Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35117

by littlexsparkee • 3 months ago

343 380 3 months ago

goda902• 3 months ago

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.

appreciatorBus• 3 months ago

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?

goda902• 3 months ago

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.

Retric• 3 months ago

The issue is using a single factor to push change does not mean that change is a net good. Nobody talks about windmills killing birds because that’s what they actually care about, instead there are so few downsides they needed to find something no matter how meaningless in context.

As such single issues are often a fake justification for what they want to happen for other reasons.

AnimalMuppet2• 3 months ago

"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.

keybored4• 3 months ago

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.

xp84• 3 months ago

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.

cableshaft2• 3 months ago

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.

dempedempe• 3 months ago

What card games do you play? Do you have any recommendations?

stringfood• 3 months ago

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.

deepspace• 3 months ago

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.

DrammBA• 3 months ago

including somewhat complicated solo card games

any suggestions?

lenerdenator2• 3 months ago

Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.

I'm sure you could do that just with basic math today.

LeCompteSftware2• 3 months ago

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.

littlexsparkee3• 3 months ago

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.

gruez• 3 months ago

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.

LeCompteSftware2• 3 months ago

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.

AnimalMuppet2• 3 months ago

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.

jdw64• 3 months ago

I finally found the reason why my cognitive function feels like that of a 7years old child.

rts_cts• 3 months ago

A strangely click-baity title for an academic paper. What's next? "Four crazy macroeconomic predictions. You won't believe what's number four!"

jonas21• 3 months ago

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.

dec0dedab0de2• 3 months ago

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.

funimpoded• 3 months ago

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”

triceratops• 3 months ago

so how about, you know, the idle rich?

They get together a few times a week for golf and tennis with their other idle rich friends. Skiing in the winter.

globular-toast2• 3 months ago

Interesting. As soon as work is done I'm either outside walking, in the garden or workshop etc. I did a PhD which actually did consume my whole life until I finished it. Every job I've had since then seems so easy in comparison. I'm never "vegging out".

rullelito• 3 months ago

Do you think you are the typical person?

dec0dedab0de2• 3 months ago

And for everyone like you I suspect there are a thousand who leave work exhausted and can't wait to drink a beer, and watch tv.

gowld2• 3 months ago

How old are you?

keybored4• 3 months ago

What income brackets correlate with having a PhD? Is it mostly underpaid teachers, overqualified service workers, or something else? I don’t know the answer.

nate3• 3 months ago

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 :)

steveBK1232• 3 months ago

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.

wing-_-nuts6• 3 months ago

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.

bcrosby95• 3 months ago

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.

nate3• 3 months ago

"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.

Tade0• 3 months ago

From my pool of anecdotes I can only say that moving around - not necessarily doing sports or anything - affects things tremendously.

My maternal grandmother lived to 97, while my grandfather is still with us at 99. Interestingly, their next door neighbours are also alive and in their late 90s.

The one thing they had in common was living four floors up without an elevator. Curiously, in that block, people started dying starting from the lower floors.

Realistically I think they were born in an unique moment in history, which allowed them to have a childhood of running around barefoot, barely ever seeing a motor vehicle[0] and an adulthood with modern sanitation and post-war healthcare.

[0] Grandpa recalls how bewildered everyone was by the arrival of the nazis, with their tanks, motorcycles and, closer to the end of the war, bicycles(that part he found hilarious). They've never seen such a huge motorcade in their lives.

ericmay2• 3 months ago

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 both mentally and physically.

_blk• 3 months ago

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.

safety1st• 3 months ago

I'm no fan of car culture but I think to say it's the primary cause of living a sedentary life at home is an overstatement. I deliberately moved somewhere where I could walk to everything I needed including a fantastic central train station, I no longer even own a car, and yet... over the years my habits changed and I now spend a ton of time at home. My motivation to go out has simply declined.

There is a relevant concept in psychology called activation energy, James Clear provides a good introduction to it. Certainly in recent years screens seem to be incentivizing more stay at home behavior. People used to not own a TV, many quite intentionally, before our other screens were invented. But it is a very complicated topic.

dividefuel• 3 months ago

I do think that once an elderly person loses the ability to drive, it's often a big tipping point towards their decline. I would suspect that losing the ability to drive usually (but not necessarily) comes before losing the ability to navigate public transit.

But I don't immediately believe the link that 'car culture' -> 'earlier cognitive decline'. Car culture, for example, is usually associated with living on larger plots of land, which comes with its own set of tasks and chores that can keep someone older occupied. A smaller apartment requires much less ongoing work.

I think a lot depends on the individual and how they best stay active. More dense living probably provides easier opportunities to do things, whereas less dense living sort of forces you to perform ongoing tasks.

rsynnott4• 3 months ago

One thing we do in Ireland is that all public transport is free for people aged over 65. While I don't think this was the original _intent_, it definitely seems to encourage people to get out of the house more.

(In particular, some people seem to go places just to get the value out of the free pass, which probably keeps them more active than they would otherwise be.)

mrsvanwinkle• 3 months ago

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.

antisthenes3• 3 months ago

But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker.
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.

It's a nice "just so" story, but when you're in your 80s, you are already in multiple stages of decline across the board. One small injury can cause a cascading failure of systems.

The poor health came after being forced to quit.

