Removing the Friction of Retirement. Who’s Crazy Idea Was This Anyway?

January 31, 2023

I follow a young fella on Medium.com by the name of Rocco Pendola. Rocco has a newsletter entitled “Never Retire.”

Since that’s my personal position on this unnatural concept, I was obviously intrigued when I came across his writing.

Rocco is a deep-thinking, iconoclastic, 40-something GenXer.

I like that age group. There’s a certain kind of experiential and whipsawed-based wisdom there that you don’t find in the groups before and after. I try to hang out with them as much as I can. My daughter and son are in that group. The parent-child role reversal has not happened – yet. It’s germinating. I’m learning to listen and pay more attention now while suppressing my “dad lecture” tendency they’ve endured for so long.

Nothing against my long-standing and beloved pre-boomer and older boomer inner circle. It’s just that there there’s a bit too much of a rut there, in the classic definition – a grave with the ends kicked out.

It’s not easy being weird.

There are things that Rocco advocates that I don’t line up with – inner-city rental apartment living, moving to Spain to avoid the current cultural insanity, to name a few – but his core principle of living a semi-retired life starting in your 20s or 30s really resonated with me.

In a recent post, Rocco was lamenting that he misnamed his newsletter because the name triggers friction. In his words:

“When most people think about never retiring, they take it as a negative. I probably should have called my newsletter Living the Semi-Retired Life. “

Wow, can I relate to the friction. I’ve been encountering it for a few decades on two fronts:

Advocating for living to 100 or beyond.
Never retiring.

The friction is greatest amongst the 70+ cohort. That space between the temples has taken on concrete block characteristics when asked to consider these ideas. Few minds get changed on these two topics at that age.

My advocacy – and Rocco’s – makes sense for the generations behind the boomers. They are more open to removing the friction that the idea of retirement creates.

What friction?

We start early creating friction with the anxiety over needing to be able to retire. It shows up in alarming intensity even amongst 20- and 30-year-olds.

I’ve been helping a master-degreed nurse executive with her career documents recently. In her 50s and on a solid career track, she recently decided to sign up to get her doctorate in nursing. Her 20-year-old son chastised her, saying she was too old to do that and that she should be focusing on planning for retirement.

Friction!

If I’m 65 and unretired, I’m considered unfortunate, a laggard – or strange.

Friction!

If I retire early, I’m a hero and am envied.

Friction!

If I speak out against the concept, I’m weird and misinformed (I’m taking a bow!).

Friction!

If I’m 50, an average saver, I wake up one day to realize I’m only about $1 million short of being able to experience that dream retirement.

Friction!

The reality behind the friction.

Lending Tree just announced that $1 million in retirement savings is no longer adequate for a “comfortable” retirement, at least in 146 metro areas.

My current domicile is one of those. The Denver Post recently reported this:

“In metro Denver, the typical retiree makes $25,504 from Social Security a year, spends $58,992 a year, which implies the need to earn $75,245 before taxes. A retirement portfolio would need to provide $49,741 to meet that demand. Following the 4% rule, a Denver area retiree would need to set aside $1,243,532 at the time of retirement.”

Let’s bounce that up against the reality of retirement saving in the U.S., as revealed in this federal report published by Edward Jones recently:

Average retirement savings by age

Source: Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, 1989-2019; https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

Friction!

Semi-retirement is the friction antidote.

Friction suggests a lubricant. Semi-retirement is the lubricant.

Rocco and I are on the same page – just different starting points. Rocco advocates semi-retirement starting in the 20s and 30s. I suggest it for those entering late mid-life and later.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent Rocco post that describes the friction and a “practical and psychological guide to living the semi-retired life.

You realize you’ll Never Retire. Because, like so many Americans, you simply don’t and will never have enough money saved to quit working.
You fight this feeling, doubling down on the lame how to catch up on your retirement savings advice that litters the financial media.
You do the math. If you don’t have nearly enough saved today to retire and will most certainly be unsuccessful playing catch up, why expend the energy — physical and mental — and resources — particularly time — for a most likely futile effort?
You let logic overtake your emotions. You rebel against what you’ve been told and taught over the years about how to live during mid-life on the road to relative old age.
You start to live more evenly across the lifespan. If you’re going to fall short on retirement savings, why bust your ass? Because, if and when you fall short, you will continue to require cash flow. This is the obvious consequence of falling short — needing to continue to make money.
For example, at age 40, you have $100,000 (or much, much less!) saved. The chances of hitting whatever the retirement calculator spits out at you by, say, age 65, are slim. Often, they’re next to impossible.

So you slow down.

You officially become semi-retired.

