Why Did Isocrates Live to 98 and We Can’t Make It Past 80? A Longevity Lesson from the Ancient Greeks.

Much has been said about the meteoric increase in average lifespan over the last century. I’ve made a pretty big deal of it all in past articles. Considering that we moved that needle from 47 years to about 80 between 1910 and 2010, I guess it’s worth a mention. Especially since we hockey-sticked it more in 100 years than in the last 100-200,000 years.

 

The emperor has clothes but they have worn pretty thin.

It makes for a great story, this hockey stick stat. That is until we pull back the curtain and find the glitter has left the gold.

Kudos are due to the medical establishment, government, and technology for teaming up to reverse the elements that resulted in a 47-year average life span. Together they:

  • Reversed infant mortality
  • Eliminated or radically reduced infectious diseases
  • Improved workplace safety
  • Improved our drinking water
  • Improved quality and availability of food
  • Improved education

A lot of “fixing.” A lot of “curing.” A lot of “downstream repair.”

All low-hanging fruit. 

Then we hit a wall around 2010 and started going backward.

Now we’re stuck – with institutions that can’t, or won’t, think like the Greeks!

The ancient Greeks probably would have cautioned us to think deeper during that 1910-2010 sprint.

Hygeia vs Panacea

The Greeks, 2,500 years ago, had it right in many areas, but particularly when it came to good health. They identified that medicine had two components – Hygeia and Panacea.

Hygeia equals health preservation and Panacea equals repair. Hygeia equals prevention. Panacea equals cure.

For the Greeks, Hygeia held precedence.

Our 100 years of fixing and repair never got us to that model. We’ve moved far from it with limited interest in moving in that direction.

And the consequences are glaring.

We are getting sicker as a population each day – and have been for the better part of 50 years. 

Hygeia and Eugeria

In his outstanding book “Boundless Potential: Transform Your Brain, Unleash Your Talents, Reinvent Your Work in Midlife and Beyond,” author Mark S. Walton reveals a number of things that we (and our medical establishment) can learn from the Greeks when it comes to our health and longevity.

Many of Greek fame lived longer than most. At a time when the normal lifespan was around 35, many of the notable, quotable Greeks lived longer and aged happily.

Walton points out that a study by the Royal Society of Medicine in London explored this in 1994 and 2007, studying the “men of intellectual excellence and achievement” during that period.  They found that the “men of fame” had a mean and median life span of 71.3 and 70 years, respectively. Twice the average!

It turns out that the Greeks had another arrow in their quiver of equal importance to hygeia – a term for attaining genuine happiness called eugeria.

According to Walton, eugeria required:

“-a lifelong pursuit of worthy goals through the three components of our humanity: body, mind, and soul.”

Walton examines the Greek eugeria formula and its components:

  1. They played hard. They were “the first people in the world to play and they played on a grand scale.” Games, athletic contests of every description. Not as an end in itself but as preparation “for the work yet to come.”
  2. They worked hard. As the world’s first knowledge workers, they never stopped exerting their minds and were the original reinventing people. Knowledge work was the ultimate fun.
  3. They paid it forward. For them, “-it was clear that the soulful pursuit of paying it forward, of working for the benefit of each other and future generations, provided the greatest payback of all.”

He reminds us that the word philanthropy was derived from two Greek roots: philo (love) and anthropos (mankind) and that:

“The lifelong pursuit of excellence (arete), with the goal of contributing our accomplishments to others – this, to the Greeks, was the ultimate formula, the blueprint, for eugeria, a long and happy life.”

Plato lived to 80; Isocrates to 98; Sophocles to 90; Aristarchus, Democritus, and Gorgias all lived past 100.

Today, you will be front-page media fodder for living 20% past the average life span i.e. to 100. In ancient Greece, living 2x the average or more wasn’t all that unusual.

Walton provides a nice summary:

“While the Athenian paradigm has faded into history, the thinking behind it has endured through the ages – most especially its soulful tenet: that paying it forward, working for the sake of others, pays us back in unexpected ways.”

Our lifestyles, built around bad diet, sedentary living, seeking comfort and convenience, and an increasing lack of generativity would have been unsettling to the Greeks but it’s how we choose to live and thus pull up short of our full life potential.

