A couple of blogs ago, I mentioned that I started taking the advice of a large squadron of very successful writers, who have persuaded me that learning the craft of writing is “unglamorous blue-collar work” and that I should “just write.”
Duh!
So I’m holding fast to writing at least 500 words a day on something in my mental wheelhouse (positive aging, health and wellness, career/life management in the third age, etc.)
I’ve found the easiest way to hit that daily goal is to pick a question submitted on Quora.com which is, according to Wikipedia, “an American question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions.”
It’s been around since 2009 and has a user base of around 300 million active users.
I’ve been answering at least one question a day for a few months now and, quite shockingly, have had, as of this writing, over 885,000 views of my posts in Quora and achieved #1 Quora writer on the planet in one category (Longevity) and climbed into the top ten in two others (Health and Fitness).
It’ll be a tough position to hold but is a nice ego-stroke while it lasts.
////////////////
This Quora question hit my email this week:
“What should you do daily in order to live super healthy when you become 70?”
Smack into my wheelhouse!
I think my response is pretty good. Probably not good enough to go viral like one post did where I answered the question “What is the best anti-aging workout? It went viral with 445,000 Quora views.
I decided to let you determine if this latest one is good so I’m reposting it here for this week’s blog, with some modification and additions. You be the judge and let me know what you think.
P.S. If you’ve been tagging along with me on this 2 ½ year blogging journey, you’ve heard some of this before. But I believe “repetition is the mother of learning” still applies.
“What should you do daily in order to live super healthy when you become 70?”
The components of good health that will carry us into our 70s and beyond in good health are not complicated and we’ve known them for a long time. Sad to say, individually, we choose to be naive to them, find them too difficult and inconvenient and end up not doing them.
I suggest that the most important “daily” activity to insure being super healthy late into life is to remind ourselves each day that we have an inheritance of good health and an obligation to maintain it.
We aren’t inclined to put the components of good health – nutrition, exercise, social engagement, continuous learning, sense of purpose/service – in place without an attitude that honors this inheritance.
This point was driven home to me several years ago when I stumbled across the book “Dare to Be 100” written by Dr. Walter Bortz, a semi-retired Stanford University geriatric physician.
In this timeless book, he lays out a simple roadmap for good health using the acronym D-A-R-E:
- D=Diet
- A=Attitude
- R=Renewal/rejuvenation
- E=Exercise
The D, R, and E are biological compass points for living to 100 (which, BTW, we all should be able to do). But attitude is the most important and the most difficult because, as Dr. Bortz says, “it’s in attitude that we find all the planning and decision-making that facilitate the biological steps. It is possible to live to 100 by chance, but not likely.”
So living healthily into our 70s and beyond isn’t going to happen by chance either and will only happen with a commitment to a discipline that builds the simple components of diet, exercise, social engagement, having a cause bigger than yourself, and continuous learning into a lifestyle.
It’s important to remember that there is no biological reason for any of us not to live to 100 or beyond.
The body has demonstrated that it can last 122 years and 164 days which is the benchmark for longevity set by a Parisian woman named Jeanne Calment. (Yeah, I know – you may have heard that this has been debunked. Look again – the debunking has been debunked.)
The right attitude acknowledges this as our whole-life potential and the inheritance that we should honor.
Will we get to 122 1/2? Not likely. But with an attitude that acknowledges that the body is designed for a longer life than we experience on average, we enhance our chances of getting closer to it than if we accept that average life span as our destiny.
On average, at an overall average lifespan in the U.S. of around 80 (78.9 for men, 81.1 for women), we achieve only about 66% of that “whole life potential.”
With the exception of the consequences of the infrequent “blueprint error/genetic defect”, we die early in our culture simply because of our lifestyles. Our declines as we move into our 60s and 70s are thirty-year problems of lifestyle, not disease. We are more victims of our own healthcare illiteracy and lack of discipline than anything else.
Let me quote Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the best-selling and life-changing book “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond”.
“The simple fact is that we know perfectly well what to do. Some 70 percent of premature death and aging are lifestyle-related. Heart attacks, strokes, the common cancers, diabetes, most falls, fractures, and serious injuries, and many more illnesses are primarily caused by the way we live. If we had the will to do it, we could eliminate more than half of all disease in men and women over fifty. Not delay it, eliminate it.”
I believe that statement has attitude written all over it, as well as a call to learn about our biological inheritance, how it works and how to treat it.
I’m two months short of 78 and approach each day with an acquired understanding of how my body and mind work at the cellular level (thanks to Dr. Lodge). I set a preposterous age goal of 112 ½ at age 75 because I wanted a third of my life left to get things done that didn’t happen in the first two-thirds.
I have no illusions about getting there. I was guilty of some marginal health habits in my first fifty years and before I acquired this self-care awareness. But I know my attitude will get me a lot closer – and healthier along the way – than if I accepted only living to the average lifespan of 78.9 for men in the U.S.
If that were my attitude, I should be getting my affairs in order – which I’m not. I don’t need that drag on my attitude.
Average isn’t healthy
I started re-reading “Younger Next Year” again this week for the fifth time. It was good to be reminded of Dr. Lodge’s description of how he watched so many of his patients of 20-30 years simply start a gradual decline and accept an average lifespan as destiny.
He realized that he, along with our medical establishment, had failed them by providing them with good medical care but not great health care. He admitted that he “like most doctors in America, had been doing the wrong job well. Modern medicine does not concern itself with lifestyle problems. Doctors don’t treat them, medical schools don’t teach them and insurers don’t pay to solve them.”
We forget – or didn’t learn along the way – that what we’ve come to accept as normal ailments and deterioration are not a normal part of growing old. In Dr. Lodge’s words “they are an outrage. An outrage that we have simply gotten used to because we set the bar so shamefully low.” (See “Whole-life chart above!)
I’m going to ignore 78.9 as it flies by, which it will as each day does now. It’s just an attitude, accepting of an eventual demise but not one conceding to a “bar set so shamefully low.”
How’s your attitude about your long-term health?
- Is it infected with illiteracy about how your biology works? (Remedy: Chapters 3 & 4 of Younger Next Year)
- Is it infected with a belief that your “DNA is your destiny” or that your genetics determines your lifespan (which, BTW, it does not.)
- Is it infected with lifestyle habits spawned by comfort, convenience, conformity, and cultural expectations?
- Is it infected with a longevity goal “set so shamefully low?”
Can I suggest that 78.9 should be just a signpost reminding you that you are well beyond average and that it is merely a mid-point in your healthy third-age journey to 100 or beyond?
As I immersed myself this morning in the challenging chapter 3 of “Younger Next Year”, Dr. Lodge rocked my world for the fifth time with the reminder that we have “- stepped outside of the crucible of our biological evolution” and with a “- remarkable triumph of ego over intellect, we simply assume that we were ‘made’ for this life: that we were purpose-built for life in the twenty-first century. That is a deeply mistaken view, and one we must get over.”
He reminds us that the great problem of our times is “surfeit (excess abundance) and idleness” with bodies and minds that still instinctively respond to the abundance as preparation for famine as we did 300 millennia ago when we barely survived winters and hid from saber-tooths. Now, no famine is coming but our biology hasn’t caught up with change.
We have lots to eat with nothing that can eat us.
