or J&J or Astra-Zeneca solution for this one. No visits to the hospital or ambulance rides. Just a slow but accelerating slide down the slope on the back-side of life, unaware that the tough but simple antidote is a mindset change and a change in language.

Next time you, or someone in your presence, utters something like “getting old sucks” or “aging is for the birds” or any of the plethora of popular but deadly cliches that proliferate amongst post-50 adults, just know that you or they are infected. It’s likely that many of those closest to you have the virus. It will show up in their innocent reference to your “number” with a disregard for the deadly nature of their “social construct.”

I’ll return to the age model I’m adopting that I borrowed from Dr. Helen Harness of Career Design Associates and wrote about 9 weeks ago.

Harkness calls it the “living long and dying fast model.”

I’m adopting it.

Here it is again:

  • Young adulthood: 20-40
  • First midlife: 40-60
  • Second midlife: 60-80
  • Young old: 80-90
  • Elderly: 90 and above
  • Old-old: 2-3 years to live

Just so you know, you are granted the right to intrude on my snow shoveling domain (maybe) somewhere around the mid-point of my “elderly” period. Until then, leave your “aging sucks” and your Toro at home.

You Are “Rare and Valuable” – Don’t Waste It By Retiring!

I’ve been pigging out recently on young, contrarian author and Georgetown University computer science professor, Cal Newport, rereading two of his books and watching lots of his many YouTube podcast interviews. The podcasts provide a welcome and productive relief of the boredom of my daily visits to the treadmill and upright bike.

I guess you could say I’m exercising a bit of “reverse generativity” and trying to be more of a “modern elder” by being willing to listen to and learn from someone less than half my age. Cal is only 38, looks 25, and talks like he’s been around forever, at least in the technology space.

As a late-stage septuagenarian, I’m not supposed to like millennials because they are so impudent, impatient, immature, uninformed.

Bad mantra! Bad idea!

Cal will bend your thinking in a very productive direction if you choose to engage and try but a few of his central messages.

Credibility? Yeah. He’s one of the youngest yet most published professors at Georgetown, has written six books, has a family, doesn’t have a social media account despite being in the technology business, doesn’t work past 5:30, and never works on the weekends. Oh, and finds time to respond to lots of requests for interviews.

Someone asked him in a podcast why he writes books and who they are for? I loved his response: “I write them for myself.” He builds them around what he wants his life to look like. What seems to fall out of his research and writing are some very powerful, insightful, and useful principles.

Passion versus Craftsman

In one of his earliest books, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, Newport takes an unpopular stand by advocating that pursuing your passion is bad career advice despite what nearly every self-help book and self-development guru would have us believe.

I’ll admit I’ve handed out that “bad advice” to a number of career coaching clients. Newport changed my thinking. He builds a very convincing, research-based argument that it is rarely passion that is the genesis of people becoming great but rather their commitment to developing “rare and valuable” skills and becoming “craftsman” through the accumulation of “career capital.”

It turns out that very few people begin careers in pursuit of their passion because (1) very few people even have a passion and (2) if they do, it is usually not related to work-life or career.

So how do people become “great?”

They get really good at something and the passion finds them.

They get so good, they can’t be ignored.

It’s Steve Jobs turning his back on being a Zen master and becoming so good at something that it produced one of the most world-changing events in history – the introduction of a music player that can make and receive phone calls.

It’s Steve Martin performing, experimenting, testing routines for 10 years in front of often-hostile audiences until he got so good that we couldn’t ignore him.

Retirement steals craftsmen.

I doubt that Steve Jobs would have retired had cancer not taken him early.

Steve Martin hasn’t shown any signs of stopping to delight us with his weirdness. Too much accumulated career capital; too many “rare and valuable” skills; too much of a “craftsman.”

Yet, thousands each year take their accumulated career capital, rare and valuable skills, and craftsman qualities and let them atrophy by buying into off-the-cliff traditional retirement.

Is that fair to a younger generation that could use the direction that years of accumulated wisdom can deliver?

Bigger yet, is it fair to the owner of that career capital and those rare and valuable skills to let them go to waste after investing thousands of hours acquiring them.

I realize that many, if not most, folks entering retirement are leaving a “job” – a way to pay the bills. They don’t acquire much career capital and no craftsman status. Some are leaving a career, the constant striving to increasingly better work not taking the time to stay put in a channel long enough to develop rare and valuable skills.

But, there are those who have pursued their work-life as a calling, an important part of their life, and a vital part of their identity. They’ve become true craftsmen.

Yet they let that identity fade away.

That can be an unfortunate consequence of succumbing to the traditional retirement mindset – career capital, deep craftsmanship, and rare and valuable skills relegated to the trash heap.

Enter – Capstone Career

Last week, I introduced the idea of a Capstone Career, a fitting way to celebrate craftsmanship, deep career capital, and those rare and valuable skills to preserve identity, stiff-arm boredom, maintain relevance, and maintain better health.

We can’t all be either of the aforementioned Steves, but we can still be “so good they can’t ignore us” in our own unique way – and make the world a better place during our post-career life.

Are you using your career capital in this second half or third age? What are your rare and valuable skills? Are they still vibrating – or getting stale?  What are you doing to maintain your craftsman status?

Share your stories with a comment below.

Is There a “Capstone Career” in Your Future?

My “9-to-5” these days is writing resumes, developing LinkedIn profiles and networking strategies, and providing career transition assistance for mid-to-late career professionals, mostly in the healthcare space.

I’m fortunate to be able to connect with some very committed and talented folks on a pretty deep level as I help them with these components of their “career marketing campaigns.”

