The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job.
We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
My grandparents just jumped their volunteering from weekends to weekdays. My Boomer parents switched to leisure activities and travel (they stopped volunteering when they retired). I prefer my grandparent's retirement, but now that NGOs professionalized and became extremely political that is a no-go for me. I'm considering to retire in a small town where distant relatives live and hopefully get busy by volunteering there somehow. But it's never that simple.
Every man I know that lived well into their 80's touching or breaking 90 were all active in some way. Once they stopped, they died shortly after. Though to be honest, they didn't stop by choice, usually form an injury or medical condition.
You hit the nail squarely on the head. In days past when people retired they'd still help raise kids or look after households. When we moved past requiring that sort of thing, we left the elderly without engagement.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but perhaps as a society we could be more intentional about creating roles where the elderly can still help and feel useful, but also have flexibility and a more relaxed lifestyle.
Do you have anything more interesting to say on the topic than "No U wrong"? The OP had a lot of thoughtful comments about the issues with having things to do after retiring.
Or maybe it’s a problem of spending all your effort working a job for 40+ years, and having your curiosity atrophy into nothingness.
I retired last year in my late 30’s and it’s just such a life upgrade. I study Mandarin, go to the gym, cook fun meals, volunteer at our community garden, volunteer at our food pantry, go to board game nights, brew beer, DIY house maintenance, etc. I have so much more time to spend learning new things, it’s ridiculous. I just can’t even fathom continue doing a job I don’t particularly enjoy just because I’m too unimaginative to figure out what I’d do with the extra 40+ hours of weekly freedom.
Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
We probably all have anecdotal evidence here, but my father is a perfect example of being no longer employed and a ton of stuff declining. Yes, cognitively, but a lot of health. We're talking not just your "career". He was a commercial real estate agent. But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker. And it kept him busy. Getting out of the house. Figuring things out. Meeting and talking to people. Walking. Talking. Scheduling things. He'd even tell us that if he stopped, things would just descend. And he was so right.
He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
Sample size of 1. A ton of confounding variables. But definitely wasn't his choice to stop working at a place because of health. The poor health came after being forced to quit.
Does make me worry about "taking it easy" when I get older whatever that means :)
my mother's dementia diagnosis this year started as severe ADHD symptoms 4 years ago. but many years before that she enjoyed her retirement and pension as her last boss was abusive, and she was a bit traumatized by this that merely suggesting the idea of working again would make her anxious. the symptoms started from the stress of taking care of my dad, who suddenly found his workplace extremely stressful due to an incident with his boss snapping at him. this led to fainting incidents where he had to be rushed to ER and a after an extended disability leave he was let go. he has never been so relieved. however this just worsened my mom's condition, and the need to move out of their home of 20 years escalated it (moving stress syndrome as confounding catalyst). after only 1 year she forgot about this home and that she ever lived in it. She thinks she still lives in an earlier house. my father is much much happier, even when taking care of mom and they still get to travel. mom simply forgets what happened an hour ago, but my dad's happy just getting to travel the world with her while she can. So.. more of sample size of 2 abusive bosses in the workplace leading to significant mental and physical health improvements upon leaving such bosses. mom enjoyed kdramas, dad enjoyed reading more of world history, they regularly do everything together everywhere. they love the same music that my mom remembers every word and dance to.
As a general comment, I'd like to say that getting out of the house is a hell of a lot easier when you don't have to drive everywhere to participate in daily life. So and so family member sits at home and watches TV all day is a phenomenon caused primarily by our car-centric culture which, for the elderly, is a barrier to staying healthy but mentally and physically.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. I'll argue you don't have to be a victim and can choose where you live if you plan ahead a little.
There's plenty of places where a car is not necessary and even if people think a car's necessary I'm often the only one on a bicycle in many places.. It's doable if you're willing to put in the effort.
I think that suggesting that an octogenarian either uproot their life to a less car-centric place or start riding a bike everywhere is a bit unreasonable.
You can choose to live where you don't need a car, but those places become fewer and fewer because of the distances needed for cars. (as in parking space minimums mandated by the city).
"Not just bikes" on Youtube goes into this a lot. Car-centricism is self-reinforcing. Eventually you have no such thing as a mid-density neighbourhood.