He concludes:
“Our lifestyle – especially in retirement, especially in this wonderful country – is a disease more deadly than cancer, war or plague. We live longer because of modern medicine, but many of us live wretchedly and many of us die much younger than we should. The point is that we have to learn to cure ourselves, or, in the midst of all that plenty, we will live and prematurely die in unnecessary pain – in bodies that believe they are in the grip of famine.”
If you’ve read the book (please don’t tell me you haven’t!), you know that Dr. Lodge’s main solution is exercise and that he does a marvelous job of convincing readers of the validity of that recommendation by explaining its impact at the cellular level.
From it, we have “Harry’s Rules” which I leave as the call to action with this article (along with reading the book), to help us all get well past 78.9 and 81.1. Without an attitude committing to something like this, that is likely to be our fate.
Harry’s Rules
- Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.
- Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.
- Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.
- Spend less than you make.
- Quit eating crap!
- Care.
- Connect and commit.
Let me know your thoughts – scroll down and leave a comment.
Our tribe is growing rapidly, thanks to your consistent support and spreading the word along with folks catching my diatribes on Quora. If you haven’t joined, trip on over to www.makeagingwork.com, join the list and receive a copy of my free ebook “Achieving Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
The Ultimate Act of Ageism is Upon Us. Are You Prepared?
Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
Covid, shmovid!
It won’t touch me.
You see, I can’t let it touch me because – well, I’m too freaking old!
It’s a birthday month for me – number 78 in a few days. It’s just a number but it drives me deeper into the “expendable” category that is subtly being hinted at here in the good ‘ol USA. You know, that ultimate demonstration of ageism they have already put in motion in Italy where “battlefield triage” has people over 65 left alone on hospital gurneys to die from pneumonia.
It’s beginning to sound like there will be “no room at the inn, sir” if I show up with a fever.
Sir, do you prefer white or blue sheets on your hallway gurney?
But ma’am. I’m in better physical condition than 80% of those 40 and up.
Sorry, sir. I have my orders. Please decide – we have others waiting.
Collectively, we’re smart enough to not let it get to that. We’ll work through the toilet-paper and sanitizer frenzy, start listening to the right voices and hunker through this.
My wife and I, despite being in incredible physical condition, are self-quarantining. We’re lucky we can. We have deeply concerned and healthy 40-something children who are starting their role reversal early (with our cooperation) – doing some shopping for us, shielding us from 7-10-year-old grandkids (the most painful part).
As a family, we feel we are all on the same page, with a reasoned understanding of the complexity and danger involved and listening to the right voices. Calm and common sense should serve us well.
These are the cleanest hands EVER at this keyboard today. Believe me when I say that’s a major habit pattern modification.
Ron and I should be OK.
In the midst of all this, I found myself thinking about Ron.
I’ve never met or talked to Ron. I only know three things about Ron.
These are his actual pictures.
Ron commented on the post that I put out on Quora.com on 12/24/19 that went viral and has logged 511,000 views as I write this. The post was about the “best anti-aging workout.” Seems I struck quite a nerve with my answer.
Ron and I haven’t shared any thoughts about covid but I’m guessing we’re on the same page with regard to our confidence that our biologies will handle an assault, even if we are relegated to a hallway gurney.
I’m sharing Ron’s comment here. His story is the type that needs to be told because it validates the impact of a disciplined exercise routine. His routine closely mirrors mine and goes a bit beyond.
I work to adhere to “Harry’s Rules”, the lifestyle rules written by Dr. Henry Lodge and appearing in the appendix of the life-altering book he co-authored with Chris Crowley entitled: “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond.”
Here’s a refresher in case you are silly enough to not invest in the book:
Harry’s Rules
Ron and I are the same age – and are experiencing very similar results (Note: I don’t have the diabetic thing to worry about). I don’t know, but it sounds like maybe Ron read the book too.
Here’s his comment:
Great post.
I’m 77. I maintain my weight normal with low carb diet. I go to gym 7 days a week. 30 minutes cardio on bike, rolling hills. 30–40 minutes circuit training with sets of 30 and abs sets of 50.
I work entire body every day. I keep weights moderate for me. Leg press 225–240. Curl 80–100. Abs 60 working front, both sides and rotating 50.
I never get sore.
I do circuit training as fast as I can, no resting between machines.
As a diabetic, I take 1/2 of a pill daily. With my diet and exercise program, I keep my A1C at 5.6 and non-fasting blood sugar at 85–88. My heart rate when I get up is 45–50. Days after lots of coffee it’s around 55–60. Blood pressure 120/60. I used to take 3 pills for blood pressure. Now one small one.
My body fat is 16%. High muscle mass.
It’s vital as we age to really keep muscle mass up so we need to lift enough weights to increase and maintain muscle. Lifting light weights sets of 10–12 with a minute or more between sets is a waste of time. I think one set of 30–50 where you need to press to get the last 5 done is better. Working different muscle groups on different days is too confusing. If I work the entire body every day I never get sore.
I’m in better shape now than when I was 70.
If there is any magic in Ron’s routine it’s in the fact that it is a routine. Good health habits happen when we routinize them. If we don’t, they don’t happen. They become haphazard, ineffective, and easy to abandon.
So, is 3% worth it to keep you off a gurney, pandemic or no pandemic? Or alive if you are triaged onto one?
Keep your damn gurney!
My plan is for no gurneys when I return my parts to the universe. My life novel ends going face-down in a Colorado trout stream still striving to prove that I was smarter and wilier than an animal with a brain the size of a pea.
I suspect Ron may have just as nutty a plan.
Be safe, be sensible, take advantage of your good health inheritance. If any of this makes sense or appeals, there is more in my article archives, and more to come, at www.makeagingwork.com. Sign up for my weekly blog there and receive my free e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
What? You Haven’t Gotten Your Stent Yet?
Over the last 30 months of invading your email with this weekly diatribe, I’ve frequently quoted a fellow named Katz, as in Dr. David Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM. (I don’t have the time to look up all those credentials – feel free).
Dr. Katz is very quotable. I first got hooked on Dr. Katz with a quote that I heard him say several years ago in a video recording of him addressing a room full of his peers. He said:
“We already know all that we need to know to reduce, by 80%, the five major killers in our country. We don’t need any more fancy drugs or equipment or more Nobel Prizes. We know all we need to know today.”
He wasn’t admonishing the general public with that. He was sort of “in the faces” of his peers, saying that physicians need to be more “preventative” in their patient care than “curative.” At least that’s the way I interpreted his statement.
Health advice vs medical advice
Dr. Katz separates himself from much of his profession by being an advocate of lifestyle as the route to good health versus the “drug it or cut-it-out” methods of our broken, profit-driven health-care/disease-care system.
It’s also safe to say the food industry would like him to disappear because of the truth he speaks about their “health-destroying” practices.
So when I saw the following quote appear in an article he posted on LinkedIn entitled “The Disease Delusion”, he once again gripped me with his spot-on prose about how far off the rails we are in our current culture.
“America runs on coronary artery disease.
Coronary artery disease is fully embraced in our culture as a veritable rite of passage. If, at a certain age, you don’t have a CABG (coronary artery bypass grafting) scar for show and tell, or at least an anecdote about the particular intracoronary stent you’ve received, you are the odd man (or woman) out, the cultural anomaly. Real Americans, and increasingly real residents of all the world’s developed countries, get stents! One is all but embarrassed not to have one.”
Here’s a link to the full article.
I admire Dr. Katz for his position on real health and for his creative way of writing about it. So, I’m keeping this week’s post short to let him do the talking.
