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 (That’s the subtitle to a book I wrote several years ago that seems to be stuck in eternal unpublished mode).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.

Is Your Last Day On Earth Worth That “Big Mac?”

Twenty-two months ago, I penned out a blog that talked about my Dad’s extended morbidity. And about my intention to not have the same.

You can read the entire article here. Or here are some cliff notes.

My Dad made it to 1998 and age 81 – right on today’s average lifespan. But, a big chunk of the 81 years wasn’t pretty.

Here’s a chronology of his “fourth quarter.”

  • Heart attack – age 59
  • Stopped smoking, ate better, lost some weight
  • Early 70s, diagnosed with COPD – began a restricted life of hoses and oxygen tanks
  • Age 77, falls, breaks a hip
  • Hip replacement
  • Sepsis infection following surgery – extended intubation
  • Extended hospital recovery from intubation; no voice, no sleep
  • Rehab facility
  • A short stint in a small retirement home
  • One year stay in a larger nursing home
  • Second heart attack in the nursing home; dead next day at 81

 

Twenty-two years of insidious, creeping morbidity. And early frailty.

Do you suppose 3-4 eggs with bacon every morning for breakfast, smoking for 40 years, and no exercise outside of work may have played a role?

Today, in America, we do a little better than Dad with our extended morbidity. On average, it’s only 10 1/2 years.

Only 10 1/2 years! Aren’t we lucky?

How about a morbidity curve that’s more like this? My 35-years-to-go plan still calls for going out face-down in a trout stream having fooled another 18″ rainbow.

 

Do we think of such things as we enter a Carl’s Junior drive-up window? Or wolf down that breakfast burrito because we are in a hurry? Or rationalize french fries as a vegetable?

We have a deadly combination working in our culture: food swamps and healthcare illiteracy.

Part of my motivation for writing on this topic came this week after viewing a video podcast by Scott Fulton of The Longevity Advantage in which he interviewed Dr. Saray Stancic,  a triple board-certified physician in internal medicine, infectious disease, and lifestyle medicine.

At age 29, in 1995, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and soon thereafter was negotiating life with the help of a cane.

In 2010, she ran a marathon.

Here’s a link to the interview – I hope you will take 45 minutes and experience her amazing story.

 

I haven’t yet read her book, “What’s Missing from Medicine: Six Lifestyle Changes to Overcome Chronic Illness” but I’m ordering it. She sings my tune when she takes her own profession to task for its disinterest in being a conveyer of good health advice. Hers is a message that needs to be spread.

We all would do well to learn from this expert on the brokenness of our healthcare system and the extraordinary power of nutrition.

Dad didn’t have the benefit of what Dr. Stancic can tell us.

Most of us will ignore the advice.

And we’ll thus hit the CDC’s prediction that 44% of our population will be Type 2 diabetic within the next 30 years.

Can we find anything that will be more effective in bringing our country to its knees financially than that statistic alone?

Dr. Stancic confirms that your primary care provider is the last place to go to get health advice and the first place to go when your lack of health advice has taken your biology off the rails.

Or, when your 997th Big Mac (or equivalent) has some of your parts saying they are ready to be sent back to the universe.

I hope you appreciate the podcast and will share it. Let’s all do our part to get this message out:  be the CEO and arbiter of your health.

Eat your vegetables!!

And tell your friends to join our growing tribe over at www.makeagingwork.com.

Ten Good Habits at 60+ That Can Add Ten or More Healthy Years To Your Life

It may seem a bit crazy to be suggesting ways to add to our lives when we are all caught up in holding on to what we have in this COVID madness.

The evidence seems to clarify that the best defense against this nasty bug is to max out our immune system. That’s not something we do really well here in America with our lifestyle of comfort, convenience, and conformity, especially when we combine that with a healthcare system that can’t spell prevention, a food industry that profits in killing us slowly, and a pharma industry that exploits our self-care illiteracy.

In that spirit, I chose to resurrect and retitle an article from 18 months ago that has been the most popular post over the course of 3 1/2 years of my weekly blog.

