Commenting on NYTimes Retirement Coverage
"There is no greater joy than seeing your thoughts reflected in the world around you."
After spending the last six months writing about my own retirement journey, I was thrilled to see an article in the New York Times called “What Happens to Your Brain When You Retire?” I am glad that this topic is getting attention, so I am pasting a gift link here so you can all bypass the New York Times paywall!
Of course, reading this article sparked some thoughts of my own, some in agreement and others in disagreement. I wanted to share some of my editorial commentary on points raised, as well as refer to some of the pieces I’ve done on these topics. I’d be interested in your thoughts, too!
Decline in verbal memory
The article reported that being retired is associated with the inability to remember words. The article cited a study based on European data that tried to control for “age, education and other confounding factors.” While I acknowledge that this study attempted to look at a population as a whole, I can say for myself that my own decline in verbal memory happened well before I retired.
I understand that the European study across its population cited by the New York Times article tried to mathematically isolate the impacts of many “confounding factors,” but I still personally question any conclusion of causation between retirement and word memory recall. I think there is likely something else much larger at play here and that this is a clear case where correlation does not imply causation.
For those interested in mitigating the impacts of decline in verbal memory, I started CocoaVia supplements while I was still working at age 46. At $300 for a year’s supply, this has been an expensive habit! (We now just have a bimonthly subscription!) Since then, I don’t think anyone who knows me would notice the word memory problem that Marsha and I started to observe in me over a decade ago!
The science ended up also validating my own anecdotal results with the cocoa supplementation. A study published in December, 2014 demonstrated that word-recall scores improved by 31% in patients taking high doses of cocoa flavonols.
Decline in Cognition
The article’s assertion that cognition declines with retirement is one that I would also be careful with. Again, there may very well be an association here when looking at the data mathematically. From my own personal experience, my dad never retired and “worked” pretty much until the day he was put in a memory care facility. As a country, we had to watch the decline of Joe Biden, and he was most certainly not retired.
Personally, I’ve found that retirement has brought the opportunity to have a more diverse set of experiences. If anything, the long hours and demanding nature of work can leave little time for personal life, hobbies, and relationships. I would like to challenge the notion that “working” is more cognitively challenging than retirement. Those who read my Substack about my emotional journey and the work I’m doing on myself can likely see the mental effort going into all of this!
Depressive Symptoms
The article pointed to retirees having more “depressive symptoms.” I believe that the depressive systems aren’t associated with retirement itself but whether there was a choice to retire. I believe that choosing to enter retirement can be empowering and energizing. However, I do believe that feeling “forced” to retire, either because of health, disabilities, or just ageism can lead to depressive symptoms. In fairness, the article did point to the lack of choice as contributing to retirement, too.
Researchers also suggest that there may be a steeper decline with those in higher ranking jobs because they may associate their identities more closely with their jobs. I certainly had to go through this journey and wrote in a previous post about how I even had to adjust my response to even simple questions like “what do you do for a living?”
At the same time, I also believe that in my personal experience, having a higher ranking job gave me more opportunities to be exposed to different types of coaching tools, including personality tests and executive coaching to help me understand myself better. I believe that much of this exposure to these kinds of tools helped transition me into my retirement journey, as well as to increase my openness to therapy.
Less decline for those retiring earlier
The article reported that people who retired earlier experienced less decline in cognition and mood. It cited a hypothesis that people who retired earlier may not have had as mentally demanding jobs, resulting in a more gradual decline in mental activity once they retired.
As mentioned above, I continue to challenge the notion that retirement is less mentally demanding than work from a cognition perspective.
With respect to a decline in mood, I’m not sure I buy the narrative offered by the article either. In my case, I believe retiring earlier and feeling that I had agency to do so simply allowed me to enjoy retirement more. It’s a lot easier to travel, enjoy physical activities, and just do more overall when retiring younger!
Commit to staying social
I agreed fully with the article’s suggestion to “Commit to staying social.” The key recommendation was to have routine in-person or virtual gatherings.
I think urban living makes for easier opportunities to convene socially. We do regular happy hours with friends on Monday nights at a local bar, and I’m in a group that does weekly beer tastings at local breweries and taprooms. To describe the latter, I wrote a Medium piece “Retirement, Routines, and Urban Living.” (If you are not a paid Medium subscriber, feel free to message me if you want the private “friend” link on Medium to read it.)
The article also suggested that men may decline faster because they tend to spend less time than women with family and friends. I agree with this assertion, and the male loneliness problem doesn’t just apply to retirement. I’ve written before about the friendship recession and would recommend routine gatherings for both men and women alike!
Finding a new sense of purpose
I totally understand this point in the article describing how people found a sense of purpose from their careers and that there’s often benefit to finding something else (like volunteer work) to take its place. I don’t think I’ve yet found purpose through volunteering, but I do believe it helped with social connections.
I’ve previously described the ABC’s of Meaning (agency, belonging, and cause.) While I believe I’ve found agency and belonging, I’m less sure of my cause (or purpose) right now! The good news is that two out of three ain’t bad! 😜
Introducing new routines before retiring
The article also recommended developing a plan for retirement and introducing new routines in advance to avoid a harsh “pivot” from one kind of daily life to another. Truthfully, I didn’t do this, and I’m not sure if a plan would have helped.
Still, I was probably more ready for retired life than most. I’ve written before about how I had two periods prior to retirement to consider life without work — once at age 37 during a midlife transition when I took 7 months off from work and once during a 9-week sabbatical while “back in the saddle” in Silicon Valley about 7 years later. These periods of taking a break and experiencing life without work likely prepared me for middle adulthood and taking an early retirement!
In terms of daily work routines, I also did a lot (actually, too much) consulting before fully retiring. In that sense, I already got used to life managing my own time without simply showing up at the same workplace every day as a matter of routine.
From a lifestyle perspective, my wife, Marsha and I got ourselves accustomed to our urban life by moving to downtown Seattle for my last full-time job before retiring here to Portland’s Pearl District. After observing our own moms aging in-place in suburbia, we considered the value of an urban lifestyle as we aged.
We’ve also moved quite a bit since we’ve been together, so we were accustomed to being in situations of having to make new friends. As such, making new friends in retirement was somewhat familiar territory.
So, even without a formal plan, easing into an early retirement hasn’t felt that difficult for us!
Practice creativity like writing
The article referred to research suggesting practicing creativity and suggested tasks like writing for a few minutes every day. I’m still not quite sure where I’m taking this Substack, but I’ve tried writing on different topics on a regular basis.
(As a side note, the article mentioned that listening to the radio or watching TV, doesn’t provide the same stimuli, as we need to have a “back and forth of a conversation.” My last Substack post on my reflections on the Apple TV+ series Severance got a record low number of views and no comments. Any thoughts?)
Overall, I found the New York Times article to hit a lot of the points that are top of mind and that I write about here. I was psyched that they covered the topics, even though I don’t quite agree with all of them! Are there any points they brought up that struck you differently?
Thank you again for reading this Substack and joining me on this journey!