Archive for category: Retirement

Me:  So, John – how long do you expect to live?

John:  Well, I’ve never been asked that question.  Probably mid-eighties.

Me:  John, you’re 72 and healthy – why the mid-eighties?

John:  Oh, genetics, I suppose.  My dad died at 63.  My mom was in her late eighties.

Me:  Suppose I told you that we’ve determined that genetics may play, at most, a 30% role in our longevity and virtually no affect after age 65 – would that influence how you began to feel about how long you will live?

John:  Well, maybe – I’ve never heard that.  I’ve always assumed genetics determined how long I would live.

Thus went a portion of a multi-faceted, catch-up discussion over lunch this week with a friend of mine – a fellow executive recruiter with whom I’ve shared some of my passions for living healthy, not retiring, staying productive.

John’s a guy that subscribes to all of that, so we’ve hit it off well in the several years we’ve known each other.  He’s an energetic, engaging, fun guy to be around. He continues to maintain a successful IT recruiting business, started at “mid-life” 22 years ago after an extended stint in big-company CIO roles.

He has no intention of retiring.

His rationale is pretty simple:

1. He still enjoys recruiting, although it’s gotten a lot tougher with the advent of the internet and the fact that a number of his key client contacts have retired or died early. He admits to some complacency and the need to resurrect some of the old success habits that got him where he is.
2. He would go stir-crazy if he retired. John is an extrovert that is empowered by being around people.  He told me he can’t sit still for more than a couple of hours before he has to talk to somebody, live or on the phone. (NOTE:  that has a lot to do with his consistent success as a recruiter.  Mildly demented total introverts, like me, don’t show up in the stats of highly successful recruiters).
3. The money is still good in recruiting and he’s good at it. Why quit?  What would I retire to, he asks?
4. He’s in a business that is largely age insensitive. You find a needy client the problem-solving candidate they need, they could give a rip if you are 12 or 92.
5. He has the lifestyle he wants: good income, industry reputation, total control of his calendar; a “significant other” that he enjoys spending time with (he’s divorced 20+ years with no intent to re-marry); large but dwindling circle of close friends that he consistently spends time with (maybe a few early deaths amongst friends has influenced his perspective on his own length of life – I didn’t probe that.)

Summary:  FREEDOM!

John’s a healthy guy.  He eats right – lots of fish, no meat.  He is slender. He does a little bit of strength training (not enough, I told him.)  He is a gonzo road biker, doing long rides multiple times per week with friends.

I chuckled as he complained that his average mph has dropped in the last ten years from 17 mph to 13mph on the extended road trips.  In the same breath, he proudly states that he hasn’t found many 40-year olds that can keep up with him even today.

Why check out early?

Given all this about John, I was a bit surprised to have him set such a limited time horizon for himself.  It seemed out of sync with the rest of John’s thinking and lifestyle.   That is until I realized that, like so many other 20^th- century myths that we have brought forward, he was coming from the outdated assumption that genetics drives our longevity.  He was surprised to hear that this isn’t the case and that our longevity is largely driven by the lifestyle choices we have made and will continue to make.

I think – I hope – I sensed a bit of awakening on his part to the possibility that a mid-eighties demise is accepting an unnecessary shortfall.  He is certainly doing the things that would say that maintaining his current level of energy, drive, and vitality at the age he expected to die is a very real possibility.

When we injected the theory of “self-fulfilling prophecy” into the discussion I believe some new lights came on.

I reminded him of my own personal longevity goal of 112 ½ and how setting a WIG (wildly improbable goal) like that has changed my perspective on what I want to do in this third act and my optimism about being able to do it.

Like all others I share this goal with, he thinks that kind of threshold is a bit nutty.  But I’m predicting that when he hits 85 and he’s still kicking it – be it recruiting, biking, or whatever – he will have a different viewpoint.

John does, and will continue to, qualify as an “audacious ager.”  I love meeting and learning from audacious agers.  If you know of others like John that I could talk with, please send them along.

I’m going public and confess to murder.

Fortunately, I won’t be jailed for this murder, although one could argue that I should be.  A physical jail isn’t needed because the penalty I pay for this murder is tougher than an actual jail cell.

My jail time is mental.

The murder victim in my crime is time.

My commission of the crime is relentless – weekly, daily, hourly.  My most serious jail time comes at the end of a day or week when I look back in wonder at where it went and how absent or non-productive I was.  That’s when I realize I’ve been guilty of a crime – a murder of the most valuable, but unreplenishable, resource I have – time.

Tony Robbins in his book “Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny” asks: “How do you define your use of time?  Are you spending it, wasting it, or killing it? It’s been said that killing time isn’t murder, it’s suicide.”

The mental jail I put myself into is for murder, not suicide, thankfully.  But Tony’s rant resonates.  Time has taken on greater significance each day as the number of days ahead of me narrow relative to those behind.

My sensitivity to this shrinking horizon took on increasing influence a quarter-century ago as I moved into my fifties – and it hasn’t let up.

There are no filling stations for time

In a look back in one of my journals recently, I came across a quote about time that I had captured from author MJ DeMarco in a book entitled “The Millionaire Fastlane”.  He says: “We are born rich (with a full tank of gas) and will die broke. Time is the great equalizer. There are no filling stations for time – your one fill-up occurred the moment you took your first breath.”