Ten Good Habits at 60+ That Can Add Ten or More Healthy Years To Your Life

1. Reconsider retirement. How’s that for a controversial starting point? Retirement, as we’ve known it for several decades, is dying, none too soon. And for good reason. Joint research by the Social Security Administration and the National Institute on Aging indicates that full-stop retirement is associated with a 23-29 percent increase in mobility and daily activity difficulties, an 8 percent increase in illness, and an 11 percent decline in mental health.

Today, the average American endures 10.5 years of illness from multiple chronic conditions before dying, nearly all related to lifestyle decisions. For many, retirement is a lifestyle decision that takes them to the wrong side of the biological ledger – to a decay process rather than a growth process. Growth or decay are the only two options our biology offers us.  Senescence in the later years of life is a choice, not fate.

2. Upgrade your diet away from animal-based and processed foods.

The verdict is in, and has been for a while: a largely plant-based diet is by far the healthiest. The only argument the food industry can take against that – particularly the beef, pork, and poultry industries – is that a plant-based diet doesn’t provide enough protein. Wrong! Most nutrition experts claim we are over-proteined in our culture and feel a plant-based diet offers adequate protein. Follow the money and don’t buy the meat and poultry industry argument.

3. Up your exercise and include strength training.

Less than a quarter of Americans 18 or older met minimum physical activity guidelines for cardiovascular and muscle-strengthening activity in 2017 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On page 56 (adult) and page 68 (older adult) of the downloadable .pdf of the government Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, minimum recommended exercise calls for 2 ½ – 5 hours a week of moderate-intensity or 1 1/4 – 2 ½ hours of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise per week. Muscle-strengthening activities involving all major muscle groups should be added on two or more days a week.

Get your heart rate into the optimal exercise range for your age (220 minus your age times .65 and .85) and sustain it.

Weight training is vital. You are experiencing sarcopenia and probably aren’t aware of it. We all fall victim to it. It’s the loss of muscle mass and it started for us all in our 30s. The only antidote is strength training. Remember this simple mantra: Aerobic exercise will give you life, strength training will make it worth living.

4. Get more sleep.

No magic here. You need a minimum of seven hours a night at this age. Naps count. Research shows that a chronic lack of sleep, or getting poor quality sleep, increases the risk of disorders including high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, and obesity. Don’t be fooled into using over-the-counter sleep medications. They aren’t the solution and have adverse long-term affects.

If you would like a high-level overview of the mechanics and benefits of sleep, spend some time with Dr. Andrew Huberman on YouTube.

5. Challenge your brain.

Don’t believe the myth that brain senescence is automatic. It isn’t. Oh, it can happen if you let it. But we’ve known for years that our brain, regardless of age, can produce new synaptic connections. It’s called neurogenesis. Think of your brain as a muscle. It, too, can atrophy. Use it or lose it.

6. Maintain a high level of social activity.

This critical component has taken a serious hit with COVID. Find a way to max it as much as possible under the conditions. It may never be the same as before going forward, but that doesn’t change the need to be connected, somehow, someway.

AARP says that social isolation is as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Too often, reduced social engagement is a consequence of the retirement phase of life. We now know that being socially active plays a key role in longevity and good health. TV and Lazyboy are deadly combinations.

7. Assess your relationships and do some housecleaning.

Do you have toxic relationships in your life? We benefit by getting rid of negative, draining relationships. Motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, famously said: “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” We are greatly influenced by those closest to us, in the way we think, our self-esteem, our decision making. Severing a relationship can be tough, but vital to avoid the energy drain and excess cortisol production that a bad relationship can cause. Do yourself and your toxic friend(s) a favor – cut the cord.

8. Increase your interaction with younger people.

We seem to be quick to throw rocks at Millenials when we should make an effort to interact more with them. It will be a mutually-beneficial relationship. You feed off their energy, enthusiasm, ideas, and tech-savviness. They gain from your wisdom, steadiness, and common sense. It’s encouraging to see more and more companies discovering this and striving toward multi-generational workforces.

9. Learn something new every day.

Henry Ford said: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.” We lament our muscle atrophy as we age but ignore our brain atrophy. One of the greatest old dead white men, Leonardo de Vinci, nailed it: “Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”

10. Don’t be a dinosaur. Get savvy on basic technology.

Technology development will continue to accelerate. If you are still pondering the purchase of a smartphone, well, you may have some serious catching up to do. Yes, there are downsides to all the tech that surrounds us. But the upsides are much greater.