It’s not unusual to slide into a conversation about the “R” word, as in:  “What are your thoughts about retirement?”

These folks usually have a time frame for the start of their retirement, either a specific year or a certain number of years beyond where they are now.

Not surprisingly, it almost always involves the number 65, reminding me of the strange entrenchment that number has in our collective psyche.

Even with a prospective date in mind, when asked what they expect to do with their retirement years or what retired life will look like for them, I invariably get the equivalent of a blank stare on the phone.

Few have a clue or have taken the time to think about it beyond the financial side – even though, for some, the decision is looming.

We’re stuck in 1935

I was reminded recently that “we created the clock and now it’s our master.” In the past, there was only the sun, moon, and stars and whatever creative notion about time that the priests and prophets came up with. Along the way, we came up with number boundaries with the 20th century producing 21 and 65 as the entry and exit points for participation in the adult world.

We get lots of guidance and advice and direction leading up to the first gateway. We drift out of the second gateway with little or no roadmap and a dearth of advice on what to do with the years that follow. We just know we need to do something resembling retirement at, or close to that number because that’s what “they” have been telling us now for 5-6 decades, keying off an irrelevant number established 86 years ago for political expediency.

A few decades ago when we typically only survived a handful of years beyond that second boundary, it wasn’t that big a deal. A commitment to a full-stop, leisure-based retirement made sense. But we screwed that up when we figured out how to live another 15-30 years beyond that.

We’ve technically invalidated the number 65 as a boundary but haven’t removed it from our heads.

Ignoring reality

If you ask these folks what concerns they may have about retirement beyond money, it typically will fall into one or more of these four categories:

  1. Boredom.
  2. Loss of identity.
  3. Becoming irrelevant.
  4. Deteriorating health

Yet, having identified their concerns, few have considered a plan designed to address them – all of which are addressable.

I’m committed to doing something about that.

How about a “Capstone Career?”

Mike Drak is a friend of mine,  a self-proclaimed “retirement rebel” and author of two really good books on the topic of retirement: “Victory Lap Retirement: Work While You Play, Play While You Work” and “Retirement Heaven or Hell: Which Will You Choose. Nine Principles for Designing Your Ideal Post-Career Lifestyle.”  I regret that Mike thought of “Victory Lap” first because it describes a great mindset for a post-career life.

I’ve been brainstorming for an equivalent term and came up with “Capstone Career”, with help from executive career coach, Helen Harkness, founder of Career Design Associates, who introduces the concept in her book “Don’t Stop the Career Clock: Rejecting the Myths of Aging for a New Way to Work in the 21st Century.”

I think a “Capstone Career” is a great solution to the aforementioned retirement concerns.

Why “capstone?”  What is it?

Capstone has a couple of definitions:

  1. a stone fixed on top of something, typically a wall.
  2. the high point; a crowning achievement; a culminating experience.

Much like Drak’s “Victory Lap”, a Capstone Career could be that “crowning achievement and culminating experience” that celebrates the bringing together of dormant dreams, resurrected talents, accumulated skills, and experiences to create a life-enhancing, purposeful antidote to the hidden pitfalls of full-stop retirement.

Helen Harkness puts it this way:

“We can do this by concentrating on functional age – ignoring chronology and learning a new way to tell time, re-careering and rethinking retirement, moving from career crisis to career quest, creating and activating what I call a capstone career. By knowing what we want and doing what we love, we can continue life’s journey with creativity, wisdom, power, and purpose.”

Landing strip or launch pad?

Our culture says it’s time to land.

Our biology encourages a re-launch.

I’ll risk sounding like a broken record with the reminder that our biology offers us only two choices: growth or decay. Doesn’t 65 sound a bit like a decay-producing landing point or “use-by” stamp. It certainly has never carried the suggestion of a re-launch.

It’s interesting to note a 2018 report by the New England Journal of Medicine that found the most productive age in a human’s life is – drum roll, please – between the ages of 60 and 70.

It gets better. the second most productive age is between 70 and 80 and the third most productive decade is 50-60.

The “u-curve of happiness” study done by author Jonathan Rauch revealed that our happiness track hits bottom at around 47 and rises to its peak in the 70s and 80s.

Who knew?

I don’t need no stinkin’ job!

I get it – we can’t seem to rebrand “work” as anything other than a negative four-letter word. For the vast majority of us, work represents something that is a mismatch to our deepest skill set that we don’t truly enjoy and tolerate and endure for the money. We long to get away from it and do – what? Anything but work. Beyond that, the definition for most is fuzzy at best.

You aren’t going to be told by your financial planner or your government the truth that work is pivotal to achieving a longer, healthier life. We are encouraged to move to the wrong side of the biological ledger, become consumers rather than producers, and wind down at a time that the combination of our talent, wisdom, skills, and experiences may be at a peak. That puts us on the down-slope and accelerates the “live too short and die too long” model that characterizes the majority of our retired population.

A capstone Career is not a job. It’s a response to a “calling” or satisfaction of a “quest.” It doesn’t even need to be designed to make money although it can be. Above all it combines three simple principles:

  1. Doing what you really, really want to do.
  2. Doing what you are really, really good at.
  3. Providing something the world needs.

 

 

 

Making money at it may be necessary for some. But the heart of a Capstone Career is to retain or recover relevance, to avoid boredom, re-establish identity, and to place oneself on a track that avoids the deterioration of health that accompanies a purposeless retired life.

Stay tuned. More to come on this topic. Share your thoughts on this concept with a comment. We value your input.