Saw similar with my grandmothers. One had a busy social live and volunteer schedule for 20+ years, the other.. did not.
A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
There's always more opportunities in the community than there are volunteers, so look around.
>A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
Yeah, my guess is that someone retiring early to pursue their hobbies and interests is going to be much better off than a blue collar worker made redundant or disabled in his 50's. I always see these sort of studies used to slam the idea of FIRE, but I very much have my doubts that these findings apply equally to everyone.
It's hard to really say from anecdotes. My uncle retired early and was sharp as a whip until 86 or so. Then decline hit him hard. There was no change in life circumstances, he just got old.
Also, I think you'll find that taking care of someone who can't take care of themselves is a lot of work. I had to do it for my mom for 6 months and its a ton of stuff. Talking to doctors. Arranging appointments. Etc.
"I think you'll find that taking care of someone" => I know you were writing this generically. And I'm just replying to this for the sake of all of us who do actually know what it's like taking care of someone.
But yeah. Holy shit this is hard. I've been doing this too. Had to move my mom and dad to a place a block from me when my mom was going through her final few months with Alzheimers. That was so hard. So gross. And then now with this descent of my dads. You are catching me fresh from yet another aorta aneurism surgery of his last week. This is bananas. Just endless worry, driving, appointments, cleaning, pills, macgyvering the endless broken down things in his life: the tv, the remote, the blood pressure monitor.
OMG. I see you. I feel you. :) This is a rough part of life y'all.
It reminds of my grandparents that refuse to stop working my grandma 65 and grandfather 73. My grandma has like a stand where she sells candies and coffee and for her is just a way for socializing. And my grandpa he's still trying businesses out he thinks that there is still time for him to become rich, he's still very sharp and active he currently sells car tools and he's walking everyday
I know I interact with people on the daily with my remote job, but would love to know if that's potentially an issue too. Decent reason to get back in the office. I also miss my daily office bike rides to a certain extent, at least it was healthy for me, now I do exercise by choice and I don't always keep up with it.
I believe there have been studies into how social life impacts longevity, and probably cognitive decline as well. For some people, like my great-grandmother who kept working well into her 80s by choice, jobs can be a big social outlet. For others a job can be very socially isolating. Those factors probably matter a lot.
Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.
Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it.
But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life.
But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.
I used to think that working from home was the best thing since sliced bread, when I got to stop going to the office due to COVID.
But during the five years that I worked from home, I suffered a precipitous decline in overall health. It is too easy to stumble out of bed minutes before work starts, spend the day on Zoom calls, then spend more time behind the computer wrapping things up, and then veg out on the sofa after a long, long day. Too little exercise, no meaningful human contact.
I have been working from an office for the past year or so, and my health is improving, but it is a deep hole to climb out of.
Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job, and not nearly as fulfilling. You get to see smiles and frowns and everything in between in a job and there is no board game that can match the complexity and novelty of random humans asking you to solve their problems.
>Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job
I think one should optimize for 'most intrinsically rewarding' not 'most engaging'. I shudder to picture a retirement spent doing 'customer service' and if a retirement of working on projects, travel, reading and playing video games leads to 'more cognitive decline', well, so be it. I would rather be daft in my old age than miserable
I mean, it could be both good and bad depending on the person. My Dad worked physically demanding jobs, and would have been happy to retire and spend his time working on personal projects at age 60, and his health and well-being would have been better if he had not had to keep doing exhausting work for at least 8 more years for money reasons. So, I think people feel justifiably protective of our elders when people talk about raising the retirement age.
Honestly, the jobs where the benefits of stimulation and social interaction outweigh the physical and or mental stress of the job are not the kind of jobs most people have. So if you wanted to do what’s really best for most older people, it would be better to find ways to engage them other than financially forcing them to keep working whatever job they can get - which is what raising retirement age does.
What would be really killer would be finding more ways to enlist retirement-age professionals in training young people, in a variety of occupations from carpentry to programming. The young have the stamina and strength but lack wisdom; the older people have learned a lot and could share that knowledge and wisdom.
I doubt it would be a good decision for all individuals. Maybe the public at large, but I question if that would be what motivates the people who seek such changes the most.