There may be an organization in your area that specializes in teaching technology to seniors. One good resource is a site called Senior Planet which “celebrates aging by sharing information and resources that support aging with attitude, and helps people who were born long before the digital revolution to stay engaged and active by bringing a digital-technology focus to a range of topics – among them news, health, sex and dating, art and design, senior style, travel, and entertainment.” They have physical locations in New York City. Plattsburgh, NY, San Antonio, TX, Palo Alto, CA and just opened in Denver, CO.

11. Find someone to help or mentor.

OK, so I don’t count well. Here’s a bonus. There is often a serendipitous effect of mentoring someone that goes beyond helping. Mentors typically improve their own skills by being inspired by new ideas, expanding their network, and learning new strategies, technologies, and methods.

Up the ante!

Wait a minute! We are shooting too low! Why 10 years? GO FOR 20 – OR 30. You deserve it!

Will Your Retirement Make You a Victim of Newton’s First Law of Motion?

What are the chances that your Certified Financial Planner would have learned about Newton’s First Law of Motion in insurance sales school?  You know, the Law that says ” -an object at rest remains at rest and an object in motion remains in motion with the same velocity unless acted upon by an unbalancing force.”

Do you suppose that any financial advisor has thought of himself or herself as an “unbalancing force?”

One could argue the case, I suppose, considering that so much of what a good financial planner does is help people put the brakes on.

“Here, let’s work on this plan so we can get you from doing 110 mph down to near zero. It’s the ‘natural’ thing to do because that’s what they taught me in life insurance school. Plus, you’ve earned it. You’ve worked hard and are entitled to fade away.”

OK – a bit melodramatic, I know – and I just pissed off the entirety of one of the largest components of the massive financial services industry.

But, isn’t there a modicum of truth in there somewhere?

Don’t we innocently buy into an unnatural concept that says it’s a logical and pre-destined thing to put the brakes on the body and mind at a certain (and equally illogical) age?

“OK, look, you’re almost 65. You know, it’s time to accept the fact that you’re starting to crumble and for you to start building safeguards against that, like a safe and comfortable retirement community where you can crumble together with other similarly brainwashed ‘seniors’.”

I’ve been sleeping with my “financial adviser” for 50 years and 2 months now. She avoids dropping the “R-word” into a conversation because (1) she knows where my short fuses are and (2) she doesn’t buy the concept either. Too much kid and grandkid work to do; too much connecting-with-siblings to do; too many Jack Reacher and C.J. Box novels to read; too big a fight for traditional values left to do; too many friendships that need massaging and deepening.

No kicking her to the curb! Or the park bench! (She’s zumba-ing in the kitchen as I write this).

I like to think it’s been my tremendous influence on her but, truth be known, submissive is not in her vocabulary.

I do believe, though, that enduring the sudden death of her 67-year-old father only ten months into his retirement after 46 years with one company left an indelible impression. Here one day, gone the next with no hint of physical problems. After 46 years of motion, an “unbalancing force” called retirement, wrapped nicely in a send-off dinner and a gold watch (seriously!), sent him home to become something he’d never been and wasn’t prepared to become – unchallenged, unstructured, unplanned.

Mo’ doesn’t need to leave the house!

Are we starting to rewrite some chapters in the life manual? Like the ones about how nirvana exists on the other side of 65 with the opportunity to wind down, come in for a landing, turn off the mind, and luxuriate in self-indulgence.

We can only hope we’re doing some serious editing.

I believe we are.

Momentum in life doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – stop because a politician, big business, and union officials carved out an artificial finish line 86 years ago for purely political purposes with no humanitarian intent. Unfortunately, that act spawned an industry that has been incredibly successful for over five decades convincing us to do something that is unnatural and, ultimately, unhealthy.

It’s not realistic to expect a financial planner to fully understand or be inspired to explain that moving toward zero momentum is a violation of our very biology with its bilateral option of growth or decay. Folks, they are salespeople!  Can we really expect them to have an understanding of our cellular composition and the impact of their guidance on the same?