I don't know how you can so authoritatively state this about a man in his 80s. (e.g. - past the average life expectancy). 80 is just really really old. How fast the decline gets you at that point is really mostly a genetic lottery.

But if the anecdote helps you be more active personally - more power to you.

nate3• 3 months ago

"how you can so authoritatively state this" => because that is the exact order of events :) A happened. Then B happened. i didn't say A caused B. just like we're all discussing here in this thread. just another datapoint that we are sharing here where it seems like there could be a causation not just correlation. but i didn't authoritatively state anything other than I know what happened on one date, and then what happened on another date.

rootusrootus3• 3 months ago

I think it's good advice even if anecdotal. At least I do not think it hurts. My own observation is that almost everyone gets hit hard by the 80s. A lot of people in their 70s are spry, but it seems like damn near everyone gets significant decline in their 80s. A few people make it to the 90s, and some are even relatively spry, but my own anecdotal observations are that it is fairly rare. My grandparents both made it into their mid-90s before the decline really took hold (and then it was fast) but they were outliers. Both of my own parents made it to their mid-80s and that was it.

Bender• 3 months ago

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.

seattle_spring2• 3 months ago

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!

pugworthy• 3 months ago

Taking my companies EER package in a few months - you give me cause for cheer.

BeetleB• 3 months ago

flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.

Let me write a memo to myself: Try flirting with wildlife to ensure longevity!

snek_case3• 3 months ago

Nickname checks out

giantg2• 3 months ago

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.

gwbas1c• 3 months ago

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.

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

This feels like propaganda, like a peice from the Economist.

RankingMember2• 3 months ago

Propaganda to what end, the global cabal to...encourage people to stay busy in retirement?

moneycantbuy2• 3 months ago

no to work for someone else forever

keybored4• 3 months ago

The propaganda around propaganda is working so well. The idea that propaganda is someone with an agenda to promote Canned Beans just shouts that Canned Beans are the best and tries its best to censor any promotion of any other foodstuff. In reality it can be more direct than that.

There are thousands of ways to approach problems that the elderly and soon-to-be elderly have and will develop. This research chose to pursue the theory about how specifically wage labor is something that guards against cognitive atrophy. Why? This could achieve many goals.

- The solution is about economic activity, including increased wage labor taxing

- The solution does not involve any increase in government spending on the elderly

- It valorizes wage labor as an age-protecting activity

- That wage labor could contribute to ill effects is excluded by the framing: why do some people vegitate in front of the TV after working their normal hours?

bitwize• 3 months ago

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.

tombert2• 3 months ago

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?

seattle_spring2• 3 months ago

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.

wing-_-nuts6• 3 months ago

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.

tombert2• 3 months ago

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.

rrgok• 3 months ago

I'm the same. Free Time = Things to explore and learn.

animitronix• 3 months ago

Classic "use it or lose it". No big surprise here.

keybored4• 3 months ago

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

b00ty4breakfast• 3 months ago

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.

tootie• 3 months ago

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.

bilsbie• 3 months ago

Hey I’m in the same boat! (Except the grad school.) feel free to email (in profile) if you want to chat.

breezybottom2• 3 months ago

That sounds exactly like it's a problem with retirement.

bluefirebrand3• 3 months ago

It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives

the_gastropod2• 3 months ago

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, write some software for myself for fun, etc. I have so much more time to spend learning new things, it’s ridiculous. I just can’t even fathom continuing to do 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.

tensor4• 3 months ago

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.

tensor4• 3 months ago

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.

whatever120• 3 months ago

They shouldn’t just feel useful, they need roles that actually are useful. They’re not dumb.

wing-_-nuts6• 3 months ago

I mean, we're about to enter a demographic reversal and to hear economists talk of it, corporations are going to really struggle to find the workers they need.

I guess we're about to find out if they're desperate enough to offer genuine flexibility or not.

If I could work 2d/wk remote as a software developer, I'd probably do it the rest of my life. Something tells me that most CEOs are still gonna insist on 50+hrs/wk RTO though...

prawn2• 3 months ago

There's not necessarily money in it, but in the current era, parents still find the grandparents' availability for minding children incredibly useful. If they also cleaned my house free or cheap, I'd be thrilled!

MisterTea2• 3 months ago

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 from an injury or medical condition.

glouwbug• 3 months ago

I’m going to say there’s some mixup of causation and correlation here

jandrese• 3 months ago

Very common story for a relatively minor injury or disease in an old person to snowball to their death when they lose mobility and independence. You gotta stay active if you want to keep living.

boogieknite• 3 months ago

we just took the keys from grandpa at 93. way way wayyyyy later than we should have. cant help but wonder how many years men breaking 90 and staying active have cost others in car accidents

alecco• 3 months ago

My grandparents just bumped their volunteering from weekends to weekdays. Then 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 got professionalized and became extremely political that is a no-go for me. I didn't like to be bossed around by a 30yo narcissist driven by maxing out his EOY presentation (to keep their comfy job).

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.

bobthepanda• 3 months ago

My fantasy is maybe to start a one person cafe operation and manage overheads.

Unfortunately most retail space in the US is way too oversized to make that kind of operation work.

csallen3• 3 months ago

I think this is a problem in perspective/framing. Or phrasing, if you will.

"Being economic entities in the workforce" could alternatively be phrased, "performing a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe."