That makes us kinda like that Visa gift card we got at Christmas – someone pumps in a number you can invest, waste or kill, depending on how you choose to use it.  And once it’s empty, no value.  It occurred to me that we probably give much more thought to how we spend a Visa gift card than we do to how we are spending our time.

You’ve heard it said that we spend more time planning a backyard BBQ than we do planning our lives.

Retirement murders time

As a devoted non-retiree and unretirement activist, I’m usually the odd-man-out in any discussion about the merits of retirement.  Part of my argument against traditional retirement involves time and the distorted use of it as we prepare for and experience full retirement.

My argument starts with the fact that our culture, helped along with our deeply-entrenched retirement entitlement mindset, puts a “use-by stamp” on us as our years pile up. An artificial finish line – retirement at 65 – drawn over 80 years ago still guides much of our thinking and our time use. We distort our use of time from young adulthood into middle-age to strive for that coveted retirement goal where we can then further intensify our misuse of time.  Our culture infers that our time, in our later years, is less valuable. It’s time to go to the sidelines, the park bench, the elder warehouse – where idle time is the expectation on the part of our culture and often the goal of the retiree.

Those committed to achieving a traditional retirement sacrifice their time in the present to try to dig out of the savings gap between where they are and what they feel they will need to achieve their retirement financial goals.

In the U.S., we’ve built a $1 trillion dollar financial planning industry around treating people as a math number and capitalizing on their fear or dread of not reaching that nirvana called retirement.

That is what Roger Whitney calls the “savings gap trap.”  Whitney is a highly experienced Certified Financial Planner and author of a wonderful book on this topic entitled “Rock Retirement: A Simple Guide to Help You Take Control and be More Optimistic About the Future.”

He points out that the savings needed to cover the cost of a 30-40 year retirement – a growing possibility today – is an insurmountable number.  Yet the financial planning industry persists in using the “save more, invest more” equation to guide their clients, often with recommendations that call for “sacrificing life today in order to save or sacrificing your life tomorrow, or a bit of both.”

But really, what choice do these planners have?  They are salespeople trained to sell insurance and investment products.  Non-financial life issues weren’t in their training manuals and don’t pay commissions.  One can hardly blame them for being somewhat blind to the time use issue that their recommendations can generate.

So, what’s your point?

Sorry, it would be so easy to go off into the weeds at this point, if I haven’t already.  Let me cut to the chase by saying that our cultural “entitlement” called retirement promotes a leapfrogging from a productive middle age to a non-productive, often aimless old age and compresses the time in which that transition takes place.  To me, that is murdering precious, creative, productive, life-changing time by throwing it to the wind and saying “I’m done.”

We have lots of evidence of this murderous process.

• As recently as 1995, the Social Security system determined that the average number of social security checks issued was 29 – hardly a nirvana.
• A generation ago, IBM did a study of its pensioners and found that the average number of pension checks issued before demise was 24.
• Extensive studies of cultures worldwide with unusually high levels of centenarians (reference Dan Buettner’s book, “Blue Zones”) find that traditional retirement rarely exists and that gratitude for each day (time consciousness) prevails. Okinawans, for instance, can claim one of the highest concentrations of centenarians of any culture on the planet. Yet, they do not have a word equivalent to retirement in their language and no retirement homes in their culture.
• A study called the RP 2000 Mortality Study of men 50-70 confirms the importance of time usage by revealing that the death rates of those still working were roughly half the death rates of men the same age who were not working.

It’s not easy being an outlier

Centenarians are outliers. Where our culture tells us that our intellectual and physical functions diminish with the passing of time, healthy centenarians have largely rejected that notion by accepting the fact that they will grow old and die but choosing how they will age.  Most take each day as a timeless gift and demonstrate amazing resilience in overcoming adversity.

Yet, in the face of this evidence of the possibility of a fruitful, healthy life to 100 or beyond, to suggest living to that age as a personal goal invites a culturally-conditioned rejection and categorization as kooky, weird, out-of-touch with reality, etc., etc.

How are you going to deal with your longevity bonus?

If I were to ask you how you would use a 30-40 year, post-middle-age time span, what would your culturally-influenced instincts tell you?  Would they say “wind down” or “rewind?”  Would it say “takeoff” or “landing?”  Would it say “crescendo” or “diminuendo?”   Would it say “I’m done” or “I’m inspired?”

I’m hoping that there will be a realization of the fact that this third-age period between middle-age and true old age is rife with the potential for murderous, culturally-induced time abuse.

• Will it be movies or mentoring?
• Will it be TV or teaching?
• Will it Lazy-boy or learning?
• Will it be bingo or biking?
• Will it be conformist or contrarian?
• Will it be vacation or vocation?

Life is a series of choices, each taking a chunk of time.  Our culture does much to show us how to waste it, lose it, abuse it.  But we can all be outliers and reject cultural perceptions.  And nowhere is that more important or potentially more impactful than in this period between our middle age and true old age – our “third age.”

What are your thoughts about all this?  Are you an outlier?  Are you an “audacious ager?”  If you are, I’d like to meet you, talk with you.   Leave a comment below.  Email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.  Subscribe to these weekly articles at www.makeagingwork.com