However, I do sense that there are financial planners becoming more sensitive to the “soft skill” sides of retirement and including more dialog about planning beyond just the numbers. In fact, Mitch Anthony, financial planning consultant and author of the excellent book entitled “The New Retirementality” has launched a program entitled “Life Centered Financial Planning” with the goal of equipping financial planning firms with tools to better address nonfinancial retirement challenges – or, as he calls them “the realistic, existential risks of retirement that humans must wrestle with.”

Part of his message to planners is to raise their sensitivity to the fact that “more and more people are coming to the same conclusion – it works to work. Working doesn’t have to mean all-in, but instead as needed to meet emotional, social, and intellectual stimulation needs.”

That’s a message I hope you may be hearing from your planner if you are working with one. If you aren’t working with one but plan to (P.S. you definitely should), watch for an attitude that goes beyond the charts and graphs and shows respect for the physical, social, mental, psychological, spiritual side of retirement.

Respect the law

Newton’s first law is often called the Law of Inertia. That’s pretty close to the true definition of retirement which is derived from the French verb “retirer” meaning to “retreat, withdraw, seek a place of safety and security.”

We weren’t meant to be “objects at rest.” In fact, we are designed for the opposite, regardless of age.

Don’t let anybody convince you otherwise.

Thanks for reading. If you have some thoughts on this topic, share them below with a comment. And tell your friends about our weekly articles at www.makeagingwork.com– there’s still lots of room on the mailing list.

 

 

 

Can We Get to 85 Without Any Ailments? An Opinion.

I’m forced to take a shortcut this week because of a tough schedule. So, I’m borrowing an article I posted on Quora a few months ago that garnered over 50,000 views. It was in response to the question:

How can one live 85 years without any ailments?

I offered my opinion:

It’s not likely you will. It’s really more of being able to live with them. Resilience is one of the characteristics found in those who live longer lives.

I’m 78 with the goal of living past 100. I have my share of “ailments”, some of which I’ve had for years. Both knees ache from 20 years of pickup basketball and two “clean up” surgeries; I have an arthritic left-thumb that hinders my love of guitar playing; a CT scan revealed I have significant cardiovascular disease; I have an under-active thyroid that makes weight control difficult and causes tiredness that I’ve medicated for 30+ years; I have atrial flutter (a first-cousin to atrial fib) for which I take a blood thinner.  And my feet hurt about 24 1/2 hours a day.

Having said all that, I stay firm in my conviction that I can live well beyond the average lifespan for men which is 78.9 in America. If I don’t, I will be checking out next Tuesday. I don’t have symptoms of anything that would say that is going to happen.  I’m remaining highly sequestered to increase the odds it won’t.

Here’s the point.

So much of how long we live and how we live long is between the temples. We aren’t likely to avoid ailments, especially if we are an American since our lifestyle preceding our later years was likely – shall I say – less than stellar. We most likely ate badly because we are beholden, out of naivete, to the deplorable Standard American Diet (SAD). And, we are likely on the bell curve of those who exercised far too little.

Also, let’s be honest. We still aren’t good at releasing this 20th-century myth that disease, debilitation, and dementia are automatic, an unalterable phenomenon – the ‘ol fate/God’s-will myth versus choice.

It’s really pretty simple. As a culture, we don’t really know jack about how our bodies and minds work and how to treat them optimally even though the how, what, and why information is massive and at our fingertips. And then we whine when we hit 60+ and some of our parts are acting like they are ready to be sent back to the universe.

I love the golf analogy. Far too many of us have played a pretty crappy “front nine” with our lifestyles of comfort, convenience, and conformity and find ourselves either remorsing through a dismal back-nine or trying to make up for or reverse it on the final nine holes. If I may stretch the analogy (for you golfers), we can find ourselves 175 yards out with only a 60-degree wedge in the bag.

 

 

I’m the poster-child for that.

I smoked until age 37 and ate badly through my first 60 years. Although I have been a gym rat and avid exerciser for over 40 years, the CT scan at age 73 revealed the truth of how those first five decades+ (my front-nine plus a few holes) had slowly, insidiously taken their toll.