What’s so difficult to understand? The state or lobbying groups want to raise the retirement age which then correlates with studies on how raising the retirement age has “good effects”.[1] The goal isn’t to find out what is good for senior people. It’s to find reasons to enact the policy that they wanted.
Surprisingly, men ages 51–64 (this was specifically about men) “need” their jobs for their own health.
We could imagine studies done in more patriarchal cultures: unmarried women over the age of 40 suffer from psychological and physical health problems more than married women over the age of 40. We’ll just leave out the parts about how unmarried women are penalized socially, constantly. Policy recommendation: we should get women married, it’s just good for them.
[1] This was the hypothetical laid out in the original comment.
"Good for both individuals and the public at large" is one thing. "We found a club to beat you into doing what we want you to" looks very similar, but is quite different in how it feels and how it works out.
I would hypothesize that this is strongly correlated to where a person's sense of purpose comes from. If someone gets most of their sense of purpose from their job then you would expect to see a decline once they leave their job if they can't replace it with something else. For those whose sense of purpose is derived mainly outside of work and can continue to derive that sense of purpose in retirement, I would expect less of a decline in retirement other than normal aging.
I haven't read the paper yet so forgive a bit of ignorance here, but I feel like when I'm unemployed, I actively spend all my time trying to learn new things. This is no small part because otherwise I get depressed because I am spending all my time on YouTube and there are only so many "documentaries" about Lolcows that I can stomach, so I dive head first into projects, usually buying a few cheap textbooks in the process to play with new things. The days are way too long if I don't have something interesting to occupy my time, and I feel less guilty if that time is spent doing something quasi-intellectual instead of playing Donkey Kong Country again.
I didn't think I was an outlier with this, but maybe I am?
If I'm anything like my parents, I don't think that's something I have to worry about. My dad is constantly buying new textbooks and trying to teach himself different types of physics. Either that, or he's designing new things to be 3D printed.
He's not retired yet but I suspect that when he is he'll find a way to keep himself entertained with stuff that isn't terrible game shows.
I've heard that you can expect your retirement to look a lot like your average weekend. If your weekends naturally fill with your hobbies and interests, I don't think you have much to worry about.
I think employment may set us up for rapid cognitive decline when we finally become unemployed. As in, working 40+ hours a week makes us over-value "vegging out", which sets us up for failure post-employment.
Yeah, questions I have: 1) what’s the effect for countries with humane amounts of paid leave (e.g. France’s 7ish weeks plus ten or so holidays) and working hours; and 2) so how about, you know, the idle rich? Should we be forcing them to work 40 hours as gas station clerks, for the good of their mental health? Should we forcibly deny them access to their money sometimes so they have to get a job every now and then?
I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”
I feel like this is less about employment and more a factor of money and engagement.
You need some amount of money for good health insurance, healthier foods, lower stress, etc. You need engagement, but that could be found in volunteering and sufficiently complex hobbies.
The trend seen with employment cycles might just be picking up that many people lack these.
Thanks for saying that. My dad volunteers and gets involved with social clubs. I think he'll keep doing it as long as he's able to.
BUT: I don't think it's the work / volunteering that keeps his mind, I think it's that for people like him, they stop when their mind can no longer handle it.
I've been retired for about 5 years and I am just as loony now as I was when employed. HN, my own silly hobby sites, flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.
Anecdata: My dad started experiencing memory problems in his early 70s. When he got back into engineering as a part time consultant, those memory problems went away.
> Nevertheless, our group-average findings, if replicated by others, would hold clear policy implications. Federal efforts to promote work at pre-retirement ages would not only reduce reliance on SSDI and enhance retirement security, but would also promote healthy aging through delaying cognitive decline.
Fuck you.
Christopher Lasch wrote that our “culture of narcissism” detests aging. Unsurprisingly we, the narcissists, are horrified when we ourselves become old. Because there is hardly anything left for us.
You can subtract pure biology, i.e. normal bodily degradation. But you can also subtract respect, esteem, wisdom (because who cares what grandpa has to say?), family (see care homes), and socializing.[1] You’re not an “asset” (to use familiar language[2]) to anyone. Just a burden.
What becomes the solution to any of that? No, no. We don’t need solutions to old people problems. We need solutions to them being burdens.
