E37: 7 Domains of Retiring

The concept of stages of life is incorporated in many faiths and cultural traditions, and we don't expect a 70-year-old to do what a 20-year-old can do. Of course, it goes the other way around. We don't expect a 20-year-old to be wise and experienced.

So, today, we're going to take a little dive into the "7 Domains of Retiring." What's this all about, and what's it for? And do we want to?

Much of the retiring traditions reflect the realities of the male work experience. We don't really ever retire as mothers. We just move over in some major responsibilities and take on being a grandmother.

So our thoughts about retiring often, traditionally, were about men because women continued to be homemakers and mothers and grandmothers until they fell off the perch, as it were.

But as more women enter the workplace, they are also thinking about retiring. So let's talk about retiring.

And in the interest of full disclosure, I'm a retired clinician, but most of our "7 Domains" listeners know that.

So let's jump right into the physical domain, because that's the platform from which retiring decisions are often made. We are at our best physically in our 20s. Our brains are the fastest in our 20s. The muscles are the strongest in our 20s. Our kidneys, liver, bone marrow are less efficient as we age. And it's really the rare elite athlete that competes at the top of their game after their 30s.

The combination of fast reflexes, and strong lungs and heart, and strong muscles, and experience lead some to perform well into their 30s, but then injuries and decline in function lead them to retire.

And it's very rare for a gymnast to continue to really perform and compete in their late 20s because of injuries largely, even though they have enormous experience.

So as we age, we get stiffer in our joints and are more likely to have injuries and slower to recover, and our brains get stiffer. We're able to do cognitive things we used to do, but less able to take on new cognitive tasks, like a new computer or a new electronic health record. I think that those become increasingly difficult to master quickly as we get into our later years, our 60s and 70s.

Now, there are some examples of mandatory retirement out there. Pilots have mandatory retirement age of about 65, and that's up from 60, what it used to be. And air traffic controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56 with exceptions to go all the way to 61. And foreign service employees at the Department of State usually have to retire at 65. But that's where I think the experience would be really great to have into their 70s.

Law enforcement officers, national park rangers, and firefighters often have mandatory retirement of age about 57. And in many states, judges cannot run for office or continue their job after the age of 70. And in Oregon, it's 75.

Now, there are some other examples. Long-distance running, to run an ultra-marathon takes fitness, but it also takes a point of view to keep going, to put your brain in another place. So some of the best ultra-marathon runners who are often women are into their late 40s. So there are some things we do better as we get older.

How do wisdom and experience count in terms of the physical domain? There are some jobs where people never retire. I think of farmers around the world. They rarely have a retirement plan, except their children. They just keep working until they can't work anymore. And they may love what they do, but they don't see any other options. So the physical domain has a big say in when people decide to retire from a particular job.

But let's move into the emotional and social domains. I'm going to bring in my favorite millennial, Chloé, who's also our producer here at the "7 Domains," and we're going to talk about the emotional and social domains of retiring through the lenses of a boomer and a millennial.

 

Dr. Jones: Welcome, Chloé.

Chloé: Why, thank you.

Dr. Jones: I know you're here because you're managing my sound. So Chloé has the fast brain to do the electronic parts of our podcasts and the editing part, and I don't think I'd be very good at that. So we're grateful for a fast young brain.

Let's talk about the emotional domain. As you're thinking about your own retirement someday, you're a very young person. You're moving toward the peak of your capacities here. Are you thinking about retirement?

Chloé: That's scary. The peak of capacity.

Dr. Jones: I know. Your peak capacity. Are you thinking about retiring?

Chloé: So I don't think about retiring so much as what retirement looks like. So I don't sit here and go, "Oh my gosh, I wish I was retiring tomorrow." But I do think, often actually, about the time I do have left working and what my life would look like once I do reach the retirement age.

Dr. Jones: So you're really thinking about it in a really structured and intellectual way. You're not thinking emotionally.

Chloé: I think more financially.

Dr. Jones: Financially, okay. That's important.

Chloé: Dreams cost money. Hobbies cost money. And so I think about kind of what I want to do when I reach retirement age, and will I have the finances to help me accomplish what I want to accomplish when I get there.

Dr. Jones: Right. Well, when I was in my 40s, I hadn't ever thought about retiring. There were some days when I was working, we were short, and I was working 100 hours a week, and I would walk in from the parking lot thinking, "This is my last day. I can't do this one more day."

Chloé: At 40?

Dr. Jones: At 45, but then everything worked out.

