At 72, I Can Bring a Little Credibility

By Klaus Döring

From my own experience, here are three things to avoid after 70.

1. Most other 70-year-olds

That sounds cruel — and it may blow a big hole in my circle of friends, many of whom are 70-plus and whom I love and cherish. I suspect I may have some explaining and repair work to do. But here’s my rationale.

Many, if not most, 70-year-olds are innocently in the “decay mode,” attitudinally and biologically, with resignation to the myths of automatic senescence and accelerating physical decline. Dinner conversations rarely progress beyond the latest knee replacement or shoulder surgery, concerns about memory lapses, or a friend with this or that malady.

I’ve started calling them “organ recitals.”

“Getting old isn’t for sissies” and “aging is a bitch” are common clichés.

Rarely does the conversation swing to how to continue to honor one’s birthright of good health and counter the accelerating decline with good practices that should have been a part of life all along.

There is little appreciation for “it’s never too late to start, but always too early to quit.”

As an outspoken advocate for living to 100 or beyond (I’ve set my target at 112 1/2), I’ve learned not to bring it up at gatherings of my 70-something friends, as I’ve endured enough derision to know not to put my hand on that hot stove again. The repulsion is deep and wide.

Famed motivational speaker Jim Rohn said, “You rise to the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Selfishly, as time squeezes in, I ask myself how I can grow through this relationship and whether this person is open to considering that life doesn’t need to be one of accelerating decline.

I love hanging with a kick-ass 70-year-old who is relaunching and not landing. But there’s a lot of chaff and not a lot of that type of wheat in our demographic.

Edith Wharton once said, “In spite of illness, in spite of even the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

Maybe it’s just my circle, but I don’t find many who peer into elderhood with excitement or have that “unafraid of change, insatiable curiosity, big thinking” attitude.

I’m more inclined to find it among the younger generations and suggest that, as 70-year-olds, we are better served by increasing our efforts to engage with those younger than us with two thoughts in mind: (1) to grow and learn from their creativity and energy and (2) to help guide them with our acquired wisdom and experience.

If you would like a big dose of the logic behind this and the results of this type of effort, check out Chip Conley and his book Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder.

2. The retirement trap

OK, here again, I’m trespassing and entering sacred ground. But the evidence supports this heretical suggestion.

The traditional leisure-based, “vocation to vacation” retirement that has been pounded into our heads for five to six decades is a Trojan horse that has led several generations into a lifestyle counter to our biological nature and to a pattern of “living short and dying long” in the Western cultures where it exists.

Retirement doesn’t exist in nature, nor did it exist anywhere on the planet 150 years ago. It’s a Euro-American concept that doesn’t exist in many countries, some of which can claim the longest-living citizens.

It is a concept constructed for political purposes and has no relevance in today’s world.

Retirement puts us on a path to accelerated biological decline because it implies that “winding down” is preferable to staying in the growth mode. We are given only two choices with our bodies and brains: grow or decay.

Retirement, which is derived from the French verb retirer, meaning to retreat or go backward, can put us on the decay path — and does for most.

What are the fruits of traditional, leisure-based retirement? Here are a few that are not life-enhancing:

• Increased isolation — a major killer.
• Sedentary living — despite best intentions, most retirees fail to maintain adequate exercise to sustain good health.
• Self-indulgence — we are wired to serve. Retirement says you’ve paid that price and earned the right to be a self-indulgent consumer and to abandon being a selfless producer.
• Removal of work from lifestyle — work is a key factor in longevity, but retirement takes us in the other direction.

Fortunately, we are waking up to the fallacy and irrelevance of traditional retirement as we find ourselves in the unfamiliar territory of having a 20- to 40-year longevity bonus.

Un-retirement and semi-retirement now represent a rapidly developing trend.

3. Drifting

Because, as boomers and pre-boomers, we’ve been indoctrinated to covet the leap from labor to leisure, most of us move into that “third age” space between end-of-career and true old age without a roadmap or plan for what that now-extended period is going to look like.

We are now in new territory with 20 to 40 more years ahead and limited precedents to guide us.

The result, for many, is entering an extended period of life adrift, feeling their way through at the expense of the reservoir of energy and drive that exists in the early stages of this phase.

For example, we know that two out of three retirements commence with no semblance of a non-financial plan that addresses the mental, physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual sides of life in this new territory.

Retirement can be like an iceberg, drifting with little of the realities of retired life visible on the surface.

It can become a purposeless, unfocused time of life that puts us on the path to accelerated deterioration.

Dan Sullivan, renowned business and entrepreneur coach and founder of Strategic Coach, says:

People die early for three reasons:

No money

No friends

No purpose

A successful, healthy third age requires a plan, a sense of purpose, and direction.

Without it, we waste the talents, skills, experience, and energy that still reside in us as 70-year-olds.

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Email: doringklaus@gmail.com or follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn or visit www.germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com.