So how to make them less of a drag on our collective selves: encourage them to work at their shitty jobs for longer.
[1] See the old man who meets you again after six months and talks way too much about what he’s up to. Does he have any other outlets?
It's 48 pages and I haven't read it fully, but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable:
"Does Unemployment Make It More Likely for Late Middle-Aged People, Particularly Men, To Drink Alcohol? Evidence From We Obviously Should Have Considered This In The Paper, Perhaps We Are Too Sheltered"
To be clear I am not being pedantic. The paper explicitly endorses the policy of pushing back the retirement age specifically because doing so likely reduces cognitive decline. I agree with this, in the same sense that shooting car thieves in the street without a trial reduces automotive theft. "Reducing cognitive decline in people near retirement age" might be better met with psychiatric intervention, so that unemployed people also get some of the benefits. Ignoring this confounding variable and prattling about "causal explanation" - while endorsing the policy of snatching away people's pensions until they work a few more years - is evil born from ignorance.
>but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable:
I thought that's the reason why they used "Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"? The idea is that when "Labor Market Shocks" (ie. mass layoffs) happen, the people who lose their jobs are somewhat random, so there isn't the confounding variable of low performers/sick people.
I'm not sure that completely addresses the GP's point, because "mass layoffs" are still somewhat selective. You're more likely to lay off the people that you think aren't worth their pay, which would include those who are already suffering cognitive decline, those who are drinking enough that it's affecting their job performance, and so on.
this paper uses a Bartik / shift-share instrument that looks at changes in sectors and the localized effects (exposure) due to concentration/reliance on that industry. It's an exogenous labor demand shock, not a mass layoff which frames the decision as made at the company level. Skills matter in this consideration but the point is to account for that statistically.
It's not about "low performers / sick people," it's unemployment itself (especially sudden layoffs) making people more susceptible to substance abuse, regardless of their health when they're unemployed.
Whilst that's a perfectly valid hypothesis, they explicitly did test for relationships with rises in opioid misuse and didn't find evidence to support it. There isn't even consistent empirical data to show unemployment as a causal factor in aggregate increased drinking, never mind it being concentrated among recently laid off early onset dementia patients. The reality is unemployment influences some people to drink more and others to drink less, the circumstances of the unemployment and the demographics of the individual matter as do the patterns of the drinking, and even the statistical relationship between drinking and dementia is complex as statistically the lowest risk behaviour tends to be "moderate" rather than zero alcohol consumption
I have to wonder how much of this is socialization and the valorization of having a job (and the detrimental health effects due to lack). We don't really paint a good picture of what else people could do with their time that's respected or interesting. So many people retire early but not to something - expressing feelings of loss, idle uses of time like TV watching because they haven't developed hobbies / interests due to hegemony of work. We've killed boredom with devices and work, now people can't deal with silence and the existential questions it raises - more comforting to just be told what to do.
Does slavery slow cognitive decline? Capitalist propaganda says being a wagie is good for us. That being said people are so indoctrinated that they have no idea what to do without an employer. pretty fucked up society and culture we now find ourselves in.
Seems like a fairly conventional economics paper title.
Perhaps you're misparsing the second sentence? "Shocks" is not used as a verb here -- it's a noun, part of the phrase "labor market shocks," which refers to sudden events that disrupt the labor market.
The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job.
We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
My grandparents just jumped their volunteering from weekends to weekdays. My Boomer parents switched to leisure activities and travel (they stopped volunteering when they retired). I prefer my grandparent's retirement, but now that NGOs professionalized and became extremely political that is a no-go for me. I'm considering to retire in a small town where distant relatives live and hopefully get busy by volunteering there somehow. But it's never that simple.
Every man I know that lived well into their 80's touching or breaking 90 were all active in some way. Once they stopped, they died shortly after. Though to be honest, they didn't stop by choice, usually form an injury or medical condition.
You hit the nail squarely on the head. In days past when people retired they'd still help raise kids or look after households. When we moved past requiring that sort of thing, we left the elderly without engagement.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but perhaps as a society we could be more intentional about creating roles where the elderly can still help and feel useful, but also have flexibility and a more relaxed lifestyle.