We won’t get help from a healthcare system that grew up “fixing” and can’t/won’t move off a business model based on cure and a “downstream” mindset that avoids addressing the cause in favor of fixing the symptoms.

The Greeks believed in prevention. Our systems are geared to cure. The Greeks planned “upstream”; we react “downstream.”

The Greeks never stopped learning. We warehouse our brains at a certain age.

And-

-the Greeks had no inkling of the concept of retirement.

I suspect they would have found the concept foolish, maybe even offensive.

We’ve got a lot to learn. The Greeks can still teach us.

The question is: Are we willing to be taught?

What do you think about this? Leave us your thoughts with a comment below. We appreciate your feedback.

How does one work a 40 hour a week job, have time to cook healthy meals, sleep 8 hours a night, and go to the gym?

 

Maybe you’ve got this all figured out.

I don’t.

I know – we’re just supposed to get better at “time management.”

But then, we can’t “manage time.” Time is fixed, immutable, and unchanging. It manages itself and we can’t change what exists for us to function within. We can’t change that a minute is a minute and a day is a day.

We can only manage ourselves.

What we tag as “poor time management” is simply “poor self-management.”

I can sense your pain because you are baffled – as we all are – by “where does all my time go? How can I end up killing so much time?”

I’m a pretty organized guy that doesn’t finish a day without saying to myself: “Where the hell did my day go and why didn’t I get done what I wanted to get done?”

Have you tried doing the math on your day or week? I do it all the time trying to get better at not “killing” so much time.

Eight decades and I’m still frustrated with my progress!!

Let’s do a hypothetical and try to break down the question.  I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on some of this.

  • 168 hours (the week we all start with)
  • Less 40 hours of work
  • Less 5 hours commute (five days, 30 minutes one way)
  • Less 56 hours of sleep
  • Less 14 hours to fix and eat healthy meals
  • Less 8 hours at the gym
  • Balance: 40 hours

24% of the week untagged.

Isn’t it freaky how we can’t account for a quarter of our week? Or that it slips through our fingers so easily?

The gold for a fulfilling, happy, purposeful life lies in our 24%.

People who demonstrate productive self-management seem to have a handful of common sense things they have put in place:

  1. A well-defined direction and sense of purpose in their lives. They have clear, challenging, and motivating goals, know where they are going, and have a limited number of lanes they are staying in.
  2. They stay focused on priorities by defining what is most important within those lanes. They have learned to avoid letting the urgent displace the important. (You might find Stephen Covey’s classic book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” helpful).
  3. They are very good at saying “no.” This appears to be one of the most important things to consider to put solid self-management in place. Self-management experts will tell you that saying “yes” is a major killer of getting your time use under control. Whether you say “yes” or “no” will be driven by the clarity of, and commitment to, your goals and purpose.
  4. They have 5 or 10-year plans that are written but flexible. They work backward from those to develop written quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily activity lists.

You can see that the principles of good “self-management” aren’t rocket science. But that’s not to say they are easy. Life just gets in the way. Being able to roll with the unexpected that sucks up so much of that 24% and getting back on track takes discipline. And, without question, discipline is central to good self-management.

Two books to consider.

When I feel myself skidding off the rails on my efficiency, I’ll drag out one of two books that are reminders that this doesn’t need to be the problem that I allow it to become.

Time is our most valuable resource. Once spent it is irretrievable. Treat it with respect and it will reward you in kind.

What works best for you to get your time under control? Love to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment or drop me an email at gary@makeagingwork.com

Are you “youthful” or “useful”? (The mirrors at 24 Hour Fitness answer part of that question for me!)

Part of me says it’s unfair to have so many mirrors in an athletic club. They are everywhere – and they don’t lie.

But then if you are part of the tank top, tattoo, tiny testicle, mirror muscle group hanging out with your lululemon-clad girlfriend, mirrors are essential.

For someone approaching geezerdom it’s, well, painful.

Undeterred, I endure the pain ’cause I’ve still got this illusory section in my brain that says that my biceps will grow, the droop over the beltline is temporary, and that the furniture disease wherein my chest has fallen into my drawers is just a myth. (sorry, bad joke!!)