You can find additional creative paragraphs in the article, like this one:
“The distal, or root causes, are a lifestyle also subordinate to the dictates of culture- a culture that runs on Dunkin; peddles multicolored marshmallows as part of a complete breakfast; and conflates the Olympics with a trifecta of fast food, junk food, and sugar-sweetened beverages.”
I so wish I’d said that.
Please use this post to read the article and get acquainted with Dr. Katz and his raw style of unveiling the truth about how we’ve lost our way in self-care.
I hope you will follow him.
I publish weekly on Mondays at 5 p.m. Mountain. If you haven’t, you can subscribe at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
85/15, 8 of 10, and 114 Years
What’s in a number?
Meet Ron Benfield, Vancouver, WA.
Numbers are a big deal for Ron.
He has been swimming in them for over four decades as a finance executive with several prestigious hospitals and health systems.
I met Ron last fall on the phone while doing business development work with an executive healthcare outplacement and career transition firm, Wiederhold and Associates.
Ron is a previous client of W&A. My call was a courtesy “catch up” call to nurture an important networking relationship.
In my pre-call prep, I sensed this might not be a typical call. My first hint was the background picture on his LinkedIn profile (shown above). From database records, I knew Ron had just entered his seventh decade (he’s 61). Reaching the top of Mount Rainier at, or close, to that age hinted that this could be an interesting conversation.
It turned out to go beyond interesting.
A “third-age” poster child.
Ron is now on my “Wall of Fame” for modeling a purposeful, productive, fulfilling post-career third age.
(Newsflash: There is still a lot of room on the wall for anyone interested).
Starting new at 59
Ron’s four-decade W-2 career is quite notable. He had earned a reputation as a stellar turn-around financial specialist while serving in various C-level (COO, CFO) roles. Pulling hospitals back from the brink of insolvency became his calling card.
Despite his mastery over numbers, there was one that was out of his control. One that forced his most serious life-pivot.
In his last corporate C-level role, he “had begun to feel the presence of an unwillingness to value a 60-year-old who has seen more things over the fresh views of someone in their 40s.”
He harbored no enthusiasm for the uphill battle to get hired at his age.
Despite being financially set to age 114 (I’ll come back to that number), Ron drop-kicked the idea of retirement, booted his W-2 job (with an ageism-based boost from his last employer) and took his deep expertise and reputation forward into his own business at age 59.
Thus Millwood and Associates was born a year and a half ago, leveraging his team-building and financial turn-around skills to form a consulting firm with seven virtual specialists. Each has unique skill-sets that enable Millwood to do essentially what he did as a W-2 employee – building and directing a team to find and fix the causes of the financial ailments that beset most hospitals and healthcare systems.
Immediate success? No, but close. It took four months to generate customer interest, a time in which Ron discovered what it was like to put on a selling hat.
Meeting expectations at this point? Ron is blown away with their results. They have all they can handle and soon may have to turn away business. And they haven’t reached outside of the state yet!
Ron’s goal with his business is straightforward: to provide his customers with solutions they can carry forward without Millwood being entrenched for the long term. He wants to hand off the knowledge. It’s a philosophy that has his existing customers returning for more help in other areas and the high-class problem of having his team and resources stretched.
His vision is to build a company that will sustain itself “post-Millwood and post-Ron” providing his clients with problem-solving skills to find and permanently plug the plethora of financial leaks that exist in the hospital environment.
I could stop here and have a pretty good article, don’t you think?
But that feel-good story isn’t what excited me most about my conversation with Ron.
It was the life perspectives that Ron brought to the story that I found most profound and helpful. I’ll share three.
Time: 85/15 versus 15/85
Long ago, Ron realized one of the trade-offs of working in the corporate world meant giving up control of a very large portion of your time – as much as 80-85% by his estimate. Meetings, recurring monthly activities, lots of low impact stuff. The 15-20% left over was where one tried to make a difference.
Enough was enough. As he evaluated “what’s next” at 59, he knew he had to reverse that and that would only happen outside the W-2 world.
He has reversed that with his new business. Every day is in his control and virtually every hour within it.
8 of 10
Ron longed for a setting where he looked forward to going to work 8 out of 10 of his workdays, something that happened more rarely in the W-2 world. Starting this business has become a 10 of 10. He can’t believe he gets to do what he does each day, get paid for it and move a needle that badly needs moving.
I suggested to him that it sounds like he has achieved the Japanese concept of “ikigai” which translates to “a reason to get up in the morning” or a “reason for being.” Graphically, it looks like this. He appears to be in that green-shaded sweet spot.
114 years
I was surprised when Ron told me he plans to live to 114, exceeding my goal of reaching 112 1/2. Ron decided, at 57, that he wanted that to be his midpoint so he doubled it for his longevity goal.
He’s quite serious – and confident. His confidence is buoyed by an Adventist upbringing and lifestyle. Raised a Seventh-day Adventist, Ron continues to abide by tenants of the faith which includes a number of things that bode well for extended longevity. For instance.
You may recall that Loma Linda, California – predominantly a Seventh-day Adventist community – was one of the five societies in the world with the highest concentration of centenarians featured in the best-selling book “The Blue Zones” by National Geographic explorer, Dan Buettner.
Ron is still part of a decades-long study of the Adventist lifestyle.
I like his chances of hitting that number.
But most of all I like the model that Ron is following: a balanced lifestyle of labor, leisure, and learning as he moves into his third age.
Ron checks the box for purposeful, fulfilling labor with Millwood.
The leisure box is temporarily not fully checked as business momentum builds, but he has an African trip on the books and several countries selected that he and his wife Joyce plan to visit.
The learning box was checked long ago. Ron is an avid reader, stays on top of changes within healthcare and does sudoku daily. He also is an accomplished cello player which he admits he needs to spend more time with because of the mental challenge it presents.
The last box that Ron checks is the “generativity” box. He is devoted to helping others by sharing what he has learned, in business and in life, with those coming up behind him, whether it be his adult children, friends or aspiring healthcare professionals. Ron is one of the most active and appreciated networkers in the Wiederhold and Associates executive network, never denying an opportunity to share his experience and knowledge with another W&A network member seeking career counsel.
I came away from my conversation with Ron with a greater appreciation for paying attention to the numbers in my life – especially those involving time. Our casual treatment of time overlooks its irretrievable nature, a fact that really squeezes in as we pass the mid-point. I don’t get the sense that Ron is feeling squeezed on that front.
I also have appreciated Ron’s humility. As I do with anyone that I want to feature, I had him review a draft of this article. Although he agrees on the accuracy, he feels it’s a bit too flattering. I don’t. His story just has too much of the message I’m advocating for me not to share details, professional and personal. Sixty isn’t a time for a landing but is a great spot for another take off leveraging acquired professional and life skills and experiences to pay forward and leave something that lives on when the parts are sent back to the universe.
Underneath that humility, Ron is making that happen.
With a 17 year difference in our ages, my 112 1/2 won’t have me around to see if he makes the 114. Would one or more of you out there make a mental note to check on Ron in 2073 to see if he makes it and send me a text? Who knows – by then, we may have that capability.
Do you know anybody like Ron Benfeld (maybe it’s you)? Let me know by email to gary@makeagingwork.com. I really want to feature more stories like Ron’s that draw attention to what we “modern elders” can bring to the table.
Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
Enough of this “Life Purpose” thing! Can’t We Get Over It?
Do me a favor. Google “life purpose.”