So, resilience is part of the backbone of my existence as I march on this “pollyannish mission” to 100+. I work out aggressively, both aerobic and weight lifting, six days a week. It’s painful at every session but I’ve learned to tolerate the pain in favor of the results. I’ve also moved my diet more to a WFPB (whole-food-plant-based) program and away from the SAD C-R-A-P (calorie-rich-and-processed) diet that we Americans are captive to.

I choose to do the things that I know will maximize my chance of hitting my goal while having no illusions that I could be out of here by the end of the day. I’ve learned that all I have is today and have, with difficulty, learned the value of avoiding time travel into the future or the past.

It’s really all about ATTITUDE (see this article) and RESILIENCE as we age. Do some research on the lives of centenarians and you will find that nearly all of them have two consistent characteristics: (1) they have endured and survived numerous health and mental challenges with their resilience and (2) they have kept a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives, with the majority of them avoiding leisure-based retirement and staying engaged in some form of work.

So, if 85 is your goal (P.S. I suggest raising the bar – the human body can last to 112 years, 164 days), be prepared for ailments but adopt a “second half” lifestyle that will help you keep those to a minimum or give you more physical and mental strengths to live with them.

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

How are you handling your “ailments?” (C’mon, you have some!) Share your thoughts with a comment below.

A New Model for Aging: Subtract 20 Years From Your Chronological Age.

I pulled another book at random off my “A” shelf this week as I wait for Amazon to deliver my latest new book purchase. It turns out the book’s kind of an oldie, published in 1999. As I began my reread, I quickly realized why it was on the “A” shelf even with that publication date. It sat ignored since my first reading in 2013.

It’s worth a second read for me, chock full of timeless wisdom and still-current advice on making something of the second-half of life.

It’s entitled “Don’t Stop the Career Clock: Rejecting the Myths of Aging for a New Way to Work in the 21st Century” and the author is Helen Harkness, founder and CEO of an executive coaching company in Dallas called Career Design Associates.

harkness_allen_lib

I recall placing a call to Helen after reading her three books because I was so impressed with the process she had developed to help executives successfully find their “capstone career” in their second half.

I believe Helen was 81 or 82 when I spoke with her in 2013.

She’s still at it.

Do the math.

Shouldn’t she be doing something other than – gasp! – working?

Ms. Harkness, as you might expect, has some strong feelings about attitudes toward aging. In the late-1990’s, she was at the front of the parade calling for us to “break the mindset that chronological age, the age on your birth certificate, is your real age.”

Twenty-plus years ago, she took to task our bent toward using the calendar to determine our age, saying:

“In contemporary urban society, we have the notion that a precise chronological age marks the transition from one stage of life to another, which is highly questionable. Today, the chronological ages of twenty-one and sixty-five define the lower and the upper boundaries of participation in the adult world, as well as the cultural definition of full humanity. Unfortunately, as it is today, those over sixty-five have no defined active roles in our society. So what are we to do with our highly extended long life.”

“This is an outdated but strongly established system that maintains tight control over our destiny. Yet there is absolutely no expert on aging today who holds that chronological age is a preferred or valid way to determe our actual age.”

Ahead of her time, Harkness was suggesting then that, with our advances in nutrition, fitness, medical services, and scientific breakthroughs, we should expect mid-life to start at sixty, not forty.

We’re still stuck – –

-with a chronological mindset. We’re trending away from it but at a snail’s pace.

Because of our “- social and cultural expectations, we program ourselves to begin to fall apart at a certain designated age, and we oblige.”

We are still dogged by this irrational concept of full-stop retirement as something obligatory and entitled, refusing to acknowledge that the chronological component of age 65 spawned 85 years ago wasn’t relevant then and is totally irrelevant today. And, history is showing us that this outdated concept can put us at the top of a downward slope and accelerate the slide.

Yet, it persists.

Can we perhaps admit that with our average lifespan now beginning to recede and the average American living with over 10 years of multiple, debilitating chronic illnesses that it’s well past time to consider a new “aging model?”

What if – –

-you subtracted 20 years from your current chronological age? Knowing what you know about yourself and the world around you, what would you do? Harkness suggests that if you know what you would do, then go do it now, adding: “Move on with your life. Take action. Forget who or what you are supposed to be because you are a certain chronological age.”