My advocacy for semi-retirement amongst the 60+ cohort is more about not wasting the talent and accumulated skills and experiences on a leisure-based, purposeless lifestyle that can increase the risk of early frailty and extended morbidity.

Semi-retirement in the second half or third stage presents the opportunity for a healthy balance of labor, leisure, and learning, not to mention reducing the friction that the fear of outliving your financial resources can create.

It’s unfortunate that we’ve allowed this unnatural, illogical concept to take such deep root in our culture and in our psyche.

Semi-retirement shields you from the friction, anxiety, and physical and emotional downsides that accompany retirement for many. You mix labor, leisure, and learning on a schedule determined only by you doing what you enjoy doing and perhaps even continue doing until the universe calls for the parts back.

Full-stop retirement deprives us of the opportunity to continue to contribute and create and live a healthier, longer life.

I suspect the politicians that dreamed up the idea 88 years ago didn’t give that an ounce of thought.

Leave us a comment and share your thoughts on this topic.

Let’s Eliminate the Future! Avoiding the Hypnosis of Linear Time.

January 24, 2023

Photo by Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

“Just For Today”

That’s a sign that you’ll likely find hanging somewhere in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting room.

I know – I’ve been in a few of those rooms and seen the signs or heard the words. Not as an addict, but as an observer and a presence in support of a loved one deep in the clutches of alcohol.

The phrase won’t hold much sway or meaning for the sober, man/woman on the street.

If alcohol or drugs own you, it means the world – a life-or-death mantra.

It’s a mantra that saved my loved one and sustains him today.

It saved Steve Chandler – thankfully!

Steve who?

Around 9 years ago, I stumbled across a life/business coach and author named Steve Chandler. It was a time when I was succeeding at the crazy, misguided goal of reading 6-8 books a month. It was also a time when my loved one was in the depths of his struggle.

Steve’s crisp, no-holds-barred writing style – and his personal story – gripped me and I plowed through at least a dozen of his books that year, including “Prosperous Coach”, considered to be the seminal book in the field of executive coaching.

I’m replowing. I’m committing to re-reading all the Chandler books on my shelf and in my Kindle in 2023.

I need to do that because the story is so powerful and the life-changing advice that good.

And, because I need that constant reminder that “just for today” is the best of that advice.

Chandler is an alcoholic.

My loved one is an alcoholic.

If you’ve been in or on the fringes of that world you know that recovery never stops. There are no “recovered” alcoholics.

It’s one day at a time – just for today. It’s what saves the alcoholic’s life.

But it’s a thin edge.

That’s what makes Chandler’s story so compelling. His emergence from alcoholism while raising four children as a single dad and rising to the pinnacle of the coaching profession is inspiring.

It’s why I’m thankful for “just for today” as my loved one lives by it and is recovering a lost decade of his life and succeeding beyond his, and my, expectations in business and life.

The hypnosis of linear time

I work hard at avoiding “time travel” and encourage others to avoid it as well – mentally traveling into the regrets and guilt that exist in the past and the fear that is the main resident of the future. That’s a central message in Chandler’s writing.

He writes about the impact of this sign in his book “Wealth Warrior: The Personal Prosperity Revolution.”

“That sign never left me. I later built my whole time warrior training and coaching around that sign. It’s the most counterintuitive sign ever put up in any room anywhere. Why? Because it eliminates the future. In fact, it eliminates the hypnosis of linear time altogether, and linear thinking as well (always, in the past, a dreary cocktail mix of paranoia and regret). So, the “Just For Today” sign in the meeting hall gave me my first taste of freedom and my first flirtation with this wonderful thing I call the “higher self.”

Chandler goes further and references the great UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden:

“His method was to eliminate the future. He called it ‘Make each day your masterpiece.’ And when he got his whole team to devote all their skills and attention to today’s Wednesday afternoon practice (instead of the upcoming ‘big game), they became the Zen Masters of college basketball. Linear thinkers could not beat them. Because Wooden’s boys were always in the moment they were in.”

Would we not all be better served if we remembered this? “Give us this day our daily bread.”

There is no reference to the future in this good phrase.

Just When I Thought Creativity Was In Sight – – –

January 17, 2023

I struggle with creativity. Some days I think there’s hope that I may hit a creative streak. Then there are the days (most common) when I find myself totally encased in imposter syndrome.

Just when I’m feeling a tad bit creative, something like the following hits my email and I’m shocked back to the reality that true creativity is eternally elusive.

Thanks to friend and prolific-sharer-of-humorous-stuff-off-the-internet, Dick Bissell, here’s something I couldn’t not share with you. Chances are you’ve seen this by now and deserves a quick trip to the delete button. But, if not, enjoy.

Back to snarky, sarcastic, modern elder content next week.

