Where Do You Go With Your Wisdom? Don’t Waste It On An 88-year Old Retirement Model.

Image by Georgi Dyulgerov from Pixabay

Shouldn’t we, as “modern elders” be marrying our wisdom to others, somehow, someway?

We’ve piled up 30, 40, 50 years of it. Where does it make sense to hoard it, warehouse it, let it go stale?

OK, so you don’t feel like you are wise.

Wrong, dear friend!

You have your own individual wisdom, a mash up of all your victories, defeats, exhilarations, embarrassments.

Personally, I feel I’ve earned a masters degree in screw ups and a doctorate in toe-stubbing.

But, I claim no failures. It’s all just been a long string of research and development.

One of my failures, some would say, was that I missed that road sign that said “Detour 65. Please move to the sidelines, get out of the way, and take it easy.”

I often wonder what it would be like for me today if I had bought the traditional retirement Kool-Aid.

I can only conjecture, but there’s a part of me that still wants to avoid challenge, problems, or leaving the comfort zone. At my core, I’m as likely a candidate as those who succumb to the temptation to grab hold of this semi-entitlement and hop on to an ever accelerating downward curve.

We’ve all got this part in us. In fact, Steven Pressfield wrote a whole book on it: “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.” He calls it “the resistance” and “genius’s shadow” saying further that “- it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.”

I arm wrestle with resistance everyday. Some days it wins, like last week when I failed to post my weekly article for only the 3rd time in 5 1/2 years. OK, it was the day the Nuggets swept the Lakers, so a little slack is accepted.

There is little more gratifying than winning that wrestling match and breaking through the imposter syndrome and doing what is invariably a mix of discomfort, inconvenience, and doubt.

Just know that the resistance doesn’t want you spreading that wisdom around. It won’t get in the way of you letting it atrophy.

 

Genius? Who me?

Yep. You!

We were all born individual geniuses. It doesn’t take long for that to be squashed. Parents, peers, professors, pastors, physicians, politicians, and pundits team up with the media and Pressfield’s resistance to take it away in favor of conformity, comfort, and convenience.

The result is a learned mindset that puts a time stamp on our value.

Retirement by it’s very definition means to “retreat to a place of safety and security.”

Biologically, neurologically, physically – that’s not a good place to go. But, the temptation is great because of the disguise that the resistance puts on an environment that slows the learning process, leads to sedentary lifestyles, reduces social relationships, and encourages removal of a key component of longevity – work!

Don’t be a burned-down library.

There’s an African proverb that says:

“When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.”

What say, let’s spread our library around before it burns down. And, oh, by the way, it is going to burn down.

Keep learning. Keep stretching and pushing the edges. Help somebody. Be a rebel against the stale, illogical retirement model.

Favor us with your genius – it ain’t dead yet!!

 

 

 

 

What Happens When Our Doctors Don’t Like Or Trust Our Healthcare System? Positive Change May Be Coming!

I’m going to step aside and let someone else take center on my little stage this week.

An article appeared in my daily Medium.com feed this week on a topic I’ve riffed on repeatedly across the near six-year life of this blog:

Our hosed-up medical system.

Published in the Nuance publication and written by veteran writer Markham Heid (323,000 followers on Medium), the article is an interview of a cardiologist and medical director of a major American health system who unpacks his take on how the incentives in our health care system are “messed up, meaning they’re not always aligned with patient welfare.”

The physician talks about “the unprecedented and recent drop in U.S. life expectancy, the rise of non-communicable diseases, and the need to take control of our “toxic” lifestyles.”

Topics near and dear to my heart – and yours, I hope.

Finally, someone in the “system” that understands and can spell “prevention.”

Here’s a link to the article. I hope you’ll take the time to read it (6 minute read).

One caveat: you may discount the validity since the cardiologist is not named – and we are now aswhirl in ChatGPT written articles. I trust the author and understand the physicians posture on anonymity. Regardless, the content is undisputable.

I encourage you, dear reader, to absorb and take to heart what we are up against in enhancing our ability to achieve healthy longevity.

A Giant Conflict of Interest: A Doctor’s Views On Our Flawed Medical System and Toxic Lifestyles

 

 

I’d appreciate your views on this. Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.

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

Photo by Julien L on Unsplash

I suspect most of the advice you will get on this will say better “time management.”

At the risk of sounding insulting, let me remind you that 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. You can’t change that a minute is a minute and a day is a day.

You can only manage yourself. 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?”

WTH!

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.

You’d think, after 8 decades on this mudball, that I’d have it figured out.

Go ahead – think again!

Let’s do a hypothetical on the question, granting the benefit of the doubt on some of this. There is some solid priority stuff built-in already – sleep, healthy meals, and the gym.

  • 168 hours (the week we all start with)
  • Less 40 hours of work
  • Less 10 hours commute
  • Less 56 hours of sleep
  • Less 14 hours to fix and eat healthy meals
  • Less 8 hours at the gym (or equivalent)
  • 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 may lie in your 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 5–10-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 get back on track takes discipline. And, without question, discipline is central to good self-management.

The simple fact that we feel the angst about this and ask the question means we are at a good starting point.