I believe it was Satchel Paige, Major and Negro League Baseball pitcher, who asked: “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

Many of us remain frozen in our thinking about what we want this extended period of lifespan to look like without realizing that our chronological age is unconsciously and automatically blocking our thinking about our future.

Harkness goes further to say (bolding is mine):

“We grow old, not by living a certain number of chronological years, but by becoming idle in mind, body, and purpose. We decline and decay by abandoning our flexibility, our ideals, our talents, our life’s mission, and our involvement in our community. We grow old and retire by buying into society’s story that we can be surplussed, junked, and discarded. The most deadly assumptions related to aging are that retirement and old age are directly connected to the chronological age of sixty-five, that mental decline begins at age twenty-one, and that senility is inevitable if we live a long time.”

What do we have left if we abandon our chronological age?

Functional age, which Harkness describes as combining and integrating biological, social, and psychological measures into one active package and the answer to shaking ourselves loose from our fear of aging.

Next time someone asks you your age, ask them “Do you want my functional or chronological?”  I assure you, it gets some interesting responses.

The “live long, die fast” model for aging:

You may know by now that I’m an advocate for all of us  “dying young, as late as possible.” Harkness calls it “living long and dying fast” and she created her own aging model.

I’m adopting it.

Here it is:

  • 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

At 78, I like the sound and feel of still being in my second mid-life. It feels right since I’m finding a surprising reserve in the old gas tank.

I also like the brevity of the “old-old and 2-3 years to live”  except that I favor 2-3 minutes instead of years.

I still envision going face down in a trout stream having just fooled a 20″ rainbow. At somewhere around 110.

I may have to rent a walker one of these days and see how it would work in a river.

Does this aging model resonate? What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below or email me at www.makeagingwork.com.

Stay safe. We’re getting our vaccinations tonite at 7:30! Yay – maybe a taste of normalcy around the bend.

What is the biggest failure in modern health? Maybe not what you think?

I recently was monitoring an online forum on the topic “Why is our healthcare system failing us?”

It generated some interesting responses, some of them a bit out in “woo-woo” land.

Here’s a sampling:

  • Mega health mergers
  • Big data
  • Obamacare 2.0
  • Private practice doctors trapped in a completely perverted “fee for service” mode.
  • Drug corporations feigning concern with health when even they admit health is bad for business.
  • Corporate medicine creating disease deliberately with vaccinations and maintaining disease by suppressing true health knowledge and cures that would put them out of business. (There have been reports that this guy was seen on the capital steps last week!).
  • The almost religious reliance on antibiotics that replaced ‘barrier’ methods of keeping infections at bay in the last fifty years.

Some legit, some naive, some nuts.

It struck me that it was all about “them, them, them.”

It’s easy to point fingers and say it’s “them” that are failing in our “modern health system” when in fact it may just be US that are keeping it broken – our failure to take charge and accept responsibility for our own health.

When we point, we need to remember we have three fingers pointed back at ourselves.

We can say it’s a busted health care system (which it is) or greedy, profit-driven pharma companies (which they are), or a food industry that doesn’t care about our health (which they don’t). Or we can say I have the option to do a work-around of all that and be responsible for the actions I take that will allow me to avoid being enmeshed in all of that.

Maybe someday we will be honest and admit that it isn’t the failure of a health care system that causes me to take 1/3 of my meals through the side window of my car or cause 25% of the male population in the U.S. to be obese.

Or that pharma has driven me to become one with my voice-activated remote, La-Z-Boy, and Netflix an average of 40+ hours/week.

Or that the health care system has caused me to treat my health care as a reactive $35 co-pay experience when it goes off the rails.

Maybe someday we will just have to admit that we have a magnificent health care system that is supreme at “fixing” and “chasing the horse after it’s left the barn.” That’s the way it grew up over the last 120 years, stamping out diseases, fixing things, drugging and cutting things out.

We really can’t blame it for not being able to spell “prevention”, let alone teach, preach, or practice it.

Consider what would happen to that broken health care system if it taught you and me to be healthy? The entire infrastructure would crumble in a New York minute.