It turns out a number of my colleagues died before they turned 65. And my husband and I planned the Alive at 55 plan, meaning we would save enough money that at 55, we could do what we wanted to. So we had a little life, and we saved a lot, and at 55, we were still having a great time. So we didn't retire then.

But I know what it's like to look around and say, "I really have some things I'd like to retire to. There are some things that I'd always hoped to learn about. And what happens if I don't get a chance to do those?"

Many of us who have jobs that are all-engaging . . . And boomers are notorious for being all in on their jobs. And we put so many things off, but sometimes while we're racing down the razor blade of life, we get cut off from the things that we were hoping to do.

Chloé: When we think about retirement, I have two stories. My parents retired and their thought process and the reason why they wanted to retire differs very much from mine. I don't know so much that it's generational, but I think it's just kind of the environment that I was brought up in versus the environment and the conditions that they were brought up in.

They're immigrants. They came from Vietnam, and we come from a middle-class family, but they made sure that I had everything I needed, I had the education I wanted, I had the career that I wanted, and they very much encouraged me to pick my path and kind of go down the road that's best for me.

And so I think that, in a way, really helps me in, I guess, "thinking about retirement" because I don't really resent my job, right? I think a lot of times when people think about retirement, it ties a lot back to your career. You're retiring essentially from your career, from the job that you've been doing for many decades.

A lot of people, unfortunately, don't like their job. Maybe it's not the career choice that they wanted. Maybe it's not even a career. Maybe it's just a job to put food on the table.

For me, I'm very lucky in the fact that I don't view my job that way. I actually view it as a career that I really like and I really enjoy. And so when I think about retirement, I don't think about ending a part of my life that was so much job- and career-focused. It's more about working up until that point and what does it look like after?

You talked about retiring too, right? So once I retire from this phase of my life, then what do I have to look forward to next? And a lot of people, unfortunately, don't really have that vision. It's just that they kind of live day for day. And when retirement age comes, they feel lucky enough to just not be working anymore.

Dr. Jones: Exactly.

Chloé: When you think about retirement, it's not so much the end result, but I think it has a lot to do with how you got to retirement.

Dr. Jones: I think that's exactly right. And in the social domain, there are often social strata or financial burdens that keep people working well beyond the time that they even physically are comfortable doing it.

Certainly, some people have jobs . . . and I think of the very difficult jobs in meat packing or in farming, although many farmers work for themselves. But around the world, people might be almost indentured servants to the people that whose land they're using. And they work to help their children. They feel like they have to work to keep their food on the table. And once their kids are launched, then sometimes they have ability to step back a little.

But the majority of people on this planet don't have a retirement plan, except maybe their children are their retirement plan. And with families getting smaller, there's nobody to take care of them. So they just have to keep working.

Chloé: And that's unfortunate, because I think we are fortunate enough to live in a country that even still, like you said, a lot of Americans don't have retirement plan and they just work to survive.

Dr. Jones: That's right.

Chloé: They work to live essentially. And that's something that I feel like a lot of people that do retire might take for granted the decades of leading up to retirement, right?

That also includes my parents who sacrificed what they had to sacrifice so that I had a good life. And so there's so much that goes into it.

I think a lot of people, when they think about retirement, it's just the end, I feel like. They go, "Oh, it's the end of an era."

Dr. Jones: Well, it's the end of an era, but not the end of your life. There are so many things that . . .

Chloé: No, hopefully not. But like you mentioned in the physical domain, there's a certain age that people retire. And at what point do you say, "Is that age too young to retire? Is that age too old?" Kind of the debate now is that a lot of people are going to still be working and they're going to die before they even reach retirement.

Dr. Jones: Well, we hope that's not the case. But certainly, the retirement age . . . Social Security used to kick in at 65, and now from my age group, it kicks in at 67. And for your age group, it might be . . . It's going higher and higher.

And that's because, in general, we are much fitter. The average life expectancy is going up compared to when Social Security was invented in the 1930s. They looked at how long people were expected to live, and people are living longer and they're living more healthy. So they're actually more likely to be able to work.

But emotionally, you've got the 65 thing in your brain, or younger maybe for you. And 65, people were saying, "I just want my health. I want to stay strong and be healthy so I can enjoy myself and my retirement." I've heard that a thousand times. So people are planning to retire to, not retire from.

Chloé: Kirtly, a fun fact.

Dr. Jones: Yeah?

Chloé: So as I mentioned many times, I'm from Vietnam, and a lot of my family is back there. One of my aunts, she's a social worker and she retired at 50. I didn't know that.

Dr. Jones: No.