That sounds much less sinister. It's something humans have been doing for millions of years. It feels good, it engages our brains, it's helpful to others, and it's helpful to ourselves. And I can't help but feel the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is unfair in its approach of disparaging it.

Of course, play and socializing are important, too! Life isn't all work and contribution. And there are many ways to work or contribute outside of having a formal job, anyway. So I do agree with you that it's a bit sad that people don't have ideas for how to do either of these things unless it's through their long-term career.

tardedmeme2• 3 months ago

They were specifically talking about a commercial labor-for-money transaction though. Not just any useful work.

pixelready• 3 months ago

Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.

I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.

[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

crabbone• 3 months ago

Absolutely!

But also: with age more and more doors are closed to you. Many hobbies become inaccessible. You may end up with a bunch of choices that all just sound outright depressing. Losing a job is losing one more choice, restricting yourself to the possibly more boring options that you can still physically pull off.

It's just not fun being old.

overfeed• 3 months ago

Multi-generation households - which also can keep older people active like you noted -are mostly gone. You can't do much for your tribe from a retirement home on a random Saturday afternoon every few months in summer, so work or hobbies are the remaining activity centers, but you now which of the 2 is lionized as a virtue in American culture. Some hobbies are unfortunately only discovered in retirement, so perhaps some criticism of the economic system as imperfect is due.

jodrellblank• 3 months ago

I don't think the modern "anti-capitalist" trend is disparaging "performing a skilled role that's useful for your tribe". It's disparaging various of these things:

- being arm-twisted to perform a low-skill, low-utility, role because economic weirdness and bad luck makes it the only work that you can get. Your tribe could use your <furniture making skill>, but it's cheaper to import furniture from China, so tough. Your tribe might like your music, but you aren't as good as Adele, so shut up. You could grow decent fruit but it doesn't pay well enough for you to afford the land to do it, and farms using illegal migrants can undercut your work, so find something else.

- systems parasitically exploiting your desire to provide useful work, to extract maximum value from you beyond what is satisfying and fulfilling, while treating you as disposable waste. You like cooking? Become a chef for 14 hours a day including evenings and weekends, or get out. From Amazon warehouse workers to programmers in the video game industry; intense grind, burnout, fired. Tribes don't tend to do that to people they value.

- systems distorting skills and responsibilities, e.g. not providing good tools, Kafka-esque bureaucracy, firing people in your 'tribe' at will, having your day micromanaged so your skilled work is entirely at the behest of other people, taking away agency from your work, demanding lower quality but faster, demanding higher quality and faster, demanding higher quality and paperwork, so that even if something is using a fulfilling skill, it actually doesn't feel that way.

- removing options to do multiple things; a job is usually a reduced to one role from day start to end. There's not much room for someone who is the local baker, tends the canal lock, sells eggs in the market, and does mountain rescue or whatever.

- taking over your life; e.g. controlling your days off, providing your healthcare, owning all the land so there aren't 'commons' you can opt to live off, lobbying and bribing the lawmakers, mandating 37 pieces of flare, setting your start and finish time, making you justify sickness, demanding you be on-call or available at night.

Consultants with high-demand skills still have some opportunity to avoid this, but huge numbers of people don't.

hiAndrewQuinn• 3 months ago

Hyperbolic. Unless she has a second job she surely has other activities to occupy her 50-80 non working, non sleeping hours. She's making the much weaker statement that dropping from e.g. 40 hours of economically productive and legible work to zero would leave her worse off, and that's much more understandable.

Most of the people who get a lot out of retirement are still doing economically productive work, it's just illegible to the point they don't feel it's worth bothering to make a buck off it. Any serious hobby is basically a second job you don't get paid for, in other words.

ElevenLathe3• 3 months ago

We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market. Severing all social connections will make a person deteriorate at any age. This is why solitary confinement is a cruel punishment.

philipallstar3• 3 months ago

This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised.

No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.

No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.

The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.

andix3• 3 months ago

In my experience its really hard to find something that connects people of different age groups in a meaningful way, that doesn't involve a workplace-like setting. Older and younger people often just don't compromise enough from an intrinsic motivation to make it work.

If they are somehow forced to work together, and have to make compromises, it suddenly works much better. They also benefit and enjoy it.

It doesn't have to be paid work. But it has to be something with a defined structure and some kind of management. Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.

JumpCrisscross6• 3 months ago

We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market

Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities.

We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.

stouset2• 3 months ago

I used to follow FIRE-related communities.

There were a depressing number of people who would post something along the lines of “I just pulled the trigger! Now what am I supposed to do to fill the time?” Your take is spot on, and it’s incredibly sad the number of people we’ve created whose only source of meaning or joy in their life is their desk job.

As someone who pulled the trigger about a year ago, I feel like there’s not enough hours in the day to fill with personally enriching activities, both mentally and physically stimulating. And I feel increasingly lucky to have a life like that.

rconti• 3 months ago

I think the FIRE crowd is even more likely to fall into this trap than the average wage slave. In addition to finding meaning in their day job, they're also more likely to forego short-term costs (like recreation/socialization/travel/whatever). Plus the FIRE planning itself becomes a hobby. So when they retire, they "lose" even more than the average person who might have more side interests.

piloto_ciego• 3 months ago

Those people are wildly un-creative.

qwerpy• 3 months ago

I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours.

Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.

lovecg• 3 months ago

I’ve noticed some people with seemingly fulfilling hobbies stop doing them after quitting their job as well. It’s entirely possible all those hobbies are valuable precisely as something powerful to latch onto and disconnect from the day job, and seem pointless the day after quitting. Seems like you had a strong sense of identity outside of your job already before quitting. Building that could be a lot of hard work for other people (and it sometimes comes as a surprise that it even needs to be built).

wing-_-nuts6• 3 months ago

The largest FIRE sub on reddit is aptly named 'financial independence' because FI is much, much more important than RE.

The first post they link to on the sidebar is 'Build the life you want and save for it'

https://old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/58j8...

I honestly don't know how someone gets to the position of being able to retire without having thought long and hard about it. Even if you get an unexpected windfall, it's probably best to keep working until you know you're mentally prepared to retire.

henrikschroder3• 3 months ago

Your take is spot on, and it’s incredibly sad the number of people we’ve created whose only source of meaning or joy in their life is their desk job.

I worked for a silicon valley company that graciously offered its employees a month or two of unpaid vacation every five years. And people who had worked there a long while agonized over it, if they should take it, and whatever should they do with all that free time??!?

Meanwhile, my European ass and my European colleagues were so incredibly bewildered by it, because we were used to 5-6 weeks of paid vacation per year, and being used to that means you have no issues finding stuff to do outside of work.

Corporate American produces the weirdest drones ever, people are so incredibly conditioned to work work work.

calferreira2• 3 months ago

I actually have the same fear. I love computers and I don't know what I'll do once I retire. Problem solving on computers is like oxygen to me.

djmips• 3 months ago

There's a big ocean of problem solving on computers that doesn't require a day job! I find it very fun. I mean I started on computers for fun when I was young and it turned into a job so being retired means I can just go back to working on the stuff I like in particular.

zamadatix• 3 months ago

Love computers outside of ${dayJob}!

Work on some open source projects and dig into some bugs, become that crazy but fun neighborhood guy always building some contraption in his garage, volunteer as a mentor for advanced STEM programs like FIRST FRC, volunteer at/run a local computer reuse program where you help take used computers and get them into a state people in need of one can use, build those things you always thought sounded fun to work on at ${dayJob} but could never "justify" to management, build and operate a retro computing collection.

Some of these scratch the tinkering itch, some of these scratch the community itch, some of these scratch the meaning itch, and so on, but all allow you to have a goal, sense of purpose, and to love computers however much you want without having to make money doing it.

Getting initial momentum on this can seem tricky, same as for careers, but once you get going the time at ${dayJob} starts to feel like it gets in the way of loving computers instead of the other way around.

ASalazarMX• 3 months ago

Hear me out: you would get to choose which problems to solve!

But I get you; a job finds well-scoped problems and spoon feeds them to you, it can be daunting to look for a worthy problem to solve on your own. Think of it as a new skill you'll have to develop.

protocolture• 3 months ago

Honestly when given downtime I generate more computer problems than I could ever hope to solve. I cant even fathom being bored with a computer. My mother used to accuse me of breaking the home PC just to keep myself busy and it was not far from the truth.

vitaflo• 3 months ago

You literally have one of the easiest things to retire to. You can do whatever you want with computers when you retire and for the rest of your life.

If you were an ER doctor and loved saving lives it would be a little harder.

hylaride2• 3 months ago

There are tons of projects and communities you can participate in. From embedded on up. A math geek I know (who is underused at work) did a lot of work helping with filtering out electrical noise for https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight for example, but there are tons of communities out there.

kortilla• 3 months ago

It’s not that depressing if you view it as her wanting to help society and sees a job as the main way of achieving that.

When nobody is paying you to do something it’s easy to lose the feedback loop of “I’m at least providing this one person enough value to keep getting paid”.

This is much older than capitalism too. Very old religions derive value from work

mannanj• 3 months ago

For most, work in America seems inherently undignified.

vkou2• 3 months ago

Authoritarian hierarchies (Which is precisely what your workplace is) rarely have dignity to spare for the people building the pharaoh's pyramid.

scottyah• 3 months ago

It's definitely polarizing, I think a lot of people feel that work is your life's purpose.

devilsdata3• 3 months ago

The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. And then on retirement, people would still have their hobbies and passion projects they had been working on their entire life.

That is the biggest rock in the bucket. Smaller rocks include social media use, diet, exercise, whether the person is in a toxic home environment, mental health, or has children.

I have ADHD and I often struggle with having the energy to do anything outside of work. So I try to optimise my life to give me the most energy that I can have. I eat really healthy; high protein, high fibre, low saturated fat. I try to keep my social media use low, using ScreenZen. I meditate. I do resistance exercise a few times a week.

But even still, I find that my mind is exhausted part of a way through a workday, usually by 14:00-15:00. Maybe that's because I'm a software engineer.

I don't know how to fix it. But I'd really appreciate an extra day a week off, even at the cost of some remuneration. I love my work, but I don't want it to feel like it's the only thing I have going.

jandrewrogers2• 3 months ago

they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering

This is not what actually happens in practice. There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. If this was going to occur there would be mountains of empirical evidence for it by now because this situation isn't rare.