That sounds exactly like it's a problem with retirement.
Do you have anything more interesting to say on the topic than "No U wrong"? The OP had a lot of thoughtful comments about the issues with having things to do after retiring.
Or maybe it’s a problem of spending all your effort working a job for 40+ years, and having your curiosity atrophy into nothingness.
I retired last year in my late 30’s and it’s just such a life upgrade. I study Mandarin, go to the gym, cook fun meals, volunteer at our community garden, volunteer at our food pantry, go to board game nights, brew beer, DIY house maintenance, etc. I have so much more time to spend learning new things, it’s ridiculous. I just can’t even fathom continue doing a job I don’t particularly enjoy just because I’m too unimaginative to figure out what I’d do with the extra 40+ hours of weekly freedom.
It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives
Or maybe that's just the human condition? Retirement is a pretty recent concept anyway. Back when people were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers, you didn't have the option of retiring. You either kept working or you starved, perished from the elements, etc.
I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
We probably all have anecdotal evidence here, but my father is a perfect example of being no longer employed and a ton of stuff declining. Yes, cognitively, but a lot of health. We're talking not just your "career". He was a commercial real estate agent. But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker. And it kept him busy. Getting out of the house. Figuring things out. Meeting and talking to people. Walking. Talking. Scheduling things. He'd even tell us that if he stopped, things would just descend. And he was so right.
He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked.
Sample size of 1. A ton of confounding variables. But definitely wasn't his choice to stop working at a place because of health. The poor health came after being forced to quit.
Does make me worry about "taking it easy" when I get older whatever that means :)
my mother's dementia diagnosis this year started as severe ADHD symptoms 4 years ago. but many years before that she enjoyed her retirement and pension as her last boss was abusive, and she was a bit traumatized by this that merely suggesting the idea of working again would make her anxious. the symptoms started from the stress of taking care of my dad, who suddenly found his workplace extremely stressful due to an incident with his boss snapping at him. this led to fainting incidents where he had to be rushed to ER and a after an extended disability leave he was let go. he has never been so relieved. however this just worsened my mom's condition, and the need to move out of their home of 20 years escalated it (moving stress syndrome as confounding catalyst). after only 1 year she forgot about this home and that she ever lived in it. She thinks she still lives in an earlier house. my father is much much happier, even when taking care of mom and they still get to travel. mom simply forgets what happened an hour ago, but my dad's happy just getting to travel the world with her while she can. So.. more of sample size of 2 abusive bosses in the workplace leading to significant mental and physical health improvements upon leaving such bosses. mom enjoyed kdramas, dad enjoyed reading more of world history, they regularly do everything together everywhere. they love the same music that my mom remembers every word and dance to.
As a general comment, I'd like to say that getting out of the house is a hell of a lot easier when you don't have to drive everywhere to participate in daily life. So and so family member sits at home and watches TV all day is a phenomenon caused primarily by our car-centric culture which, for the elderly, is a barrier to staying healthy but mentally and physically.
Respectfully but strongly disagree. I'll argue you don't have to be a victim and can choose where you live if you plan ahead a little.
There's plenty of places where a car is not necessary and even if people think a car's necessary I'm often the only one on a bicycle in many places.. It's doable if you're willing to put in the effort.
I think that suggesting that an octogenarian either uproot their life to a less car-centric place or start riding a bike everywhere is a bit unreasonable.
It's a cart and horse problem.
You can choose to live where you don't need a car, but those places become fewer and fewer because of the distances needed for cars. (as in parking space minimums mandated by the city).
"Not just bikes" on Youtube goes into this a lot. Car-centricism is self-reinforcing. Eventually you have no such thing as a mid-density neighbourhood.
Saw similar with my grandmothers. One had a busy social live and volunteer schedule for 20+ years, the other.. did not.
A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
There's always more opportunities in the community than there are volunteers, so look around.
>A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc).
Yeah, my guess is that someone retiring early to pursue their hobbies and interests is going to be much better off than a blue collar worker made redundant or disabled in his 50's. I always see these sort of studies used to slam the idea of FIRE, but I very much have my doubts that these findings apply equally to everyone.