Go ahead – I’ll wait.
Did you come up with the same number I did: 5,680,000.
Is it really THAT important?
Some would say it’s in the “woo-woo”, “touchy-feely” category crafted to sell books, workshops, and coaching services.
Others would say it’s essential to a life well-lived.
I’ll go with the latter.
The former and latter are working well for Richard Leider, founder of Inventure – The Purpose Company. He’s written three books on the topic and is ranked by Forbes as one of the “Top 5” most respected executive coaches on the planet.
Influential Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan, maintains that people die early for three reasons:
Having coached over 18,000 successful entrepreneurs to success over 40+ years, Dan has observed the power of purpose and knows of what he speaks.
There must be something to it.
What is it anyway?
The University of Minnesota website Taking Charge of Your Health and Wellbeing describes it this way:
Purpose can guide life decisions, influence behavior, shape goals, offer a sense of direction, and create meaning. For some people, purpose is connected to vocation—meaningful, satisfying work. For others, their purpose lies in their responsibilities to their family or friends. Others seek meaning through spirituality or religious beliefs. Some people may find their purpose clearly expressed in all these aspects of life.
OK, if it’s that important, why do so few end up with one?
Approximately 45% of U.S. employees are not happy in their jobs, according to a 2019 survey by The Conference Board. Maybe building somebody else’s dream isn’t the most fertile ground for finding a life purpose.
Some find it there – many don’t.
In this era of Bernie, Elizabeth, Peter, and AOC, we seem to be thinking there’s hope in having it found for us. Just get in line – D.C has the solution to your angst.
Then again, maybe not.
This caption from P. 259 of the book “Younger Next Year” by co-author Dr. Henry Lodge unpacks some interesting insight into that solution (bolding is mine):
“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, enormous numbers of Russian men lost the only structure they had known. With nothing to replace it, many of them lost their sense of place, of belonging, of matter, of simply being needed or relevant to their families and to their society. What happened? Within just a few years, life expectancy for Russian men plummeted from sixty-four years to fifty-seven years. They died limbic deaths. Heart attack and cancer rates soared as did depression, alcoholism, suicide, accident and violent deaths – all cries of limbic agony. In some ways, what happened in Russia is happening to many of us in retirement, and it’s scary as hell.”
Hmmm – a forced sense of purpose doesn’t seem to have legs. And the loss, however shallow, is devastating.
We’re sandwiched in a no-sense-of-purpose system.
OK, I may be going off the rails here – please let me know if you think I am.
I’m thinking we lack a “front-end system” that comes anywhere close to broaching the topic of life purpose.
We’re plopped into a classroom with thirty others, told what to learn, how to learn within a system that hasn’t changed in a hundred years. Conformity is paramount, originality is often unrecognized, stifled.
Harry Chapin – the greatest troubadour ever – picked up on this and put it together in one of his greatest songs: “Flowers Are Red” – enjoy and ponder it here.
We carry the conformity forward into the 40-year phase of this 20th-century life-cycle model and getta job, getta wife, getta family, getta mortgage, fenced yard, 2 1/2 kids, two cars and a labrador retriever, getta title, getta 401K, and getta gold watch.
A sense of “life purpose” in there? Maybe – evidence says usually not.
Then we back-end it with a wrap-up system called retirement that’s fully encumbered with an 85-year-old process whose purpose is to move us out and into a purposeless life of leisure and self-indulgence.
And then we die young.
Lacking a beginning, middle, and end, life-purpose development doesn’t have much of a chance it seems. So we “live too short and die too long” in our society.
Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us:
“Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.”
It’s not too late!
I’m encouraged. I believe we are beginning to see the emergence of a focus on “life purpose.” From this seat, it seems to be coming from those at the mid-life point – that uneasy time of tough questions (Why am I here? Does anybody care?); of waning career interest or opportunity; of empty-nesting; of a deepening sense of life’s finite nature; of a sense of not wanting to waste the acquired wisdom, skills, talents, and experiences on a cruise ship, beach, golf course or pickle-ball court.
Maybe even a sense of having better answers to the mess the country finds itself in.
We have the tools.
Permit me to link two phrases that we should be pondering in the face of the messiness around us:
“Life purpose” and “Active wisdom”
Unless terminally infected with the narcissism our current culture promotes, we are drawn to serve, to pass on what we know, to lighten a better path for those behind. It’s called “generativity.“ It seems to surface the drive for a life purpose.
It provides the “why.”
“Active wisdom” is a term coined by anthropologist, activist, and writer Mary Catherine Bateson. She calls it a “new stage” where “wisdom is reaped from years of experience and living.” She calls it the “most acceptable and positive trait associated with longevity.”
“Active wisdom” brings the “what.”
Not as I did.
I’ll be your poster-child for the wrong path. I drank the 20th-century Koolaid and barnacled-over my innate talents or any chance for life-purpose immersion for 6 1/2 decades.
But it came, gradually, grudgingly – slowly removing the last vestiges of conformity and the cultural expectations and beliefs that were in the way. It feels right to try to bring forward the mere modicum of my life’s accomplishments and acquired wisdom, season it with legions of mistakes, challenges, and trials and to share it as a light for somebody.
Is there certainty in it all? Not even.
But neither was there on the other path.
I’ll confirm that there’s lots of room on this “road less traveled” – and that the need is great.
Hop on – you’re wired to make a difference.
Your thoughts, criticisms, compliments, complaints all mean a lot. Leave any or all below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.
Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
What Do Retirement and the Internal Combustion Engine Have In Common? Read On!
I’ve read Fortune magazine cover-to-cover for over 30 years.
It’s bathroom reading and I usually get through each issue about the time the next one arrives.
Sorry – that’s more than you wanted to know. Here’s the point.
I appreciate the thoroughness of their reporting and the professional writing style. I need it to have at least a modicum of awareness of what is going on in the business world globally.
I was intrigued by a small article in this months’ issue which features “20 Ideas That Will Shape the 2020s.”
It’s an article by Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (Whew!)
Ms. Figueres headlines her article:
“We’ll witness the end of the internal combustion engine era.”
The cliff notes of the article are that we will see an explosion of electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles because of the drive for climate change and, more significantly, the tremendous amount of investment in this new industry. She claims that “the demand for low- or no-emission vehicles is increasing exponentially.”
As she predicts this demise, she says: “That is quite remarkable because the entirety of our economic growth over the last 150 years has come on the back of this technology and the fossil fuels that feed it.”
Perhaps a bit of climate-change-advocate hyperbole. But think about the significance, if true.
I suspect she doesn’t relate to geezers like me whose greatest automotive thrill was my new 1969 Olds 442 380 hp, 6-mile/gallon monster that won a few drag races at the impromptu Coors-fueled (us, not the cars) Midnight Winternationals on I-25 north of Cheyenne, WY.
Or for my brother-in-law, whose gem of a restored ‘67 Chevrolet muscle-car rattles neighbor’s windows at each startup.
Thing is – I believe Ms. Figueres is right.
Hard as it is to imagine, I believe the internal combustion engine is beginning to die a slow death.
Maybe it’s time. Hard to argue against an electric vehicle (EV) that performs as well with less maintenance while helping Denver’s air be less of the brown, stinky daily occurrence it has become.
The internal combustion engine is about 150 years old and dying.
The concept of retirement is about 125 years old. (Otto Von Bismark kick-started it in Germany in the mid-1890s.)
Is it time for it to die also?