I know many people with a lot of free time. In the vast majority of cases, people spend their free time in almost exactly the same way they spent their free time when they had less of it. Binging on social media, television, or games? Now they just do more of it for longer. The people that volunteer more were already doing it, and they are in the small minority.

People should probably work less but the idea that this will generate productive activity is a rationalization against all evidence.

PacificSpecific• 3 months ago

I've been doing a 4 day work week and it certainly helps quite a bit. I worry I have gotten too used to it now though.

tayo42• 3 months ago

Ever try waking up early and doing your work stuff before work?

Aurornis5• 3 months ago

The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering.

I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can't do anything else with their lives, but if we changed that to 38% of their waking hours they'd be so bored that they be starting businesses and volunteering all over. That's not even consistent with your own experience of being exhausted halfway through the work day. Two extra hours per day isn't going to translate to launching a new business or volunteer effort.

You hinted at the real problem: Most people don't have the time management skills and motivation that they think they do. Remove a couple hours of work per week from most people's lives and those hours will get redistributed to mostly leisure time. Some of it more productive than other options (socializing with the community, working on hobbies).

incompatible• 3 months ago

It's hard for me to even contemplate having "nothing to do." I haven't had paid work for many, many years, yet I don't feel like I have any spare time at all.

andai• 3 months ago

Also ADHD here, I have the same problem.

The only way I can get anything meaningful done outside of work is to do it before work.

Those first few hours of the day are precious, as far as energy goes. Or attention, or will.

On a related note, I put Q2 of Eisenhower Matrix (important but not urgent, i.e. the stuff you want to get done "someday" but keep putting off indefinitely... i.e. your hopes and dreams) at the front of the day, because Q1 (urgent and important) basically forces you to do it and requires no special attention.

To put it bluntly, the long term stuff needs to be scheduled and consistently acted upon, or the default outcome will be very depressing.

I schedule it first thing, every morning.

absynth• 3 months ago

If there's a schedule to your tiredness then can probably reschedule it. This is a lesson I've discovered to good effect. [Side note: 2-3pm is probably due to food/glucose/insulin levels - its worth investigating]

Don't be fooled by tiredness. You can be mentally tired but not physically tired. These are not opposites. You can be physically tired in one aspect but not another.

You can be mentally tired but because you like to paint, then painting will regenerate you. It will make you less tired after you paint or even better: have you now appropriately tired that you properly sleep due to that tiredness.

Tired is not tired. You be tired in one way and not in another. This blanket use of the word isn't helpful and leaves a lot of potential left behind as you sit on the couch "tired".

aaarrm2• 3 months ago

I lay down and close my eyes (and sometimes nap) pretty much every day for like 20 min. When the mid afternoon slump hits, instead of trying to fight it or use caffeine I just lay down. Does wonders for my energy levels afterwards.

zeafoamrun• 3 months ago

The people I know who have done it best are a friend's parents. They are both general practitioners and just gradually scaled back how many hours per week they worked, and gradually filled the time with various community and outdoor activities (church, choir, book clubs, hiking, biking, etc). My aim is to do the same, but I think I need to shift from being a tech employee to some kind of consulting to do that since scaling back is seen as weakness in corporate culture.

nicbou3• 3 months ago

I would like to know about your ADHD tricks and which ones had the most impact.

When the mind exhaustion hits, the day ends. I go ride my bicycle. I stopped pretending I can be productive on another person’s schedule. This is good if your job allows it.

21asdffdsa126• 3 months ago

Half of those hobbies also would gestate into new jobs and businesses within a year.. turns out if given free time, some people do get busy..

hcfman• 3 months ago

"I have ADHD and I often struggle with having the energy to do anything outside of work".

Ritalin can help tremendously with that.

kakacik2• 3 months ago

Yeah, not buying this entirely. People love slacking off in their free time, after some intense period its the easiest way to relax. Hard manual labor should have mental exercises as resting and reverse.

Its completely on people. Who the heck was ever told to work like crazy whole life, do nothing more, and let their personality formed up till mid 20s slowly evaporate? I certainly never heard that. Its your and mine responsibility to keep our life interesting, bring up challenges for good old struggle and overcoming, fostering resilient personalities, find passions. Nobody forces you to work till you drop with gun next to your head, do they.

These aren't some empty words, I can attest it myself - moved myself half across the Europe into completely unfamiliar environment, culture, customs and language. That's challenging if one decides to stay, find friends and integrate properly. Doesn't help the language is French - one of the harder ones to learn well, IMHO a badly designed 'spaghetti code' of a language that needs desperate update from endless sets of old rules and exceptions. Then I picked up from 0 various mountain sports - from hiking to climbing and alpinism, ski touring, even flew paraglider for a while, also started free weights gym training. Diving in the sunny places with coral reefs. What spurred all this was a hard breakup and one guy who showed me the way to these activities and I walked it myself from that point.

Had a bad paragliding accident where I broke both legs (wheelchair perspective on life for 6 weeks was truly eye-opening experience), so I supplanted it with more climbing which I luckily can keep doing (ie this evening with my US buddy). You see the pattern - once these become your passions, its very hard to actually not wanting to do them more and more, they make me feel great long term, are super healthy and one sees world and life from other perspectives. As body ages I can move to other sports - planning starting wind surfing this summer as a replacement for that paragliding, fingers crossed.

