Never Retire - How Old Do You Think You Are?

Different ways of viewing age can impact how you see work and retirement

I continue to receive Google Scholar alerts on working in retirement and topics related to retirement.

An interesting article came through today.

In this free newsletter post, I briefly summarize it and explain why it’s relevant.

We’re piecing together the Never Retire puzzle over time by considering components of it.

In a day or so, I will send out part four of our working in retirement series—The (hopefully) Fluid Nature of Working in Relative Old Age—to paid subscribers.

As is often the case, this paper (actually book chapter) has a fancy, if not slightly pretentious academic title:

Beyond Chronological Age: Alternative Age Constructs and their Implications at Work

Here’s a link to the full chapter.

Now the pertinent details and thoughts.

In this research out of Germany, the researchers contend chronological age isn’t a good metric to evaluate work and organizational outcomes, such as job attitudes and retirement decisions.

In addition, there is strong consensus that chronological age is often only a superficial indicator of aging as it does not capture the complex and multifaceted nature of the aging process (Baltes, 1987). Relying on chronological age alone thus fails “to explain how and why, or through what mechanism the aging of an individual affects a given outcome” (Schwall, 2012, p. 2).

The chapter goes on to detail three alternatives:

• subjective age

• essentialist beliefs about aging

• age group versus generation identity

Subjective age

The first alternative age construct that goes beyond chronological age is subjective age, that is the age people think of themselves as being. Although everyone grows older, this does not necessarily imply that one also feels older. Studies across a variety of countries and cohorts repeatedly show and have well established that the older people get, the younger they feel. The discrepancy between the age people feel and their chronological age has been examined as early as the 1950s.

According to the broad research, this idea of feeling younger has wide-ranging implications:

Research also suggests that for older adults feeling younger than one’s chronological age appears to be beneficial and has been associated with better health, well-being, cognitive functioning, and even a longer life (for a reviews see Kotter-Grühn et al., 2017). With regard to the workplace, studies suggest that employees’ subjective age can affect work motivation, attribution processes, job-related behavior, job performance, and stress at and off work (Akkermans et al., 2016; Barnes-Farrell et al., 2002; Kunze et al., 2015, Nagy et al., 2019). For example, Cleveland and colleagues (1997) showed that a relatively younger subjective age was linked to a higher self-rated promotability, lower retirement intentions, and higher transferability, as well as to higher manager-rated promotability and health, above and beyond the effect of chronological age.

I found this particularly interesting because one of the reasons why I believe in semi-retirement so much has to do with how “old” you feel rather than your actual age.

My working hypothesis is that by opting out of the 9-to-5 grind and the associated dogged pursuit of traditional retirement, you go a long way to preserving and extending your physical and mental well-being. By committing to something closer to a part-time schedule in your prime as well as in your traditional retirement years, you spread out your work effort across the lifespan rather than distribute it unevenly with excessive hours and super hard work during your prime leading to mere rest and relaxation post-retirement.

Essentialist beliefs about aging

This section goes pretty deep in the academic weeds and isn’t focused on what we discuss here, therefore I’ll leave it alone. You can explore it on your own if you choose to read the entire paper.

Age group versus generation identity

This excerpt pretty much explains this alternative way to consider age.

Research suggest that generational distinctions are often arbitrary (Rudolph et al., 2020) and only become ‘real’ for individuals who actually adopt a specific generation identity (Weiss &Lang, 2009).

Although research has documented that people categorize themselves and others based on age, emerging evidence suggests that people may perceive themselves and others in terms of their generational membership (Joshi et al., 2010; Mannheim, 1928/1952; Perry et al., 2017; Rudolph & Zacher, 2017; Weiss & Lang, 2012; Weiss & Perry, 2020; please see also Chapter 6). One consequence is that membership in specific age groups and generations represents important social age identities and provides a sense of self-definition (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). In contrast to age group identities that are transient in nature, generation represents a permanent social identity that is embedded in a specific social, cultural, and historical context. Thus, individuals remain members of the same generation throughout their whole life, while they become members of different age groups as they grow older.

I love this.

It helps further explain something I’ve touched on in my writing over the last year.

I’m part of Generation X, however I tend to feel as if I think more like a millennial when it comes to attitudes about money, work, and retirement. By the same token, I know and know of baby boomers and such who look, act, and think like they’re much younger.

Technological advances and our use of and attitudes towards them help drive the semi-retirement, working in retirement, and Never Retire movements.

Consider something I wrote about on Medium the other day:

We all have more options at our disposal than ever before. Options that old people have yet to even begin to understand…

You don’t have to be under 40 to execute on the myriad ways we can make money nowadays.

Even though using nowadays makes me sound old (I’m 46), I tend to view work more like younger people. I’m not alone in this way of thinking among my Generation X counterparts.

Bottom line — like Charlie points out, it’s more difficult to explain to your parents what you do for a living nowadays, particularly when you don’t have what they’re accustomed to or wanted for you — an apparently steady and stable 9-to-5 job and everything that traditionally goes along with it.

Just because large swaths of relatively young people don’t do it the way it has always been done doesn’t mean they’re not doing well. They’re just doing it differently.

Lots of “older” people like to throw shade (see how young I feel using this lingo) at the millennial generation, Generation Z, and even some of us in Gen X.

I’ll never understand it.

You don’t have to dress like them to adapt some of their ways of thinking and lifestyle preferences and choices, especially as they relate to money, work, and retirement. It’s this willingness to consider, if not embrace new and relatively fresh ways of doings things that can help us deal with personal financial issues we face now and going forward.

There’s a difference between thinking you’re 20 when you’re 60 and doing dumb shit as a result and feeling/thinking like you’re younger as you get older.

It’s a distinction central to these Never Retire conversations we’re having.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting my work as a freelance writer by subscribing to my stories on Medium and/or upgrading to the paid version of this newsletter.

As always, I appreciate it.

Rocco