Chloé: And so I would always go visit her, but she just never worked. I just assumed that she just stopped working. And so I asked her. I'm like, "So did you just quit, or what's going on?" And she told me, "Well, I'm retired." I think she was like 52 when I asked her. So, yeah, they retire when they're 50.

Dr. Jones: But in Asia, often, they have a very large population of young people. And so you need to push people out of the way so young people can rise, and they may not have the social safety nets. So the 50-year-old may be taking care of her 70-year-old parents.

So there are jobs, but particularly for women, number one, you need to move out of the way. So in a population base that's very young, the young people need those jobs, and then you need to take care of the elderlies like me. So who's going to take care of me?

Chloé: Kirtly, I remember you saying that some sort of test told you that you were going to live longer than expected.

Dr. Jones: Yes. I went to the Northwestern Mutual's insurance company.

Chloé: I remember you telling me, and you're like, "Uh-oh. I'm going to live longer."

Dr. Jones: They said I was going to live to 97, so you have to plan. Well, that nicely fits us into the financial domain. So I'm going to step away from the emotional and the social domain and my wonderful producer, Chloé, who is still going to be here, thank God.

Chloé, thanks for joining us, and your thoughts about your own family's experience and your thoughts about retiring. Two things. So thank you for helping us out on that.

Chloé: You're welcome, Kirtly.

 

Retirement plans all over the world in developing countries, they don't have retirement plans. And our children traditionally have been our retirement plans. We quit doing what we were doing, whether it was in the fields, or whether it was hunting, or whether it was working somewhere. We slowed down in the work of childcare and farming or fishing, and our kids took over.

But with smaller families everywhere, this becomes more difficult. Outside of the subsistence world and the business world, long-term employees are often offered a retirement plan, and, in fact, are incentivized to get off the boat, meaning retire now.

I want to just talk about Andrew Carnegie, because he's personally involved in my retirement plan. And he was a famous industrialist, born in Scotland, dirt poor, came to the United States, and started a steel industry. He said, "No man becomes rich unless he enriches others."

He retired at about 65, sold his steel company, and he was at the time the wealthiest man in the world. But he spent the rest of his life giving away his money, and many of the most beautiful buildings in small towns around the country were built with money from the Carnegie Foundation. They're called Carnegie Libraries, and they are gorgeous buildings.

And he also realized that the teachers in New York had no retirement plan. He was on the board of trustees at Cornell University, and he realized that teachers earned less than his clerks that worked for him and had no retirement benefits. So he started TIAA, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association. TIAA insures almost all of the university professors in the country. So I can retire because Andrew Carnegie retired at 65 and gave over the rest of his life to doing things that he's now remembered for.

It was the second half of his life that he became most famous for, his Carnegie Libraries, his endowments, and the amazing things he did that echo into my life.

So teachers can afford to retire, and I can afford to retire, but many people don't have a retirement plan through their work or they haven't been saving and Social Security isn't enough.

And women who have been mothers maybe didn't work outside the workplace. Luckily, Social Security allows mothers and wives to participate to get money from their husband's retirement plan if they get divorced.

So having something to live on becomes critical if you're going to leave the workforce at 65.

Well, as we're thinking about not only the financial domain and how much it might cost to retire, we also have to think about the environmental domain. The image we have of the retiree is somebody from Minnesota or from Detroit who retires from the car industry and packs up and moves to Florida. Many people, if they have the resources, pack up and relocate. They sell a big home, they get a motor home, and they go park it in a park somewhere warm and toasty and hang out with other retirees.

So changing environment is a part of what many people do when they retire. They don't just change jobs, they don't just change their income, but they relocate someplace. They move to warmer climates and they get a rocking chair.

I have to divert here a little bit. It turns out that rocking chairs are not just for babies, but are good for your back, an aging back. They actually burn calories. So they had people sit in front of a TV in a nursing home and they had some in rocking chairs and some in regular chairs. And those that sat in the rocking chairs and rocked while they were watching TV were calmer, they were less upset, their back felt better, and they did better on the get-up-and-go test, meaning "Can you get out of a chair and walk 10 feet?"

So the rocking chair has got a great place in everybody's retirement. Go get one, get two, or maybe get three so you can sit side by side with your buddies and talk and rock.

Let's talk a little bit about the intellectual domain when we're thinking about what is retiring or retirement. And with us in the virtual studio is Dr. Peggy Battin. Dr. Battin is a professor in philosophy at the University of Utah, and she's a university professor, which is just about the biggest honor our university gives to our professors. She's with us to talk about some of the ethical issues about when you should retire or you shouldn't, or what about universities.

 

Dr. Jones: So thanks for joining us in the Scope studio, Peggy.