When I compare myself with peers back home who literally never moved and stayed whole life in some comfy jobs its staggering how 'undeveloped' personalities many have - know only what few news websites say, repeat what others said, but not much experience outside their little bubble, no resilience, fear of unknown (of which for them in this world there are many). Hard to have any meaningful discussion about more than weather and kids with them, very shallow knowledge on whole world and life.

That on top of having and raising 2 kids with my wife with both busy careers, no nanny and all family 1500km away. I want to say I am busy but still, there is ton of time to slack off. TON of it. But some form of 'comfort zone', even if uncomfortable but at least familiar, is the proverbial death of a person, of that spark that makes you grin like a baby from time to time and feel joy of life. Or, more simply - if work is too much on you, work less, drop a day, leave earlier and screw what everybody else in office rat race thinks, they don't live your life.

Sorry trying to cram a lot of different ideas swirling in my head into one post and I am not a poet nor english native speaker.

ap99• 3 months ago

Since you're already in this optimizing mindset -- do as much as you can to improve/optimize your mitochondria and lots of these issues get better.

bradishungry• 3 months ago

I have diagnosed adhd (since I was a child) and something I struggled with, which may be relevant to you, is that it can be really easy to tell yourself or believe you have a limited capacity to focus and later in the day you just run out. The idea that you can’t start doing a hobby because you don’t have the capacity to focus on something is untrue a lot of the time, and it’s noticeable in a situation where if you do really mentally taxing fulfilling hard work, sometimes you feel much more capable of doing those hobbies, because the same “focus” for one isn’t exactly the same as the other.

Not saying you’re wrong for feeling that way, just sharing a way of thinking that helped me out a lot

seanmcdirmid• 3 months ago

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.

What if people just really really like their jobs and didn't have enough initiative to make sure they had something to do outside of them? It isn't really wrong for people to like their work, like it isn't wrong for someone to have a hobby that they obsess over.

Considering fiction, even in the post scarcity society of Star Trek, people still like doing "jobs." Or consider a seeing eye dog after they retire, they enjoy occasionally putting the harness back on and feeling useful. It isn't simply a matter of human beings being reduced to economic entities.

gyomu• 3 months ago

We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce

What do you think people did with their lives before retirement became a thing? My great grandparents worked the fields and took care of the animals till they dropped. I did have one great grandma who spent the last few years of her life vegetating in a chair because she literally couldn’t do anything else, otherwise she’d have been working the fields and taking care of the animals.

They weren’t “economic entities” in the sense that they got a paycheck from an employer, but they were “economic entities” in that if they weren’t putting daily labor into the farm, they’d eventually freeze and starve.

deadbabe• 3 months ago

Based on my grandmothers I’d say they mostly sat around and gossiped, went on walks together, ate meals together, did fun stuff together and then talked about stuff. Repeat until they die off.

Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.

wraptile• 3 months ago

This can be extended even further - hunter-gatherers never retired either. However in both cases people did actually _retire_ from direct activity. Elders would often become advisors and community nurturers rather than actively milking cows, hunting deer and whatnot.

I think here what becomes apparent is that it's not loss of specific activity (work) that causes the decline but activity in general which is very much duuuh - obviously.

sandworm101• 3 months ago

> 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.

Unless you own shares. A population dedicated to work, followed by a retirement dedicated to steady medical spending punctuated by occassional holiday travel, is ideal for sustained economic growth year on year.

dkga• 3 months ago

I think it is also more than that. In car-centric places like Brazil or the US, older people essentially need to drive or be driven around to have a social life. In pedestrian friendly cities like many in Europe, it is very common to see older people walking to meet their friends/relatives. I saw it all the time in Switzerland. Even those with severely limited mobility would prefer to actively walk or take the tram/bus somewhere (no matter how much time it took) than stay at home.

benchwright• 3 months ago

Can agree with this (to a certain extent). Spending time in both America and Ireland, there's a definite difference in the extent to which "I can only get there by car versus public transit/other types of transport" is incorporated into the culture. By far, more urban/suburban/rural density with appropriate public transportation support leads to more freedom to walk, bike, etc. Geographically, however, there are clear reasons why places like the US and Brazil have a strong incentive to rely on cars over anything else. Distance between cities and towns, poor public transport (esp. outside of urban areas in the US), etc. cause this to be an issue.

globular-toast2• 3 months ago

Has society "created" those people? Or are some people just naturally subservient and need structure to come from somewhere else? I always assumed it was the latter.

nicbou3• 3 months ago

Leasure is a skill! It must be trained like any other. You should ideally have some hobbies lined up.

I had a few years of relaxed work, and I had to learn to fill the extra time. It was not so hard for me, but it was lonelier than I expected at first.

ctb_• 3 months ago

This

jiriknesl• 3 months ago

Oh yes, absolutely. For hundreds of thousands of years, every elderly person had something like 8 children, 40 grandchildren and was busy with them.

Now, people fill this time with TV, because if they have kids, they live 5000 km away.

analog8374• 3 months ago

Hard-working children. Uncultivated. No taste. Masters within their professional shoebox but otherwise brutally shallow. And the higher the skill level the worse it is. I see it every day.

ericmcer• 3 months ago

I still play Starcraft 2 & some other games with my friends 1-2x a week when we have time.