My end-of-day athletic club workouts go 2 hours most of the time. Strength training followed by aerobic. And I usually work in a walk of at least 1-2 miles during the day to make sure I haul my arse out of the chair that keeps me at the keyboard and at 90 degrees too much of the day.

My flesh redistribution plan doesn’t seem to be working too well. No, you can’t fool Mother Nature. Gravity works.

Wrinkles versus wisdom.

Thus, I was challenged recently by a blog post from Chip Conley, entrepreneur, author, and founder of the Modern Elder Academy. I like Chip’s stuff and read most of his daily blogs. In a recent one, he told of reminding a late-middle-aged friend who was lamenting his inability to look younger that “our wisdom is more intangible than our wrinkles” and challenged him with the questions:

“How could you be more useful in the world?”

“Who could use a bit of your wisdom?”

It’s easy to get so caught up in trying to look and feel youthful that we forget that feeling “useful” may be more important than wrinkles in living a well-lived life.

Wrinkles are a given. There’s no stopping them.

Wisdom isn’t a given. It can atrophy and fade away. If couch potato replaces career, wisdom is wasted. It’s one of the traps that full-stop retirement can suck you into.

Dr. Ken Dychtwald of the AgeWave organization reminds us in his book “What Retirees Want: A Holistic View of Life’s Third Age” that the average American watches 47+ hours of television a week and that less than 25% do any volunteer work. 

How can we serve?

Chip reminds us that:

“Ultimately, one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is, “How can I serve?” It’s a question that takes on even greater meaning in midlife and beyond. It is a question that immediately creates a sense of generativity, defined as “the propensity and willingness to engage in acts that promote the wellbeing of younger generations as a way of ensuring the long-term survival of the species.”

That bolded sentence struck home this weekend when I took my 10-year-old grandson to lunch. We hadn’t done the one-on-one thing in a while because of COVID and I was reminded of how quickly time is flying, that we don’t know each other as well as we should, and that my window to help promote his well-being as his “papa” is fleeting. So, too, for his cousins, my two other similarly-aged grandkids.

It was a convicting experience.

Never too late.

As “third-agers”, we all have unlimited opportunities to serve and share our wisdom.

We’re wired to do so.

So instead of riding off into the sunset by retiring, we can ride into the sunrise with a vision and journey to serve.

This sick world needs your wisdom – wrinkles just help authenticate it.

 

Is Early Retirement As Good As They Say, Or Is It Like The Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side? The Jury May Still Be Out.

I can’t speak to early retirement – or to retirement in general – as I am a non-retiree and staunch opponent of the concept of traditional vocation-to-vacation retirement.

I will say, however, I feel that the idea of early retirement is further validation of the tremendous grip this unnatural concept has on our psyche.

I find it curious and revealing that, in the U.S. where I live, you are considered deficient, unfortunate, or weird if you don’t retire and disengage from work on or around an arbitrary number established 86 years ago – age 65.

Conversely, you are considered heroic and put on a pedestal for being able to retire and disengage ahead of that number.

In some ways, it’s a sad commentary on what work has become for so many – a non-fulfilling, uninspiring slog through long commutes, bad bosses, unpredictability, and lack of control.

Do we need any more validation of that than the current “Great Resignation” phenomenon?

Early retirement may have a dark side.

  • Shell Oil studied thousands of its employees and found that retiring at 55 doubled the risk for death before reaching 65 compared to those who worked beyond age 65, challenging the notion that retiring early boosts longevity and, in fact, demonstrating the opposite – mortality rates improve with later retirement.
  • A study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health suggests that retiring early may actually increase your risk of dying early. Findings showed that healthy people who postponed retirement and chose to retire a year later than those in the comparison group had an 11% lower risk of dying early.
  • A study from Cornell U. and the University of Melbourne shows a striking correlation between social security claims for early takers and a jump in mortality. Men in particular see an increase in mortality risk of about 20%.
  • According to the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, retiring later appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s.

Flunk retirement? No way!

In my experience as a career transition and retirement coach, it is rare that any retiree – early or not, and particularly, men –  will admit that their retirement isn’t going well. And many retirements don’t go well because the advance planning only had to do with the money.