I’m no Christiana Figueres and advice is worth what you pay for it, but I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that traditional retirement is dying a slow – and timely – death.
By “traditional” I mean the off-the-cliff, labor-to-leisure, vocation-to-vacation, no-work, golden-years-into-the-sunset type of retirement that still dominates mid-life dreams.
Timely? Yeah.
Here in the U.S., we still hang on doggedly to an 85-year old relic that was established in 1935 to move older people out of the workforce to make room for the younger folks who were demonstrating in the streets. We hung an arbitrary, artificial finish line of 65 on it at a time when the average American didn’t make it to 62.
Irrelevant then. More irrelevant now with average life spans 18 years longer.
We’ve entrenched the number 65 in our minds like a road sign in concrete. We’re hailed if we retire before it and scorned as an “unfortunate” if we miss it, despite its irrelevance.
How many other 85-year old concepts do you still have operating in your life? (OK – maybe you still play Monopoly which was also introduced in 1935.)
Traditional retirement should die.
Here are a few things that predict it’s demise:
That’s what reality and research are telling us. Fewer can do it; fewer want to do it; we’re beginning to concede that it’s not the smartest thing to do if we want our biology to do its job for as long as it’s designed to do it.
The alternative to the internal combustion engine has been defined. The alternative to traditional retirement is evolving.
Encumbered by tradition, the pressure of cultural expectations, old “bad ideas, myths, messages, and models,” and biological naivete, the roadmap to the alternative to traditional retirement is still fuzzy.
But a roadmap is developing.
Personally, I’m encouraged to see the emergence of two terms in the dialog about this changing retirement scene: unretirement and semi-retirement.
For many, the first is leading to the second as the lights come on to the downsides of retirement. Some step straight into the second as they enter the third age of life with the realization that they don’t have a time-stamp on the back of their neck and that there is still much to do.
Either way, it’s a trend line with culture-changing, nation-saving power and implications.
The death of the internal combustion engine will help save the planet.
The death of traditional retirement can help save a deteriorating culture and a divided nation. In its place, we can resurrect what anthropologist, author, and activist Mary Catherine Bateson calls “active wisdom.” Wisdom “reaped from years of experience and living.” She calls it “the most acceptable and positive trait associated with longevity.”
What’s your plan for your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s? It will likely involve an EV. But will it involve AW – active wisdom?
I’m a small voice in a vital revolution. Come add your voice – help needed and there’s lots of room!
We value your opinions and feedback. Leave a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.
Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
We Aren’t Made for the Life We Are Living. Here’s why.
Do you remember your biology class in high school?
Considering that I’ll be celebrating my 60th high school reunion this year – assuming one of those remaining from my class of 12 has the inclination to organize it – you’ll forgive me if I don’t recall much from the class.
I remember Mr. Parsons, the most-liked teacher in our high school of 95 students. And I do recall dissecting a frog amidst the smell of the formaldehyde from which it was extracted.
But I have a hunch, with adolescent hormones at play, my mind was probably elsewhere – more likely on Maureen and what the weekend might hold.
We probably talked about cell structure but I doubt we applied it to how it affects our own biology. I don’t remember any discussion of the brain. If there was, it was soon lost in favor or basketball or football practice – or Maureen.
The message we didn’t get – or missed – is that the very cells found in that frog are fundamentally the same as the 35 trillion or so we all have in our bodies – cell membrane, nucleus, cytoplasm, ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi vesicles, mitochondria, plus some other stuff.
Cells that have been doing their thing for billions and billions of years. Cells that are organized into an amazingly complex 24×7 immune system that’s working its butt off to compensate for our biological naivete and the gazillion nefarious villains that want to attack.
However it happened, that kluged-up assembly enabled us to inherit a birthright of good health, a biological fortune.
Unfortunately, our lifestyles don’t honor that birthright.
We seem to be hoping our birthright will catch up with our lifestyle rather than adapting our lifestyle to our birthright. It’s like: if we watch enough TV and eat enough Carl’s Junior and biggie fries, our biological fortune will eventually adapt and honor our lifestyle.
OK – sorry – that was insulting.
But, think about it. For multi-billions of years, cells – fundamentally the same ones you and I have a few dozen trillion of – haven’t changed in how they produce energy, divide, decay, and die.
Regardless of whether you believe we evolved onto the savannah some 300 million years ago or that we started as we are in a garden some mystical number of years ago, the fact is our cells work with a functional design that doesn’t work well with a twenty-first-century lifestyle.
I lean toward the savannah theory, with famine and saber-tooths the norm. Cells interpreted the infrequent surfeit – of a feast on an animal kill – as a chance to prepare for the inevitable winter, famine or the need to escape the saber-tooth. They dutifully stored the bounty as fat to burn when those conditions arose.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. No winters, no famine, no saber-tooths. Our lifestyles ran away from our biology. Our cells haven’t caught up. And won’t.
So, they just do their thing and store that fat. And store that fat. And store that fat.
Waiting for a winter – or a saber-tooth to run away from.
And then they decay and die early.
Alas, we thus dishonor our biological fortune and “live too short and die too long.”
On this 21-st century journey, we’re 20 pounds heavier than 30 years ago on average but we’re no taller.
Sixty-five percent of U.S. males are overweight; twenty percent are obese.
Fifty percent of our population is pre-diabetic and seventy percent of those don’t know it.
We unconsciously accept that we will “get old and die” and then most of us find out that we will “get old and live”, enduring a sad life of extended morbidity and early frailty In bodies that believe they are in the grip of famine.
Aging is up to nature; decay is up to us.
It’s pretty simple. Our biology only knows growth or decay. Biologically, there is no retirement or aging – only growth or decay. So we have a binary choice – a road to good health by promoting growth or a road to frailty through lifestyle choices.
Our cellular biology is still poised to prepare for winter, famine, and saber tooths while we wallow in an eternal summer of plenty romancing our remotes.
Dr. Henry Lodge said in the book “Younger Next Year”:
“Your brain has no care for your happiness, no thought about your retirement. It is a ceaseless machine, in relentless pursuit of the perfect match between input and output – between growth and decay. With that thought in mind, think about what your physical brain learned from the way you lived today, and think about whether it told your body to grow or decay.”
We mistakenly assume that we are made for this life which has become a nightmarish mix of bad food, sedentary lifestyle, stress, loneliness, and chronic diseases. Then we cap it all off with the “ultimate casualty” called retirement that ensures that we continue on the path called “decay” and off the path called “growth.”
Our take-home message? What we do physically, what we eat, what we think, what we feel affects our body with processes refined on the savannah.
Our biological fortune is ignored and abused.
There is no famine or saber-tooth coming to save us from the stored fat and its adverse effects. We need only to gain an appreciation for the birthright and find suitable substitutes.
And that starts with a mindset that acknowledges we weren’t designed to live the way we do.
And that’s hard because how we live “feels so good” and the alternative is a direct assault on the comfort, convenience, and conformity we strive for.
While it kills us early.
Let us know what your thoughts are on this. Leave a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.
Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to this weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
Beware the Accidental Leap into Your Third Age
“Restless, nearly retired, discarded, and bewildered.”
I found that phrase in Barbara Hagerty’s book, “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife.” It describes many in the baby-boomer generation and the tone of numerous conversations I’ve had with prospective career or retirement coaching clients.