It's hard to really say from anecdotes. My uncle retired early and was sharp as a whip until 86 or so. Then decline hit him hard. There was no change in life circumstances, he just got old.
Also, I think you'll find that taking care of someone who can't take care of themselves is a lot of work. I had to do it for my mom for 6 months and its a ton of stuff. Talking to doctors. Arranging appointments. Etc.
"I think you'll find that taking care of someone" => I know you were writing this generically. And I'm just replying to this for the sake of all of us who do actually know what it's like taking care of someone.
But yeah. Holy shit this is hard. I've been doing this too. Had to move my mom and dad to a place a block from me when my mom was going through her final few months with Alzheimers. That was so hard. So gross. And then now with this descent of my dads. You are catching me fresh from yet another aorta aneurism surgery of his last week. This is bananas. Just endless worry, driving, appointments, cleaning, pills, macgyvering the endless broken down things in his life: the tv, the remote, the blood pressure monitor.
OMG. I see you. I feel you. :) This is a rough part of life y'all.
It reminds of my grandparents that refuse to stop working my grandma 65 and grandfather 73. My grandma has like a stand where she sells candies and coffee and for her is just a way for socializing. And my grandpa he's still trying businesses out he thinks that there is still time for him to become rich, he's still very sharp and active he currently sells car tools and he's walking everyday
I know I interact with people on the daily with my remote job, but would love to know if that's potentially an issue too. Decent reason to get back in the office. I also miss my daily office bike rides to a certain extent, at least it was healthy for me, now I do exercise by choice and I don't always keep up with it.
Averages make sense only when the distribution looks like a normal.
But after 60ish the health of people has such a high variance that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the average retiree.
Some of them are healthy and sharp. Others have disabling health problems
I believe there have been studies into how social life impacts longevity, and probably cognitive decline as well. For some people, like my great-grandmother who kept working well into her 80s by choice, jobs can be a big social outlet. For others a job can be very socially isolating. Those factors probably matter a lot.
Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.
Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it.
But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life.
But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.
I used to think that working from home was the best thing since sliced bread, when I got to stop going to the office due to COVID.
But during the five years that I worked from home, I suffered a precipitous decline in overall health. It is too easy to stumble out of bed minutes before work starts, spend the day on Zoom calls, then spend more time behind the computer wrapping things up, and then veg out on the sofa after a long, long day. Too little exercise, no meaningful human contact.
I have been working from an office for the past year or so, and my health is improving, but it is a deep hole to climb out of.
What card games do you play? Do you have any recommendations?
Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job, and not nearly as fulfilling. You get to see smiles and frowns and everything in between in a job and there is no board game that can match the complexity and novelty of random humans asking you to solve their problems.
>Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job
I think one should optimize for 'most intrinsically rewarding' not 'most engaging'. I shudder to picture a retirement spent doing 'customer service' and if a retirement of working on projects, travel, reading and playing video games leads to 'more cognitive decline', well, so be it. I would rather be daft in my old age than miserable
Your side note implies this would be a bad or nefarious thing? What if it's actually a good decision for both individuals and the public at large?
I mean, it could be both good and bad depending on the person. My Dad worked physically demanding jobs, and would have been happy to retire and spend his time working on personal projects at age 60, and his health and well-being would have been better if he had not had to keep doing exhausting work for at least 8 more years for money reasons. So, I think people feel justifiably protective of our elders when people talk about raising the retirement age.
Honestly, the jobs where the benefits of stimulation and social interaction outweigh the physical and or mental stress of the job are not the kind of jobs most people have. So if you wanted to do what’s really best for most older people, it would be better to find ways to engage them other than financially forcing them to keep working whatever job they can get - which is what raising retirement age does.
What would be really killer would be finding more ways to enlist retirement-age professionals in training young people, in a variety of occupations from carpentry to programming. The young have the stamina and strength but lack wisdom; the older people have learned a lot and could share that knowledge and wisdom.
The issue is using a single factor to push change does not mean that change is a net good.
As such it’s often a fake justification for what they want to happen for other reasons.
I doubt it would be a good decision for all individuals. Maybe the public at large, but I question if that would be what motivates the people who seek such changes the most.