We do not fear cognitive decline during retirement.

moneycantbuy2• 3 months ago

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.

gcheong• 3 months ago

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.

ecshafer• 3 months ago

There have been studies that show that elderly who interact with children are cognitively healthier compared to their counter parts.

logickkk1• 3 months ago

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.

kelvinjps10• 3 months ago

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

TheGRS• 3 months ago

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.

whatever1• 3 months ago

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

dominictorresmo• 3 months ago

brain is the same as a muscle: if you don't use it he will deteriorate

gste• 3 months ago

Is there any evidence in this paper or elsewhere that this is causation rather than correlation?

For example, it seems logical to me that people with worse health and failing mental faculties will already be feeling more motivation to retire earlier, as opposed to very healthy people who will keep on working forever. That would be pure correlation

verteu• 3 months ago

Yes - very roughly, they find that regions with lots of layoffs show an increase in subsequent cognitive decline:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35117/w351...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable

Not perfect, but less vulnerable to the correlation issue you mentioned.

9999000009992• 3 months ago

Allegedly my great grandfather was building a deck at the age of 90.

This might also be survivorship bias.

I’d like to say people need purpose and challenges. This is probably why rates of depression tend to be much lower in “poor” countries where people have to depend on each other more.

In the west everything is an abstraction. If you would imagine a baker in a small town, if she doesn’t feel like baking that day, the town doesn’t get bread.

Therefore, everyone in the town has an incentive to actually check on her, and get her back on her feet.

In the modern west who cares, surely another bakery will provide.

I believe automation will reduce the need for human labor very very soon.

We can all find meaning in arts, dance and play. If not just the gift of this experience.

Or we can point fingers as no one has work or money

setsewerd• 3 months ago

To your point about automation, I'm increasingly wondering whether the "post-labor economy" would be anywhere near as idealistic as it's typically presented. If people aren't working, they're presumably not paying taxes, and without taxes, there's much less incentive for a government to make choices in the people's best interest.

Or put another way, perhaps there's no representation without taxation.

9999000009992• 3 months ago

Gilens and Page: Average citizens have little impact on public policy

https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-...

You can argue we're already there. Politicians don't do anything for their constituents if big money disagrees.

I still remember when Obama was first elected and we thought we'd get something close to European style health care. Nobody was like oh gosh, golly I'm getting a subsidy to afford for profit health care insurance.

From technological point of view robo communism is very possible. I just don't know if it's what we're going to get.

The alternative is an endless spiral downward. You have fast food restaurants in NYC where outsourced customer service takes orders. Having a robot flip patties isn't hard. You could end up turning 6 jobs into 1.

Which on its surface is a good thing. Food service is ultimately a very dangerous job, and wouldn't it be great if those other five people could be working on art or something else.

We need to rethink what makes a person valued. I'm not religious, but from that angle, as a child of God you have inherit value.

This value exceeds any network you can seek to obtain.

Then again, economics isn't a simple thing.

tsoukase• 3 months ago

Dementia, at least of Alzheimer's type, starts at least 20 years before symptom onset and is multifactorial, so much that no single factor plays a role ("explains the variability") more than 5%. Employment, as almost all other factors, like having family/kids, higher education, wealth etc etc, might be a correlative or a confounding variable, depending on the study design because the disease mechanisms are so long and convoluted.

In the egg and chicken dilemma, I believe that the cognitive decline causes the social inactivity and not the reverse. Get your retirement because that will not cause your dementia.

psychoslave• 3 months ago

No, but the lake of activity and intellectual challenges will certainly accelerate it, even for someone middle age with an official employment! Wrote this just by reading the title, and past the summary it clearly lean into that direction.

Havoc• 3 months ago

Regardless of whether this is true I do think there is a risk of overdoing it.

My dad firmly believes in the "when people quit work they decline" theory. Which may be fair, but he's not in great health and still charging hard. Definitely think you can overdo that & end up working till you drop

Unbeliever69• 3 months ago

I voluntarily retired at age 55 after a startup I was a principal in for five years ran out of money (raising funds was not my responsibility). Having worked from home during most of that time, and having nobody to report to other than myself, I decided I couldn't go back to the grind. I was fortunate enough that my wife earns enough and has good enough benefits that I don't need to work. It took a lot of paying down debt and massaging our finances, but it's worked out swimmingly. We're doing far better on one income than we ever did on two. Obviously, at my age, there are no kids in the picture. Not only am I her personal assistant (she's a teacher), but I take care of the household, which takes a ton of stress off her plate.

I could see a world where cognitive decline takes place, but it's actually been the opposite for me. When I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities as my wife's assistant and taking care of the household, I have many hours during the day to pursue my own passions. I've also been much more structured with my time. I actively journal. I spend time with friends and family. I occasionally do things for fun like fly fishing. I set aside a specific time to read every day for pleasure and learning. I go to bed at a set time and wake up at 5am. I probably log anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day doing agentic AI coding and design in Claude Code. Freed from the treadmill of employment and the grind of keeping up with the fast pace of deeply learning new technology, I feel sharper than I have in decades. It also doesn't hurt that my passion projects are generating income, which keeps me highly motivated and mentally engaged.