Marc Freedman is CEO and founder of Encore.org, an organization that created the Encore movement linking middle-aged and older people with meaningful work that serves the social good. He refers to it as “passion, purpose, and a paycheck.” He has his arms around the challenges boomers face as they move into and through mid-life.
One of his core messages is “that we have not passed our expiration date.”
I became a Freedman fan in 2014 after reading his book “The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife.” He offers a lifeline to the many who find themselves in an “identity free fall” on a dispassionate career path full of uncertainty, wrestling with the question “what’s next.”
Ms. Hagerty quotes Freedman in her book, saying:
“A lot of people have identity very much tied up in their working lives beforehand and then they find themselves in an identity free fall. Society treats them as if they are a ‘step away from being the walking dead.'”
I relate to this life phase and the awareness that there are fewer days ahead than behind. I hit that wall in my mid-fifties. It was the start of an agonizingly slow pivot to finding my life quest, resulting in three changes in career direction.
So far, that is.
I’m probably not done and may not be until it’s time to send my parts back to the universe.
I relate to Freedman when he says we reach “the realization that there’s probably enough time ahead to do something significant, and in many cases, it’s an imperative.” We’re dealing with longevity bonuses of 20-30 years that previous generations didn’t have. That’s almost two generations of time. Think back to what you have seen develop, even in just one generation.
Two generations are a lifetime of potential growth, development, and contribution.
That is unless we buy the retirement schtick where we’re inclined to let decay take the front seat and put growth in the back.
But I’ll get off that soapbox early- I admit to being grindingly guilty of whipping that horse dead.
How to avoid becoming a bored (or trapped) Boomer
I decided against “remaking the wheel” this week and am providing links to a three-part series I posted in June 2018 entitled “How to Avoid Becoming a Bored Boomer.”
The series speaks to this topic and offers up nine suggestions for avoiding this bewildering phase. It has been one of my most popular posts and was the top post on PBS’s Next Avenue popular blog site for several weeks running.
How to Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part One
How to Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part Two
How To Avoid Becoming a “Bored Boomer” – Part Three
I hope the series brings you value. Let me know your thoughts by scrolling down and leaving a comment.
Thanks for your consistent support and for spreading the word. If you haven’t joined, trip on over to www.makeagingwork.com, join the list and receive a copy of my free ebook “Achieving Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
Your Attitude May Not Get You Past 78.9
A couple of blogs ago, I mentioned that I started taking the advice of a large squadron of very successful writers, who have persuaded me that learning the craft of writing is “unglamorous blue-collar work” and that I should “just write.”
Duh!
So I’m holding fast to writing at least 500 words a day on something in my mental wheelhouse (positive aging, health and wellness, career/life management in the third age, etc.)
I’ve found the easiest way to hit that daily goal is to pick a question submitted on Quora.com which is, according to Wikipedia, “an American question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by Internet users, either factually or in the form of opinions.”
It’s been around since 2009 and has a user base of around 300 million active users.
I’ve been answering at least one question a day for a few months now and, quite shockingly, have had, as of this writing, over 885,000 views of my posts in Quora and achieved #1 Quora writer on the planet in one category (Longevity) and climbed into the top ten in two others (Health and Fitness).
It’ll be a tough position to hold but is a nice ego-stroke while it lasts.
////////////////
This Quora question hit my email this week:
“What should you do daily in order to live super healthy when you become 70?”
Smack into my wheelhouse!
I think my response is pretty good. Probably not good enough to go viral like one post did where I answered the question “What is the best anti-aging workout? It went viral with 445,000 Quora views.
I decided to let you determine if this latest one is good so I’m reposting it here for this week’s blog, with some modification and additions. You be the judge and let me know what you think.
P.S. If you’ve been tagging along with me on this 2 ½ year blogging journey, you’ve heard some of this before. But I believe “repetition is the mother of learning” still applies.
“What should you do daily in order to live super healthy when you become 70?”
The components of good health that will carry us into our 70s and beyond in good health are not complicated and we’ve known them for a long time. Sad to say, individually, we choose to be naive to them, find them too difficult and inconvenient and end up not doing them.
I suggest that the most important “daily” activity to insure being super healthy late into life is to remind ourselves each day that we have an inheritance of good health and an obligation to maintain it.
We aren’t inclined to put the components of good health – nutrition, exercise, social engagement, continuous learning, sense of purpose/service – in place without an attitude that honors this inheritance.
This point was driven home to me several years ago when I stumbled across the book “Dare to Be 100” written by Dr. Walter Bortz, a semi-retired Stanford University geriatric physician.
In this timeless book, he lays out a simple roadmap for good health using the acronym D-A-R-E:
The D, R, and E are biological compass points for living to 100 (which, BTW, we all should be able to do). But attitude is the most important and the most difficult because, as Dr. Bortz says, “it’s in attitude that we find all the planning and decision-making that facilitate the biological steps. It is possible to live to 100 by chance, but not likely.”
So living healthily into our 70s and beyond isn’t going to happen by chance either and will only happen with a commitment to a discipline that builds the simple components of diet, exercise, social engagement, having a cause bigger than yourself, and continuous learning into a lifestyle.
It’s important to remember that there is no biological reason for any of us not to live to 100 or beyond.
The body has demonstrated that it can last 122 years and 164 days which is the benchmark for longevity set by a Parisian woman named Jeanne Calment. (Yeah, I know – you may have heard that this has been debunked. Look again – the debunking has been debunked.)
The right attitude acknowledges this as our whole-life potential and the inheritance that we should honor.
Will we get to 122 1/2? Not likely. But with an attitude that acknowledges that the body is designed for a longer life than we experience on average, we enhance our chances of getting closer to it than if we accept that average life span as our destiny.
On average, at an overall average lifespan in the U.S. of around 80 (78.9 for men, 81.1 for women), we achieve only about 66% of that “whole life potential.”
With the exception of the consequences of the infrequent “blueprint error/genetic defect”, we die early in our culture simply because of our lifestyles. Our declines as we move into our 60s and 70s are thirty-year problems of lifestyle, not disease. We are more victims of our own healthcare illiteracy and lack of discipline than anything else.
Let me quote Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the best-selling and life-changing book “Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit and Sexy – Until You’re 80 and Beyond”.
“The simple fact is that we know perfectly well what to do. Some 70 percent of premature death and aging are lifestyle-related. Heart attacks, strokes, the common cancers, diabetes, most falls, fractures, and serious injuries, and many more illnesses are primarily caused by the way we live. If we had the will to do it, we could eliminate more than half of all disease in men and women over fifty. Not delay it, eliminate it.”
I believe that statement has attitude written all over it, as well as a call to learn about our biological inheritance, how it works and how to treat it.
I’m two months short of 78 and approach each day with an acquired understanding of how my body and mind work at the cellular level (thanks to Dr. Lodge). I set a preposterous age goal of 112 ½ at age 75 because I wanted a third of my life left to get things done that didn’t happen in the first two-thirds.
I have no illusions about getting there. I was guilty of some marginal health habits in my first fifty years and before I acquired this self-care awareness. But I know my attitude will get me a lot closer – and healthier along the way – than if I accepted only living to the average lifespan of 78.9 for men in the U.S.
If that were my attitude, I should be getting my affairs in order – which I’m not. I don’t need that drag on my attitude.
Average isn’t healthy
I started re-reading “Younger Next Year” again this week for the fifth time. It was good to be reminded of Dr. Lodge’s description of how he watched so many of his patients of 20-30 years simply start a gradual decline and accept an average lifespan as destiny.