Endless battle

I ‘spect I’ll go to my grave still wrestling with this. But there is one thing that I feel supremely confident in advocating and suggesting that will get any of us closest to solving this persistent challenge.

Stop time traveling and bring it down to today.

John Wooden, arguably the best basketball coach ever, coached his player to avoid “time travel” – projecting into the future or reaching back to their past. His mantra was simply “Make today your masterpiece,” something his father had taught him. He focused his players on today – each practice session was as important as a championship game.

Steve Chandler, in his book “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself”  emphasized that Wooden knew something profound:

“Life is now. Life is not later on. And the more we hypnotize ourselves into thinking we have all the time in the world to do what we want to do, the more we sleepwalk past life’s finest opportunities. Self motivation flows from the importance we attach to today.”

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

How are you dealing with battle against time? What’s working for you? Love to hear your thoughts – leave a comment. If you haven’t joined our tribe, sign up for this weekly blurb at www.makeagingwork.com

Is Getting Old As Bad As Most People Think When They Are Young? I’m Not a Good One To Ask.

I found myself time traveling back to my youth and comparing my attitude to that of the youth of today. Attitudes in the 40s and 50s were definitely different. There was still a modicum of respect for those of advanced numbers. I revered my grandparents as I watched them age. They died earlier than grandparents of today, the product of decades of hardscrabble living in rural, windy southeast Wyoming.

But we loved ’em and cared for them in their decline. No warehousing. Aging and death in place.

Will we return to that reverence for the elderly? Let’s not hold our collective breaths.

Can we blame them?

I guess it’s just one more demonstration of a naive attitude from our ill-and TikTok-informed youth. But, can we really blame our media-infected youngsters for viewing “old” as bad when the vast majority of media portray “people of advanced age” as irrelevant, slow, useless, unattractive, etc.?

In his recent book, “What Retirees Want”, Dr. Ken Dychtwald references a 2019 AARP study of the online media image portrayals of people age 50 and up. That age cohort represent 46% of the population but only 15% of the people pictured. The study found that older adults are seven times as likely to be portrayed negatively as younger ones, and the portrayals are heavily stereotyped.

Dychtwald further points out that the average age of advertising agency employees is 34 and they are openly transfixed on their own age cohort.

Since there may be a prevailing tendency to not think on their own amongst the younger, maybe we can’t blame them for this attitude and bias?

It wasn’t always like this. Old used to be “in”, even here in the U.S. The signers of the U.S. Constitution, although relatively young, tried to look older (white wigs) because age was venerated. Older meant wiser and the younger looked to this wisdom for advice and direction.

Then, as we approached the 20th century, it all got turned upside down as we moved into and through the industrial revolution. Sage wisdom began to be replaced with an obsession with youth.

Portals galore.

In the 19th century, we essentially had two age classifications – child and adult. Today, with the help of social scientists and creative and opportunistic marketing experts, we have at least seven age portals: newborn, infancy, childhood, adolescent, young adult, middle age, and old age – each creating its own opportunity for marketing and profit.

Do you notice the 6:1 ratio there? Old age almost seems to be an afterthought. The status and privilege enjoyed by older society members eroded and the old represented a burden on society, an obstacle to progress.

I remember someone saying: “Youth is wonderful. It’s too bad it’s wasted on the young.” Our global obsession with youth is wrongheaded and ignorant and blinds us to the real world of what it’s like and what it means to grow old.

Be the example.

While it certainly is not true for everyone as they age, the vast majority of those 50+ enter their later years in great shape mentally and emotionally despite the tide of ageism and youth-orientation that older people swim against.

What our naive youth don’t understand – and most likely will never be willing to accept – is that they are headed to an abyss of emotional and psychological instability that, on average, bottoms out in early middle-age i.e. 47–50.

Research shows that, on average, it gets better from there and reaches a peak of happiness and overall well-being in the late 60s on through into the 80s.

What? The experience of “fun” dips in mid-life and then rises to a peak in the retirement years? Yep! Share that with the next irreverent, arrogant, whipper-snapper millennial that dishonors your modern elder status.

Here’s what “fun” looks like at various life stages, according to an AgeWave/Merrill Lynch study entitled “Leisure in Retirement: Beyond the Bucket List”

Age Happiness/Fun Level (on 1-10 scale)

25 – 6.4

35 – 6.0

45 – 6.0

55 – 6.4

65 – 7.3

75 – 7.1

That same study revealed that most retirees are turning out to be living their best years with their contentment and relaxation in the 70+ percentile and anxiety in the under-20 percentile while 25-35-year-olds are in the 30-50 percentile in all three categories.

So, on average Mr./Ms. Irreverant Youngster, your worst years are looking you in the face while you buy into the myths of aging and deploy your abject ageism. Meanwhile, we slow, stooped, senile, slobbering, senior citizens control 76% of the wealth in the U.S. and, frankly, are doing just fine, thank you.

We are now “modern elders”, not senior citizens. We are living longer and healthier, we are highly active, and are the biggest givers of our wealth and our time for other than self-aggrandizement. We have finely-tuned “bullshit meters” based on life’s experiences and our acquired wisdom.

Yet, we are patient with youthful insolence knowing that age has a way of bringing things into proper focus.