Over one-half of retirees enter their retirement with no semblance of a non-financial plan that would include discussion and a plan for the psychological, mental, physical, and spiritual sides of retirement.

Early retirees are guilty as well. One thing they may fail to factor in is the role of relationships in retirement and not consider that their circle of relationships will shrink and be difficult to restore because few people their age are retired.

One risk for any retiree is the threat of boredom. Far too many retirees retire from something and not to something. Self-indulgent, leisure-based retirement quickly wears thin for most, and without a purpose or a sustainable, inspiring reason to get up in the morning, boredom is in the wings. Boredom often leads to depression.

In summary –

– retirement fails to acknowledge the important role that work plays in longevity. We are built to work, to create, to produce. Retirement goes against that, and other, critical components of our biology which offers us only two options. We either grow or we stagnate.

The traditional self-indulgent, leisure-based retirement model just simply isn’t healthy in the long term as evidenced by the fact that, in the U.S., our elderly spend more of their years in chronic illness than any other developed nation.

We tend to “live too short and die too long.”

We can’t push all of that off on retirement, but we need to be honest and acknowledge that it does play a role.

I see no reason to start that deterioration process early – or ever.

How about you?

I’m 57, have no savings, and am unemployed. Is it too late to turn my life around? An open letter response.

An open letter to a mid-lifer that recently posed this question on Quora.com.

I’m 57, have no savings, and am unemployed. Is it too late to turn my life around?

Absolutely not!!!

It’s never too late to start but always too early to quit!

 

Consider that you may have 20–30 years ahead of you – maybe more if you have been taking care of yourself physically. That’s 1–2 generations. Think of how much we have progressed in that amount of time.

You can make lots happen in that amount of time also.

It’s been said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in one year and greatly underestimate what we can get done in three years. Think of it as momentum that develops through planning and compounded effort.

While I don’t know your life situation, I feel safe in saying that you got to 57 with some successes along the way. It’s only in your head that it’s disgraceful to be unemployed and with no savings. It’s no comfort to know that there are lots and lots of folks in this leaky boat with you, but it is a fact.

And, frankly, nobody is thinking about you or really cares – you just think they are.  This will erode your self-image and make the road ahead harder if you concern yourself with that.

So start by reminding yourself of what successes you’ve had and what it was that made you successful at it. All of us have innate talents. Often, we leave them unpolished or unrealized as we strive to meet the cultural expectations of parents, peers, professors, and politicians that take us down a path of conformity and comparison at the expense of allowing these deep talents to flourish.

Ask yourself:

  • What do I really, really like doing?
  • What am I really, really good at?
  • What advice do others seek from me?
  • When have I been in a “flow state” where what I am doing makes time fade away?
  • What would I be doing if time and money weren’t a factor?
  • What would your five closest friends say you are?
  • If I stumbled into my own funeral, what would you like the eulogist to be saying? And who would it be?
  • What does this world need that I can provide?

When you have that figured out, then get aggressive about finding a match for that combination. Let the match with your talents be the guide to your decisions and not money.

When you have your talents aligned with your work, you’ll see the rewards come.

In step with this, it sounds as if a change in self-discipline is in order as well. As in, spend less than you make. With a 30–40 year runway, you have the opportunity to make a solid financial recovery. Plus when you are doing what you love, you aren’t likely to succumb to the social pressure to “retire” and potentially squander a couple of decades of fulfilling, meaningful creativity and production.

Remember, that creativity is not age-dependent. And mental senescence is not automatic. Your creative brain will grow as long as you continue to challenge it.

A future bigger than your past.

So think of it as being 2/3 done with 1/3 left but with the advantage of being able to leverage accumulated life skills, work experiences, and wisdom into a lifestyle of work that can be more gratifying, purposeful, fulfilling, and financially rewarding than the first 2/3.

You are uniquely gifted and far from a slug. Recognize that, change your self-talk, get into motion, get help, and launch your restart. And remember that our society needs you to be a producer and not another “hanger-on” or someone on the dole.

Good luck – and thanks for putting yourself out there.

Beginning is half done!!