What’s so difficult to understand? The state or lobbying groups want to raise the retirement age which then correlates with studies on how raising the retirement age has “good effects”.[1] The goal isn’t to find out what is good for senior people. It’s to find reasons to enact the policy that they wanted.
Surprisingly, men ages 51–64 (this was specifically about men) “need” their jobs for their own health.
We could imagine studies done in more patriarchal cultures: unmarried women over the age of 40 suffer from psychological and physical health problems more than married women over the age of 40. We’ll just leave out the parts about how unmarried women are penalized socially, constantly. Policy recommendation: we should get women married, it’s just good for them.
[1] This was the hypothetical laid out in the original comment.
"Good for both individuals and the public at large" is one thing. "We found a club to beat you into doing what we want you to" looks very similar, but is quite different in how it feels and how it works out.
I would hypothesize that this is strongly correlated to where a person's sense of purpose comes from. If someone gets most of their sense of purpose from their job then you would expect to see a decline once they leave their job if they can't replace it with something else. For those whose sense of purpose is derived mainly outside of work and can continue to derive that sense of purpose in retirement, I would expect less of a decline in retirement other than normal aging.
Interesting.
I haven't read the paper yet so forgive a bit of ignorance here, but I feel like when I'm unemployed, I actively spend all my time trying to learn new things. This is no small part because otherwise I get depressed because I am spending all my time on YouTube and there are only so many "documentaries" about Lolcows that I can stomach, so I dive head first into projects, usually buying a few cheap textbooks in the process to play with new things. The days are way too long if I don't have something interesting to occupy my time, and I feel less guilty if that time is spent doing something quasi-intellectual instead of playing Donkey Kong Country again.
I didn't think I was an outlier with this, but maybe I am?
I'm the same. Free Time = Things to explore and learn.
I think you might be. Most retired folks I know just end up watching TV all day. Not even "good" TV-- it's mostly game-shows and 24-hour news cycles.
If I'm anything like my parents, I don't think that's something I have to worry about. My dad is constantly buying new textbooks and trying to teach himself different types of physics. Either that, or he's designing new things to be 3D printed.
He's not retired yet but I suspect that when he is he'll find a way to keep himself entertained with stuff that isn't terrible game shows.
I've heard that you can expect your retirement to look a lot like your average weekend. If your weekends naturally fill with your hobbies and interests, I don't think you have much to worry about.
I think employment may set us up for rapid cognitive decline when we finally become unemployed. As in, working 40+ hours a week makes us over-value "vegging out", which sets us up for failure post-employment.
Yeah, questions I have: 1) what’s the effect for countries with humane amounts of paid leave (e.g. France’s 7ish weeks plus ten or so holidays) and working hours; and 2) so how about, you know, the idle rich? Should we be forcing them to work 40 hours as gas station clerks, for the good of their mental health? Should we forcibly deny them access to their money sometimes so they have to get a job every now and then?
I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”
I feel like this is less about employment and more a factor of money and engagement.
You need some amount of money for good health insurance, healthier foods, lower stress, etc. You need engagement, but that could be found in volunteering and sufficiently complex hobbies.
The trend seen with employment cycles might just be picking up that many people lack these.
Thanks for saying that. My dad volunteers and gets involved with social clubs. I think he'll keep doing it as long as he's able to.
BUT: I don't think it's the work / volunteering that keeps his mind, I think it's that for people like him, they stop when their mind can no longer handle it.
I've been retired for about 5 years and I am just as loony now as I was when employed. HN, my own silly hobby sites, flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.
Taking my companies EER package in a few months - you give me cause for cheer.
> I am just as loony now as I was when employed ... flirting with the gals in town and wildlife
Flirting with the wildlife certainly does fall into the "loony" bucket in my book. Make sure to stay safe!
I don't think this is "work is medicine." It's that too much of normal life depends on having a job, so policy lands on working longer.
There have been studies that show that elderly who interact with children are cognitively healthier compared to their counter parts.
I finally found the reason why my cognitive function feels like that of a 7years old child.
Anecdata: My dad started experiencing memory problems in his early 70s. When he got back into engineering as a part time consultant, those memory problems went away.
Classic "use it or lose it". No big surprise here.