Dr. Battin: Well, I'm very happy to be here, Dr. Jones, Kirtly, my long-term colleague. And I should say first that I think I'm probably the worst person you could choose to interview because other people have figured out how to retire. I've not done it yet. In fact, I'm 16 years beyond normal retirement age.

Dr. Jones: But that makes you perfect to talk to about it, because you've been thinking about this. Well, how would you define retirement?

Dr. Battin: So there are a number of different definitions. Most of them have to do with quitting work and then depending on savings or other forms of support for one's livelihood.

If you go way back to the early roots, I think you would probably conjecture that it comes from the word "retirer," meaning pull back or withdraw. It's often used in military uses. You ask your troops to retire from a situation.

But I think we might be a little bit at a point where retirement borderlines are not so clear anymore. Especially true for people who are self-employed. When do you actually retire? Is that when you quit doing anything, or when you quit doing most of what you were doing?

And in a world in which it's much easier to work from home, some of the reasons for retirement, like the difficulties of transporting to an office or a workplace of some sort, might be less telling.

One other thing that often doesn't get discussed very much is a person's capacity to be retired and still flourish. Retirement is quite difficult for some people. They report that they feel useless, unwanted, unadmired, unmoored in a way.

And other people flourish in retirement. They tend to be self-motivated. They tend to be more pro-social, less isolated. They may work harder at health maintenance, or they're better at actualizing their own values instead of shrinking back into, I guess you might say, obscurity or isolation.

So I think this other feature of when is retirement appropriate, what should we expect, is really also about what this person can or cannot do.

Dr. Jones: As a bioethicist with an interest in medical ethics, are there some occupations that should have a mandatory retirement age? I think airline pilots, and I know European university policies have retirements in the 65-to-67 age for professors. I think about surgeons. There are old surgeons and there are bold surgeons, but there are no old, bold surgeons. That's a little ditty from my work.

So what do you think about that from a medical ethicist point of view? Are there some situations where we should just tell people, "You've got to retire at this age"?

Dr. Battin: So we want to think about what the function of mandated age-related retirement policies are. And one virtue of them, if you can call it a virtue, is that it allows people to plan ahead and to have clear expectations about how long they will work in this kind of occupation, at what point they would be expected to, not because of anything about themselves, but because that's the standard policy.

Now, the other way of looking at mandates is that they're somehow not age-related and don't set a specified date, as some European universities, you're correct in saying, do, but they're tied to function.

So if we think about pilots, or surgeons, or ballet dancers, how still able is a person to perform the central functions of this occupation? That means we have to have some kinds of tests. At what point ballet dancers get too old to perform, I assume, is something discussed among dancers.

Dr. Jones: We've talked a little bit about the fact that actually air traffic controllers are expected to retire in their late 50s. So if we're thinking about something which may be a sedentary job, but requires really fast reflexes, thought processes . . . How do we test them in surgeons? I suppose we could set up a virtual studio and have them have to . . . the way we do with air airline pilots. They put them in the trainer, they put them in the simulator, and then they have the plane try to fall out of the sky and see how quickly you respond.

But would you have to do this on an annual basis or would you have to do it every six months knowing that functional decline can be accelerated in some people and not in others? So I think that's a burden, probably, for an institution. Do you have to wait until people start getting sick, until there are errors made, and then step in?

Dr. Battin: And that involves social pressures even if they're not very overt, as well as personal decisions. So I assume that it's not exactly entirely up to you when to retire, but if there's an appearance of slippage, you'll be let know subtly or otherwise in reviews.

Now, there could be relevant data. So, of course, the medical field keeps track of mistakes. Question we'd want to ask is, "Are mistakes more frequently made by older surgeons or by younger ones, or maybe even by bored middle-aged ones?"

Dr. Jones: Those are great questions.

Dr. Battin: And that would go for any other occupation that involves good judgment and fast. There are sort of legendary stories of athletes who are much older than are normally expected to be at highest performance, but somehow keep going.

Dr. Jones: So are there some professions for which age and time actually is an enhancement of function? In your field, I think of philosophy, I'm sure Socrates was probably . . . How old was he when he died? Do you know that?

Dr. Battin: I don't know. We could look it up quickly, but . . .

Dr. Jones: No, let's not.

Dr. Battin: He does say in one of the dialogues that, of course, are authored by Plato, but it describes Socrates walking down from Athens to the port in Piraeus. And he talks with his interlocutor, the companion who's with him, about what a relief it is to be not subject to the pressures of sexual appetite. What a relief it is. So we know that he's at least somewhat older. There are physical changes, maybe emotional changes, that are relevant.