He realized that he, along with our medical establishment, had failed them by providing them with good medical care but not great health care. He admitted that he “like most doctors in America, had been doing the wrong job well. Modern medicine does not concern itself with lifestyle problems. Doctors don’t treat them, medical schools don’t teach them and insurers don’t pay to solve them.”
We forget – or didn’t learn along the way – that what we’ve come to accept as normal ailments and deterioration are not a normal part of growing old. In Dr. Lodge’s words “they are an outrage. An outrage that we have simply gotten used to because we set the bar so shamefully low.” (See “Whole-life chart above!)
I’m going to ignore 78.9 as it flies by, which it will as each day does now. It’s just an attitude, accepting of an eventual demise but not one conceding to a “bar set so shamefully low.”
How’s your attitude about your long-term health?
Can I suggest that 78.9 should be just a signpost reminding you that you are well beyond average and that it is merely a mid-point in your healthy third-age journey to 100 or beyond?
As I immersed myself this morning in the challenging chapter 3 of “Younger Next Year”, Dr. Lodge rocked my world for the fifth time with the reminder that we have “- stepped outside of the crucible of our biological evolution” and with a “- remarkable triumph of ego over intellect, we simply assume that we were ‘made’ for this life: that we were purpose-built for life in the twenty-first century. That is a deeply mistaken view, and one we must get over.”
We have lots to eat with nothing that can eat us.
He concludes:
“Our lifestyle – especially in retirement, especially in this wonderful country – is a disease more deadly than cancer, war or plague. We live longer because of modern medicine, but many of us live wretchedly and many of us die much younger than we should. The point is that we have to learn to cure ourselves, or, in the midst of all that plenty, we will live and prematurely die in unnecessary pain – in bodies that believe they are in the grip of famine.”
If you’ve read the book (please don’t tell me you haven’t!), you know that Dr. Lodge’s main solution is exercise and that he does a marvelous job of convincing readers of the validity of that recommendation by explaining its impact at the cellular level.
From it, we have “Harry’s Rules” which I leave as the call to action with this article (along with reading the book), to help us all get well past 78.9 and 81.1. Without an attitude committing to something like this, that is likely to be our fate.
Harry’s Rules
Let me know your thoughts – scroll down and leave a comment.
Our tribe is growing rapidly, thanks to your consistent support and spreading the word along with folks catching my diatribes on Quora. If you haven’t joined, trip on over to www.makeagingwork.com, join the list and receive a copy of my free ebook “Achieving Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”
Are You the Author of Your Life? Probably not.
Author: The person who originated or gave existence to anything and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created. (Wikipedia)
Last week, I finished an excellent book by NPR journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife.” One page received my personal trifecta treatment for importance and follow up – totally highlighted, paper-clipped, and tabbed with a blue tab.
A comment by an Israeli psychiatrist, Carlo Strenger, earned the page that status:
“To become the author of our own lives, we need to accept that we have not chosen the base materials of who we are. We can only choose to shape them with a clear view of our strengths and weaknesses.”
It was the “author of our own lives” and the “base materials” part of the sentence that snagged me.
It took me back two quarter-centuries. Egad! What does it say when you can begin to think of your life in quarter centuries?
That was my college graduation year -1969.
After nine years and runs at three different majors, I made it to the stage to receive the faux-leather-bound document that is now God-knows-where. Enough credit-hours for at least one Master-degree illogically spread across civil engineering (one year), journalism (1 ½ years) and, finally, a B.S. in Business Administration (3 years).
Base materials?
I may be a crowd of one, but I don’t recall a professor or advisor in my final months before graduation ever uttering anything resembling “author of your life”, “base materials” or “strengths and weaknesses.”
Conventional counsel at that point was to sign up for as many campus interviews as you can with the companies that offered the best combo of salary and location.
Look for a fit with my “base materials”? Uh, say what? Who knew I had any, least of all me.
So, I ended up leaving Wyoming for Pennsylvania and a career-launch selling ceiling tile.
Try that one on for excitement!!
The 20-40-20 Plan
I, and every campus compatriot I hung with, jumped on the same wagon and life-cycle plan. The one that prevailed then and still does. The one we had been indoctrinated into by parents, professors, and peers: 20 years of learning, 40 years of earning, 20 years of retirement nirvana.
Aside from some basic and mandatory IQ and basic skills tests in junior high and high school (which, BTW, suggested I should remain on my uncle’s Farmall driving in circles), I don’t recall ever being challenged to determine what my “base materials” were back then.
So the author for the first 20 years (27 for me) was cultural expectations: getta degree; getta job.
For the next forty, it was the same author but with the expectations ratcheted up: getta wife; getta house; getta family; getta mini-van; getta Labrador retriever; getta title; getta 401K; getta retirement.
Base materials, strengths and weaknesses be damned! Onward we marched because, well, that’s what we were expected to do. If latent, closeted desires or dreams tried to surface along the way, we tamped them down in favor of the model.
That is until we could no longer. For some, and increasingly common today, the model collapsed with a job loss.
For others, it was an existential thing such as an internal force that calls for something with more meaning or realizing that we were at a professional dead end.
Strenger brings an interesting perspective to this. He says that “changing courses in midlife is not a luxury but an ‘existential necessity.’”
I’m a career coach working with professionals wrestling with a mid-life course correction – some by choice (internal), some not (external, as in blindside gut-punch). I’ve never suggested to a professional that has been gut-punched that they are going through an “existential necessity.”
Nor have I suggested that it’s time that they become the author of their life.
Maybe I need to get some guts about suggesting both. I think Strenger is onto something from his years of working with clients in transition.
He makes the point that if people are to thrive and not just survive in midlife, they must make the change. To fail to do so will exact a price.
Strenger states: “If people don’t take a hard look at what kind of changes they want to make, in the end, those changes are going to be forced on them. The basic idea is: Don’t wait until the changes are forced on you. Be proactive.”
What is that price if we don’t?
If life authorship has been relinquished to cultural expectations, there is a risk, in Strenger’s words, “of resigning ourselves to our growing limitations and throwing in the towel at 65” and “trudging on to retirement, something that almost no one can afford to do.”
In other words, succumbing to retirement – that ultimate casualty – when it’s likely there are 20-30 years of productive life left buoyed by an accumulation of assets built over forty, fifty, sixty years.
At mid-life, we have enough biography to know ourselves, what we’re good at and where we stink, what empowers us and what doesn’t.
Our choices become (1) letting that biography author us into the next phase honoring our essence (Strenger calls it our “thus and no other”) or (2) remain authorless, captive of cultural expectations, and accepting that we haven’t chosen the “base materials” of who we are.
Slow starter
Strenger’s words were “déjà vu all over again” for me. My “base materials” were closeted until I reached my 60s and, even then, slow to emerge.
Thirty-five years of meeting cultural expectations in the corporate world gave way at age sixty to an attempt at entrepreneurism by starting my own healthcare recruiting business. Within that experience came a gradual evolution that surfaced my “base materials” and “strengths and weaknesses” and the authoring of the life that I’ll finish out with – writing, coaching, teaching, speaking on issues involving achievement of a meaningful, fulfilling post-career life.
I can relate to how difficult it is to accept your “base materials” when they don’t line up with cultural indoctrinations. Despite what a plethora of personality and strengths assessments that I took through my 40s and 50s told me about myself, I rejected their consistent message and remained outside of my “base materials” for nearly four decades in favor of the cultural mold I stepped into in 1969.