So, let’s stop throwing rocks at our modern health system and hiding behind our own crappy lifestyles. Let’s accept it’s brokenness and work around it.

Wanna change the healthcare system? Get healthy. Think “prevention” not “cure.” If you don’t need fixing, they are out of work, the big expensive machines will rust, scalpel manufacturers will be forced to Plan B, and TV ads will be something other than the latest pill for self-inflicted maladies.

 

Just saying:

THIS is NOT the fault of a broken healthcare system.

What was a choice you made that completely changed your life? Here’s mine. What’s yours?

What was a choice you made that completely changed your life?

This question was posted recently on Quora.com. I was intrigued by it and decided to pen out a response.

I had to think hard because, after chewing up nearly all of eight decades, there have been just a few choices along the way.

The first thought that came to my mind was my decision to leave Wyoming and head to the east coast for my first job. It’s when I first discovered there is this natural phenomenon called “trees.”

Certainly, choosing my roommate of 50 years was a life changer. Life got better 50+ years ago (we hit “The Golden” on 12/27/20) when our relationship started.  Not always easy, but always better.

I have to say that for two reasons:

  1. It’s the absolute truth.
  2. She is the final proofread on all of these articles.

Let’s see, what else completely changed my life?

It could be when I quit smoking 41 years ago on June 6, 1979.  That was a significant turning point.

Naaa. Lots of people do that.

Let me go with my decision to leave corporate cubicle-nation and start my own business at age 60 in 2002.

That still remains a popular option for many, so I’m gonna pass on that one.

OK. It’s a tie. My bride of 50 years and – – – – well, this is probably going to sound weird.

I’m including my decision to stop time traveling!

Whaa? Time travel?

Yep. When I decided – with considerable difficulty, mind you – to stop traveling into the past or the future and to kick worry to the curb, life got decidedly better.

You see, with a lot of reflection and study, I’ve learned that the main residents in both of those domains aren’t particularly good for our physical or mental health or success in life.

Regrets, guilt, remorse in the past. And shame – the worst and most powerful.

Fear and the ever-present worry dominate the future.

Not good thought-mates for moving forward in life.

Addicts discover this truth – or they remain addicts. I saw it first hand. Especially the overwhelming power of shame. “Day at a time” and the sense of a power greater than oneself is at the heart of recovery for the addicted. It also is a key to living a healthier, stress-free, successful life.

Dale Carnegie said it years ago:

“You and I are standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured forever, and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time.  We can’t possibly live in either of these two eternities – no, not even for a split second.  But by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds.” 

One of my favorite authors, Steve Chandler, super-coach, prolific writer, and former addict brings credibility and experience to this present-moment idea. His book “Time Warrior: How to Defeat Procrastination, People-Pleasing, Self-Doubt, Over-Commitment, Broken Promises and Chaos” is a worthy read and introduces the idea of linear time, where most of us live, versus non-linear time (day-at-a-time) where we should be living.

From “Time Warrior” (bolding is mine):

“Stay out of the past unless you are dissolving past beliefs that are dragging you down.  And stay out of the future unless you are loving drawing a map of it for yourself to follow. But even that is a present moment activity.  Make today and only today your masterpiece.

Non-linear time management doesn’t allow that line that stretches into the future because the linear thought process always produces stress – unreasonable stress.  Create your perfect day.  Figure out what you have to do in one day (today) to automatically meet that deadline.

Non-linear time management doesn’t ever have a long timeline.  It has two choices: now or not now.”

The past is history; the future is a mystery. The power is in NOW – this very moment.

Learning to practice that and striving to live it continues to be pivotal in my intentional, endless transformation. Even with my awareness, too many days are lost to hopping on my time-travel machine between my temples and wasting the most valuable, unreplenishable resource I have. I’m getting better, but “the resistance” is relentless.

If you’ve got this mastered, I’m all ears on how to get all the way there: gary@makeagingwork.com or 720-344-7784.

Do you have a life-changer you’d like to share? Love to hear your story. Shoot over a comment below or drop me an email. What say we all use the goofiness of 2020 to move toward the acceptance that all we’ve really got is the day we are in?