Never Retire - An Interesting Research Paper On Working In Retirement

Attitude is everything

Attitude is everything.

A paper about to be published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior on working in retirement comes to this conclusion.

You need to pay for full access, however you can read the abstract for free here.

All Set in Stone? How Essentialist Beliefs About Aging Affect Older Workers’ Motivation To Continue Working Beyond Retirement Age

That’s the title of the paper.

What is an essentialist belief about aging?

Basically, the idea that we have no control over aging. It’s a throw your hands up in the air, pre-determined, genetic process.

I don’t believe this. And it’s one of the main reasons why I no longer freak out over the reality that I’ll Never Retire.

A main component of a Never Retire strategy involves working less now so you can work longer across the lifespan. Working less now will help preserve your physical and mental capacity and longevity. At least that’s the premise I operate from.

To be comfortable with this, you have to believe you have at least some control over the aging process. That living a vibrant, relatively healthy life full of fun and fulfilling activities will help keep you healthy and maybe even contribute to extending your life expectancy. This can also help facilitate income generation—through some form of work—into relative old age and your traditional retirement years.

Anything can happen (knock on wood), but with all of the risk inherent in life—and as life intersects with work and money—this is the one I’m most willing to take.

Anyway, in the aforementioned study, the authors found support for their hypothesis that “older workers (40-65 years) who more strongly endorse essentialist beliefs about aging will be less motivated to continue working beyond retirement age, because they have a more constrained occupational future time perspective.”

I also think it helps to have things—exciting things—to look forward to. To strive for.

I watched quite a few members of my family become bitter in retirement. Even more bitter than when they were working. They lost any zest for life they had, spending their days in structured routines, which most often included little more than grocery shopping and sitting on the couch to watch television.

My girlfriend and I intend to continue our semi-retired lives in Europe. Probably Italy or Spain within five years.

While we’re looking forward to this, we’re also enjoying the process. Not only doing what needs to be done to make this vision a reality, but making the most of our lives until the move actually happens.

Put another way, we’re not falling into the grass is always greener trap.

We want to move to Europe for two main reasons:

• It makes economic sense. As in, it’s way less expensive to live the lives we wanna live there than it does in the United States, particularly in a big city.

• We love the culture, specifically the public life. The social life.

That said, we’re not—pardon my French—shitting on California and America on the way out. Quite the opposite. We love it here and continue to experience all this state and country has to offer. As much as we can.

It comes back to attitude is everything.

And wherever you go, there you are.

You make choices on big things such as retirement and where to live not on the hope that these decisions will remove you from a boring and/or miserable state, but because they’ll help enhance a life you’re already happy with. Almost always, you need to take care of the latter first.

Looking forward to picking from a spread like this most mornings doesn’t hurt either.

From Florence, Italy.

Also, happy birthday to my girlfriend today, June 6th. Te amo!