Dr. Jones: Well, I'm just going to say he looks old in all the sculptures and carvings of him being surrounded by his students. He looks kind of ancient to me, so I'm just going to say, without any data, that I think that philosophy might be a field in which age, because of its enhancement of judgment and experience, might be a field to keep plugging along in. What do you think about that?

Dr. Battin: They certainly do.

Dr. Jones: There you go. Well, Dr. Battin, I want to thank you for joining us and helping us think really about what age is versus what is function. The concept of retiring to or retiring from is really important as we make our personal decisions. And then you've helped me think a lot and helped us think about what are the roles of retirement in certain fields. Thanks for joining us, Peggy.

Dr. Battin: It's a real pleasure to be here, and I get to think about it too.

 

Well, in the spiritual domain, retirement has been a little bit redefined. It's no longer really an automatic shutoff time when people have to leave. It's often thought of as a voluntary withdrawal from work at an age, if you don't require to be leaving at a certain age, that best suits an individual's abilities.

But in ancient traditions, and I'm going to pick, for example, the Hindu tradition, there is a stage of life called Vanaprastha. I apologize to all those people who might be listening who know how to say that correctly. Vanaprastha is the third stage of life. You're considered in this faith to live on the average of 100 years. Now, this was written thousands of years ago, 3,000 years ago, so I don't know who was living 100 years back then, but you don't really have a life until you're 20.

But the first stage of life is when you're in your early 20s, and that's when you're a student or you're learning your craft. And then the second stage of life is when you're building a home and children and becoming a master of your craft. And the third stage of life, which is about 60, is the Vanaprastha, which means literally retiring to the forest.

This is the third stage of life, and it represents the stage where you actually give over your household responsibilities to the next generation. You take on an advisory role, you think about your spiritual life, and gradually withdraw from the humdrum of the daily world of making money or doing what you used to be doing. You turn that over to the younger generation, and you actually have time to listen to your own heartbeat. So Vanaprastha actually means retiring to the forest.

And I'm not saying that people have to retire to the forest to listen to your own heartbeat, but it's a time frame for introspection. You continue to give back through your wisdom and guidance to the younger generation. But this 3,000-year-old tradition has a very specially named time for the 60- to 80-year-olds when they do retire some, retire to the forest.

Now, they have this fourth stage, which is when you're 80 to 100, when you're supposed to give away everything and take off most of your clothes, except for a little bit of rags. And you're supposed to stand with your bowl and beg for your goods. But I don't want to even talk about that. That's the 80 to 100s, and that's a whole other world right now.

So in the concept of the spiritual domain, this is often a time when many people have a chance to explore spiritual life in more meaning and with more depth. And it's a time when they actually give up a lot of the angers and the fears. Many people find that being 60 to 80 is a time for letting go and being more thoughtful and less judgmental. And there's a 3,000-year-old tradition that informs us that this is the time for us to do that.

So on the retirement note, the "7 Domains of Women's Health" podcast is going to reframe, but not retire. For the past several years, we've taken a topic and explored all seven domains in one 30-minute podcast. That was enormous fun for me, and hopefully good listening for you.

My favorites? "7 Domains of Crying," "7 Domains of Chocolate," and "7 Domains of Becoming a Woman." Check those out if you haven't already.

But moving forward, we'll just divide up the seven domains, physical, emotional, social, intellectual, financial, environmental, and spiritual, of an issue into separate, shorter podcasts grouped together under one issue.

Take our upcoming one on the "7 Domains of Caffeine." Let me drink a little coffee here to clear my throat and get revved up. Or the "7 Domains of Stuff," the stuff we collect or that our kids collect. And we're going to be talking about some other great topics. We'll talk about it bit by bit and we can get a deeper dive on some topics.

And you can choose. Maybe you just balanced your checkbook and you're in a financial mood, and that's the domain you want to focus on for the topic. Maybe you are really busy and you're waiting, and you only have 10 minutes while you're picking up your kid and you want to listen to the physical domain. You can choose.

So it's about choosing. There may be one domain for the topic that's just right for you, and you could go back and catch the other ones later. Or if you're on a long walk, you can batch all the domains together. However it works best for you. We hope you like it. I know I will.

So thanks everybody for staying with us on the "7 Domains of Retiring," and I'm going to end with the "7 Domains of Retiring" haiku.

 

We are now retired
We hear our own hearts beating
Do we serve the world?

 

Thanks for listening to us at the "7 Domains of Women's Health," wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you're feeling strong in all of your seven domains.