Steering between Scylla and Charybdis
Strenger invokes the idiom from Greek mythology of sailing the strait between Scylla (six headed rock monster) and Charybdis (dangerous whirlpool) to make the point that a mid-life effort to recapture authorship and resurrect “base materials” calls for some careful steering.
He refers to Scylla as the choice of “resigning ourselves to our growing limitations and throwing in the towel at 65” (retirement) and Charybdis as “the illusion that, in midlife, we can enjoy ‘boundless change’ which requires a ground-up radical transformation” (the lawyer who becomes a chef or the doctor who becomes an organic farmer), the latter being “more seductive and more likely to flame out.”
Successfully steering between the two can come from putting accumulated skills and experiences up against innate – and perhaps, closeted – talents and dreams to see“how these can be reconfigured in a way that would be more appropriate to your needs today, that will be more satisfactory to you”, as Strenger suggests.
This can be tough!
This last year, I’ve had the good fortune to engage several mid-life C-suite healthcare executives who are in transition, most from an unexpected gut-punch that is common in this eternally volatile industry. Being laid-off unexpectedly at 52 or 55 or 58 and facing an increasingly difficult and competitive C-suite job market brings considerable angst. A lofty lifestyle combined with being sandwiched between kids in college and aging parents places “provision” ahead of “aspiration” for most. It’s rare for a conversation to head toward a discussion of “base materials” and anything other than hanging in with more of the same until time to throw in the towel, at or around 65.
It reminds me again of how much of a thief the number “65” is.
Aristotle and Your “Curve of Happiness”
Image by Couleur from Pixabay
I hope you don’t think I have a big-word fetish. Last week I dumped a doozy on you with “oligodencrocytes.” Judging from the positive response and zero unsubscribes from last week, I’m sensing you have a tolerance level for an occasional esoteric linguistic trip.
Assuming so, let’s go on another one. This time, I’m going to invoke a really old friend of all of us – Aristotle, he of Greek legend and fame and one with considerable currency on the personal development front.
Before I dive in too deep, let me confess that I’m drawing much of today’s content from a fabulous book that fell in my path recently entitled “Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife” by veteran NPR journalist and correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty.
If you invest in it, I think you will enjoy the trip, especially through chapter five entitled “It’s the Thought That Counts.” It was in that chapter that Aristotle resurfaced.
Apparently the Greeks thought a lot about thinking. They debated a lot about happiness. One side of the debate was “hedonia” from which we get our word hedonism, described in the book as happiness coming from “satisfying appetites, having a good beer, a good meal, and good sex.”
What’s not to like, right?
Aristotle, on the other hand, enters the debate rather curmudgeon-like, asking questions like “What is a good life?” explicitly saying it’s not hedonia but rather something more than that.
He wrote that “- the highest of all human goods is the realization of our own true potential” and suggested that we all emerge on this mudball with unique human capacities and abilities.
Deepening his role as a party-pooper. he called it “the daimen” and suggested, according to Hagerty, “that our task in life is to figure out what those unique capacities are, and then to do our very best to bring them into reality.”
This brings us our big-word-of-the-week: eudaimonia (not to be confused with those healthful, green immature soybeans).
From it, we derive “eudaimonic happiness.” It is about “striving, working hard, purposeful engagement, the kind of effort that may be stressful or even painful in the short run but over the long run brings meaning and a wildly profitable return on investment.”
Going “blue collar”
I needed that big word and definition. You see, I’ve committed to writing at least 500 words a day on something to somebody or some thing (this blog, Quora.com, Medium.com, guest blog, etc.) taking the advice of a large squadron of very successful writers, who have persuaded me that learning the craft of writing is unglamorous blue-collar work.
Since my start, and as of 12/31/19, I had missed only 38 out of 203 days and have missed 0 days over the last three months. That has produced, since I started tracking in mid-June 2019, over 110,000 words. For you non-writers, that’s roughly equivalent to 2-4 self-help books or 1 1/2 of Ms. Hagerty’s masterpiece.
How does my commitment stack up against Ari’s eudaimonic happiness checklist?
So, where’s the eudaimonia?
No, I wasn’t dropped on my head as a child? Yes, I’m feeling “eudaimonic happiness” despite the absence of anything resembling ROI presently, or a clear vision of where it may come from.
Hagerty helped me understand why, illogically, I feel that way. She suggests that there are two types of happiness: short-term happiness and long-term meaning.
As a septuagenarian feeling eudaimonic happiness, I’m not in a very exclusive club. Most folks, by this age or earlier, have “matured” past short-term happiness into seeking something with long-term meaning. If we haven’t begun to make that transition in mid-life we can end up stuck permanently in an unhappiness rut – or on a “hedonia” track. You know what I’m referring to – the trophy wife, red convertible, radical career change sort of track.
That track can make you a permanent resident at the bottom of life’s “U-curve of Happiness.”
A happiness curve?
There has been a lot of research on the stages of happiness across the age spectrum and it’s produced a thing called the “U-curve of Happiness.”
It looks something like this:
Surprising to most, happiness generally hits bottom in mid- to late-forties and then curves back up steadily through old age.
That’s pretty counter-intuitive, counter-cultural isn’t it? In our younger years, we looked askance at older people and assumed that they are unhappy and miserable with what we perceived as deteriorating minds and bodies. Conversely, wouldn’t the pinnacle of earnings years, material accumulation, title prestige, etc. be the really happy times?
Now we’re there and, if we are fortunate, have discovered it to be false.
Research has reinforced our mid-life discovery that continued pursuit of extrinsic, image-related goals won’t serve us well and can bring on negative emotions such as shame, guilt, anger as well as recurring sicknesses and loss of energy – not to mention the occasional red ‘beemer convertible.
Conversely, we’ve learned that intrinsic goals that value personal growth, deeper relationships, and something bigger than self reward us with a better self-image and better health. Maybe even a much longer life with good health.
Hagerty points out:
“Our bodies prefer selfless happiness to self-centeredness and will reward eudaimonia with longer life. Scientists have discovered that people who pursue eudaimonic well-being also have lower particular biomarkers for inflammation that have been linked to a number of health problems, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s disease. These purposeful people even have lower cholesterol.”
The MIDUS touch
I encourage you to invest in Hagerty’s book. In chapter five, she shares the results of an enormous research project conducted at the University of Wisconsin called MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) that “tracked thousands of people through their mid-life and later years, measuring their well-being in every possible way: physically, emotionally, psychologically, biologically, and neurologically.”
The conclusion of the study: pursuing happiness can backfire, but pursuing eudaimonia rarely fails. In chapter five, she shares the study’s six attitudes or mindsets that can predict health and well-being:
It’s the thought that counts!
We are nothing more than what we allow our thinking to think about what we think.
It can be both disturbing and reassuring to know that we have thought our way into our current circumstances, good or bad.
I don’t think it’s inappropriate to wrap with the time-worn cliché: the only control we have over circumstances in life is how we respond to (think about) those circumstances.
We will experience the upturn of the happiness curve only if we have our arms around that principle.
///////
How about you? Any “eudaimonia” happening in your life? I’d love to hear your story. Scroll down and leave a comment or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com with your thoughts or suggestions.
If you haven’t, join the steadily growing tribe by subscribing at www.makeagingwork.com and get a free copy of my e-book “Achieve Your Full-life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”