> Nevertheless, our group-average findings, if replicated by others, would hold clear policy implications. Federal efforts to promote work at pre-retirement ages would not only reduce reliance on SSDI and enhance retirement security, but would also promote healthy aging through delaying cognitive decline.
Fuck you.
Christopher Lasch wrote that our “culture of narcissism” detests aging. Unsurprisingly we, the narcissists, are horrified when we ourselves become old. Because there is hardly anything left for us.
You can subtract pure biology, i.e. normal bodily degradation. But you can also subtract respect, esteem, wisdom (because who cares what grandpa has to say?), family (see care homes), and socializing.[1] You’re not an “asset” (to use familiar language[2]) to anyone. Just a burden.
What becomes the solution to any of that? No, no. We don’t need solutions to old people problems. We need solutions to them being burdens.
So how to make them less of a drag on our collective selves: encourage them to work at their shitty jobs for longer.
[1] See the old man who meets you again after six months and talks way too much about what he’s up to. Does he have any other outlets?
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873477
It's 48 pages and I haven't read it fully, but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable:
"Does Unemployment Make It More Likely for Late Middle-Aged People, Particularly Men, To Drink Alcohol? Evidence From We Obviously Should Have Considered This In The Paper, Perhaps We Are Too Sheltered"
To be clear I am not being pedantic. The paper explicitly endorses the policy of pushing back the retirement age specifically because doing so likely reduces cognitive decline. I agree with this, in the same sense that shooting car thieves in the street without a trial reduces automotive theft. "Reducing cognitive decline in people near retirement age" might be better met with psychiatric intervention, so that unemployed people also get some of the benefits. Ignoring this confounding variable and prattling about "causal explanation" - while endorsing the policy of snatching away people's pensions until they work a few more years - is evil born from ignorance.
>but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable:
I thought that's the reason why they used "Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"? The idea is that when "Labor Market Shocks" (ie. mass layoffs) happen, the people who lose their jobs are somewhat random, so there isn't the confounding variable of low performers/sick people.
I'm not sure that completely addresses the GP's point, because "mass layoffs" are still somewhat selective. You're more likely to lay off the people that you think aren't worth their pay, which would include those who are already suffering cognitive decline, those who are drinking enough that it's affecting their job performance, and so on.
this paper uses a Bartik / shift-share instrument that looks at changes in sectors and the localized effects (exposure) due to concentration/reliance on that industry. It's an exogenous labor demand shock, not a mass layoff which frames the decision as made at the company level. Skills matter in this consideration but the point is to account for that statistically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_J._Bartik
It's not about "low performers / sick people," it's unemployment itself (especially sudden layoffs) making people more susceptible to substance abuse, regardless of their health when they're unemployed.
Whilst that's a perfectly valid hypothesis, they explicitly did test for relationships with rises in opioid misuse and didn't find evidence to support it. There isn't even consistent empirical data to show unemployment as a causal factor in aggregate increased drinking, never mind it being concentrated among recently laid off early onset dementia patients. The reality is unemployment influences some people to drink more and others to drink less, the circumstances of the unemployment and the demographics of the individual matter as do the patterns of the drinking, and even the statistical relationship between drinking and dementia is complex as statistically the lowest risk behaviour tends to be "moderate" rather than zero alcohol consumption
I have to wonder how much of this is socialization and the valorization of having a job (and the detrimental health effects due to lack). We don't really paint a good picture of what else people could do with their time that's respected or interesting. So many people retire early but not to something - expressing feelings of loss, idle uses of time like TV watching because they haven't developed hobbies / interests due to hegemony of work. We've killed boredom with devices and work, now people can't deal with silence and the existential questions it raises - more comforting to just be told what to do.
Does slavery slow cognitive decline? Capitalist propaganda says being a wagie is good for us. That being said people are so indoctrinated that they have no idea what to do without an employer. pretty fucked up society and culture we now find ourselves in.
This feels like propaganda, like a peice from the Economist.
A strangely click-baity title for an academic paper. What's next? "Four crazy macroeconomic predictions. You won't believe what's number four!"
Seems like a fairly conventional economics paper title.
Perhaps you're misparsing the second sentence? "Shocks" is not used as a verb here -- it's a noun, part of the phrase "labor market shocks," which refers to sudden events that disrupt the labor market.