I'm sure those of you that read this probably think that I didn't retire. I think an argument can be made for and against this. I feel retired. I just don't fill all of my time with leisure which I think is the trap that many retired people fall into. The things that I do to keep mentally sharp are intentional choices. It just so happens that those things are things that resemble work.

doc_ick• 3 months ago

How much of this article is written by ai?

hirako2000• 3 months ago

What many comments miss is that society is heavily structured around work.

If we didn't work, or simply worked far less, we wouldn't be atomized units not quite finding what to do.

There would be more structure of volunteering projects, cafés would be laid out for people having time, instead of for quick grab. Fastfood and drive through may end up being far less common.

SilentM68• 3 months ago

The primary argument of this NBER working paper is that "employment, particularly near retirement age, can slow the rate of cognitive decline."

Would this not depend on the type of work being done and type of working conditions? Doesn't working in a boring, unchallenging, repetitive, dead-end job, dull the senses? Also, now a day, people continue to work even into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s, at least those that can find work. I don't see many people opting to retire when they have bills to pay.

Stan Lee used to say something along the lines of: “I’m not working, I’m playing!” If the job feels like fun, then the primary argument makes more sense to me. Based on past experience, however, I can relate to the later as my senses definitely got dulled, add to that compounding age-related health problems which did not help.

I try to do some Sudoku & Mahjongg puzzles at least twice a day, in my Linux machine, just to keep my mind awake.

harrall• 3 months ago

I was under the impression that you delay cognitive decline (and keep brain plasticity) by learning new things.

So you need to be learning new skills, trying new sports, entering new circumstances continuously. If you’re good at something already, it’s not enough.

Employment is one of many ways of keeping things fresh because it’s easy but I see no reason why you can’t keep yourself busy too.

trashface• 3 months ago

Or people who have cognitive issues have trouble staying employed...

cathyreisenwitz• 3 months ago

I bet another reason women suffer less cognitive decline from early retirement than men is that women are less lonely and more integrated into their extended families and communities.

lenerdenator2• 3 months ago

More evidence that the US desperately needs to raise the retirement benefits age to 70 or 75.

Memory care is one of the most expensive types of eldercare.

da_chicken• 3 months ago

This still smells like the kind of paper that a think tank would fund to justify their billionaire-backed policy that social security should be abandoned and the retirement age moved to 75.

zoom6628• 3 months ago

Retirement is an artificial modern construct to create jobs. People are supposed to be active until they die. Hobbies are just a replacement activity. I have no intention of retiring (over 60 already). I work in tech and learning new skills and my income feeds and houses my family and pays for my running shoes.

As other commenters have noted folk in some places don't have anything but work. That is a global social issue that needs addressing first.

didip• 3 months ago

As someone who recently retired early, you really need to have a solid game plan on what you want to do with all the time you have. Spend a solid 3-6 months planning and mocking your post retirement days while still working.

The more detailed the plan the better. If you want to go to the gym, what will you do there and for how long and how many days a week?

If you want to have a tech side project, how many hours do you plan on spending on this project? And be reasonable. Don't trade one burnout over another.

If you are planning to learn something new, what are those? and don't just learn one thing. 8 hours plus is a crazy amount of time.

One of those plan should include making new friends post retirement, revolving around activities that are not work related.

It is far too easy to lose track of time without a brand new schedule to fill the void.

m463• 3 months ago

Go and read the book or audiobook "Younger Next Year" great book. Explains the biology of aging, how to delay/reverse it and how to retire well. Good background and good advice.

kleiba2• 3 months ago

The job I'm currently at definitely does the opposite.

danielovichdk• 3 months ago

I think better when I have been off work for 4 weeks and beyond. My mind is dancing into new and glorious places, not being caught or dumbed down by idiotic automative repetitions, inhumane and corporate politics so dumb, walled-off-elite and cargo-cult like that no one can ever convince me that humans in an office space has decreased declining cognitive abilities.

People in the workforce are dumber than people outside, no doubt.

tokkkie• 3 months ago

Most people don't need a 0 or 100 work-life balance. Maybe just 10% work and 90% life is enough.

jpfromlondon• 3 months ago

My own job is accelerating my cognitive decline and destroying my mental wellbeing.

snek_case3• 3 months ago

I can sympathize... I got to the point where I was sleeping only 5 hours a night, having digestive issues and tinnitus.

bcjdjsndon2• 3 months ago

Interestingly rich people who've never worked a day in their life dont have this problem... I wonder what the link could be

gowld2• 3 months ago

I didn't see that in the OP document. Is that mentioned in the document, or pure speculation on your part?

bcjdjsndon2• 3 months ago

Call it an educated guess.

rootusrootus3• 3 months ago

I have met people in that situation, and "well adjusted & normal" is often not the description I would use for them.

WalterBright8• 3 months ago

"Use it or lose it" applies to the brain as well as your muscles.

This was well known before this paper.

itrunsdoomguy• 3 months ago

Just retire and play Doom.

snek_case3• 3 months ago

Make it a personal goal to beat every game and expansion pack on nightmare.

pengaru• 3 months ago

A lot of comments in here are obviously describing Americans, as if that's representative of some global human reality, without acknowledging the elephant in the room is a cultural problem.

Americans in particular tend to have a highly entitled and confused "time is money" view governing their existence that enables them to do nothing except when paid by employers, which obviously results in doing absolutely nothing in retirement.

Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

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