Not all older adults need to be in paid roles in later life, but everyone needs to be productively and purposefully engaged. Everyone needs purpose and relevance.
An excellent starting point on this topic is a short paper, A Prescription for Longevity in the 21st Century Dr. Phil Pizzo. He is an authority in the field and started the Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI) at Stanford University after a very distinguished career. He is the former Dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, and now in his late 70s, he is studying to become a rabbi, demonstrating vividly to all of us that learning has no age limits. In this paper, Dr. Pizzo postulates that medical care and genetic predisposition constitute approximately 30 percent of the risk for early death. The remaining 70 percent is within our control and is determined by social circumstances, environmental exposure, behavior, and lifestyle.
His ‘Prescription for Longevity in the 21st Century‘ revolves around renewing purpose, building and sustaining social engagement, and embracing a positive lifestyle. The positive lifestyle choices include nutrition, exercise, and sleep.
Purpose and Relevance
Ageing well extends beyond physical and mental health and includes living with a sense of dignity, purpose, and relevance.
In the article, Paint Your Retirement Canvas, Life Design Coach Abhi Patwardhan states that many new retirees go through phases of happiness and unhappiness, boredom and dissatisfaction. While many spend years making financial plans for retirement, the non-financial aspects get ignored. Having a sense of purpose, caring for your emotional and physical health, and having a community to support you are what will give you years of joy and fulfillment in later life.
The purpose is the most important and yet hardest to define. A highly recommended book on this topic is ‘The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life‘ by Stanford Professor William Damon. He says that purpose is often conflated with words like meaning and passion but purpose is something different. It is broader than a goal and is the guiding motivation that gives your life a sense of direction. It is what makes you want to wake up in the morning. According to Damon, a life purpose has three components:
- It’s a long-term calling, act, or way of life that interests you,
- It’s something you have some competence in, and
- It makes a marginal difference in the world.
It’s also common to have multiple purposes in life: Your family, your community, and the satisfaction you get from your job are all common sources.
Productive and Purposeful Engagement
Four key areas that contribute to the length and quality of life are:
- supportive relationships,
- health and wellness (exercise, nutrition, and sleep),
- financial stability and financial security, and
- productive and purposeful engagement.
Productive and purposeful longevity promotes the view that older adults can be active and purposeful contributors to their work, family, and community and engage in productive behaviors. These could include paid and unpaid volunteer work, continuing education, lifelong learning, special interests, hobbies, or housework. Most of these activities have a beneficial impact on their physical and mental health. Studies show that productive and purposeful engagement:
- has positive benefits on physical and mental health and increases longevity,
- provides for additional financial security; creates continued opportunities for social engagement and participation in society,
- reduces experiencing social isolation and loneliness, and contributes positively to life expectancy and quality of life, and
- contributes to the parts of life that increase longevity, such as supportive relationships, health and wellness, financial stability, and productive engagement.
Phased Retirement and Redesigning Jobs for Older Adults
The most challenging life stage transition for people who have worked throughout their adult lives is moving from full-time work until the retirement date to not knowing what to do the next day.
A phased retirement approach enables older adults to transition gradually from full-time roles until their sixties to full retirement in the late seventies. With age, their expectations around employability and the type of jobs also change. The phased transition via part-time or flexible jobs that allow them to work 2-3 hours a day for a few days each week is a good solution. This enables them to make some money (financial health benefit) while ensuring they get some exercise as they venture out (physical health benefit), meet other people that helps reduce loneliness (mental health benefit), and keep their brains stimulated (cognitive health benefit).
The responsibility for creating such flexible jobs extends beyond corporations to governmental bodies to formulate appropriate policies. For example, 7-11 in Taiwan employs older adults for the 7-10 am morning shift. This doesn’t strain their operational procedures, especially when the shifts are during lean periods with less business traffic, and most younger workers don’t want to start that early. It is a win-win for everyone. It would be great if other companies with extended operating hours – such as IKEA, NTUC, CostCo, and others – created similar flexible opportunities for older adults. See details of this and other examples under ‘Taiwan and South Korea’ under Useful References.
Another good example of productive engagement is Experience Corps (EC) in the United States. It is a community-based volunteer program that engages people over 50 as tutors for young students to help them become better readers by the end of third grade. The program ensures volunteer success through extensive training, peer networks, and ongoing evaluation. It employs a structured, evidence-based model that improves the overall reading ability of students by building their fluency, accuracy, and comprehension skills.
The program has proven to be a “triple win,” helping students succeed, older adults thrive, and communities grow stronger. Results show that the older EC volunteers experience fewer depressive symptoms, have better cognitive function, and have fewer declines in health. This evidence supports the social model of health promotion in that it suggests that it is not just the activity (e.g., volunteering) but the nature of the activity —social, cognitive, and/or physical engagement—that leads to positive health outcomes.
Benefits of productive longevity for older adults
The Framework for Considering Productive Ageing and Work by Paul A. Schulte and others at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Cincinnati, Ohio. The paper notes that the US population is experiencing a demographic transition resulting in an aging workforce and aims to elucidate and expand an approach to keep that workforce safe, healthy, and productive. It concludes that a productive ageing framework provides a foundational and comprehensive approach to addressing the aging workforce and involves the following elements:
- life span perspective,
- comprehensive and integrated approaches to occupational safety and health,
- emphasis on positive outcomes for both workers and organizations, and
- supportive work culture for multigenerational issues.
MacArthur Research Network on Successful Aging Community Study (1988-95) finds that engagement in meaningful activities contributes to good health, cognitive performance, satisfaction with life, and longevity, as well as providing a potentially effective means of reducing costs of physical and mental illness in later life.
Economic Contribution of Older Adults
A few academic papers researching the economic contribution of older adults have been published in the last decade.
Academics usually talk about the first and second demographic dividends. Professor Linda Fried, Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, talks about the Third Demographic Dividend. She says, “Perhaps the greatest opportunity of the twenty-first century is to envision and create a society that nurtures longer lives not only for the sake of the older generation but also for the benefit of all age groups.”
One of the most cited papers on the economic contribution of older adults is Valuing Productive Non-market Activities of Older Adults in Europe and the US. It provides a framework for measuring the economic contribution of older adults (defined as adults aged 60+) in Europe and the US. The research methodology includes examining participation in and calculating the value generated by the older adults’ market activities and productive non-market activities (PNMA). It estimated that contributions in the US and sample European countries, where older adults made up 21 percent and 14 percent of the population, respectively, added to the equivalent of 7.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
The report, The Longevity Economic Outlook, was published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) for AARP in 2019 and provided an update of a 2013 AARP study on the economic contribution of the 50+ population in the US. It calculates their contribution to the US economy at USD 8.3 trillion, or 40 percent of gross domestic product, up from USD 7.1 trillion in 2013. Put another way, if America’s 50+ population were its own country, its GDP would now be the world’s third largest, following the US and China.
Another important paper is Population Aging and the Three Demographic Dividends in Asia, published by the Asian Development Bank. The study examines the structural shifts in the population’s age mix and the resulting economic growth potential. The study covered selected Asian economies – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia – from 1950 to 2050 and analyzed the impact on economic growth in terms of the first and second demographic dividends.