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the winners:

Cashtration(n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

Intaxicaton: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Bozone(n): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.(This one got extra credit.)

Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.

Decafalon(n): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

Glibido: All talk and no action.

Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Arachnoleptic Fit(n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

Beelzebug(n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

Caterpallor(n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.

Negligent, adj Absent-mindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.

Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

Balderdash, n A rapidly receding hairline.

Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.

Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.

Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men

I’m going to pull this post back up and read it whenever I feel like I’m on a creative blitz as a reminder that I’m a forever rookie.

Who Wins the Diet-versus-Exercise Longevity Debate? Let’s Call It a Draw.

January 10, 2023

It’s nice to be back from my two-week writing sabbatical. I doubt I’ll do that again – I hope the rust isn’t apparent with this first article of 2023.

I got some pushback from a few readers on my 12/6/2022 post (see here) in which I claim diet to be the biggest determinant of a longer, healthier life.

Exercise, they claim, is more important than diet.

My argumentive side is inclined to invoke the Jim Fixx story to illustrate otherwise. You remember him – the guy credited with helping start America’s fitness revolution by popularizing the sport of running. Fixx claimed that diet mattered not if you exercised enough. He was a 240 lb, two-pack-a-day smoker before he became a runner. Despite losing 70 pounds, Fixx continued with a marginal diet, espousing that it didn’t matter what he ate.

He died of a heart attack at 52 after a morning run. The three main arteries leading to his heart were almost completely blocked with plaques, and his other arteries were filled with plaques as well.

But wait, why argue –

-over two things that both contribute to healthy longevity? How ’bout we avoid either-or thinking and go with both-and?

I’ve revealed my hand on what I think is most important. But let’s look at the arguments in favor of the other side.

Here’s a quote from a young man I follow on Medium.com, Gunnar De Winter:

“The closest thing we have to an anti-aging pill is not some fancy supplement, but physical activity. Exercise keeps your blood, your brain, and everything in between young, down to the (epi)genetic level.”

But what is the optimal level of exercise. That’s where it gets interesting – and challenging for us generally sedentary second-halfers.

You might want to sit down for this:

An article in Springer Open addresses “optimal” exercise for longevity, stating the following: (the bolding is mine):

Regular physical activity (PA) represents the most important lifestyle component associated with cardiorespiratory fitness, healthy aging and longevity. In order to induce general health benefits, public health guidelines recommend, beside strength and balance exercises, at least 150–300 min of PA at moderate aerobic intensity or 75–150 min at vigorous intensity per week [1, 2]. Much more engagement in PA, however, is necessary to achieve maximal benefits on longevity [3]. For instance, a large prospective cohort study demonstrated maximal longevity gains at about 700 min of moderate or 350 min of vigorous PA per week [4]. The accomplishment of this objective is challenging in particular when considering that even minimal PA recommendations are difficult to achieve in the aging populatio

Raise your hand if you can get motivated to find 100 minutes a day for moderate exercise or 50 minutes a day for vigorous exercise.

It’s a tall order for all of us. But the benefits are well documented.

My unassailable weekly exercise regimen amounts to about 550 minutes/9.2 hours of combined vigorous and moderate exercise. It seems like a lot until you think of it as a % of your week:

9.2/168 = 5.4% of my week.

I don’t find 5% to be much of a sacrifice in order to feel good and mostly pain-free every day and enhance the chances of putting more years in my life along with more life in my years.

Borrow 11% of average TV viewing time.

Ken Dychtwald’s research for his book “What Retirees Want” A Holistic View of Life’s Third Age” revealed that the average retiree in the U.S. spends 49 hours watching television.

If exercise is, in fact, the most important thing we can do to live a longer and healthier life, it wouldn’t seem to be too great a sacrifice to rechannel a bit of that sedentary habit into moderate or vigorous exercise.

I don’t think twice about 5% of my week going to exercise because it’s so ingrained as a habit I started nearly 40 years ago.

If it ain’t on the calendar (mental or physical) it ain’t gonna happen. It never leaves my mental calendar.

I know vigorous exercise isn’t for everybody in my cohort. I’m still waiting for another octogenarian to join me in the deadlift area at Lifetime Fitness.

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

There’s no arguing that statement.

Nor is there logic in arguing which is best – diet or exercise.

Let’s table the argument and max out with both.

What’s your exercise regimen look like? What works for you? What can we learn from you about how you come down on diet versus exercise? Leave a comment or drop a note to gary@makeagingwork.com. If you haven’t joined the Makeagingwork tribe, trip on over to www.makeagingwork.com and sign up to receive a free article each week on the topic of successful aging, longevity lifestyle planning, and health & wellness for folks over 50.