8 surprising facts about aging and retirement

As a young reporter in the 1980s one of my first assignments was to interview a retiring coal miner who had worked in the earth’s dark underbelly for more than 40 years.

At the age of 18, the idea of 40 years seemed like an eternity to me and I asked how he had endured for so long.

“It really doesn’t feel like 40 years,” he confessed. “In fact it only seems like yesterday that I was your age. And inside my head I really don’t feel any different than I did then.”

For some reason those words have always stuck with me and, as I get older, the truism of life’s unrelenting time march becomes even more pronounced.

But, in the 30-odd years since that interview, things have changed. Back then, an Australian male could expect to live about five years after a standard retirement. Today, based on the same retirement age, a large proportion of the population are on track to be retired for as many years as they worked.

Treasurer Joe Hockey has provoked a heated national debate around pushing back the official retirement age. The very thought messes with our sense of entitlement in a lucky country where paying taxes and working hard are synonymous with earning the right to comfortable, largely government-funded twilight years.

However, as the following eight points reveal, this is a debate that we will need to bring on.

1. Old age is a relatively new phenomenon

Researcher and author Fred Pearce (Peoplequake) says it is quite possible that half of all the human beings who have ever lived past the age of 65 are alive today. The rules of demography and longevity have changed, and only recently.

2. Working longer and living to really advanced years often go hand in hand

In 1958, Gallup discovered that, for men who lived to the age of 95 and beyond, the average retirement age was 80. But these men weren’t just working for the sake of it. Whether they were collecting supermarket trollies or doing office filing, they liked what they did and found it engaging and meaningful.

3. Sometimes old-age is a mindset imposed by social norms

In his brilliant book, Before Happiness, Shawn Achor cites a 1979 study by Ellen Langer in which she was able to reverse of effects of ageing on a group of 75-year-old men by having them pretend they were 20 years younger.

4. Living past 100 is becoming much more common

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that there were 3800 Australians aged over 100 in 2013, an increase of around 400% in two decades. An article on the Health and Aged Assist website says this number will grow to an estimated 78,000 by 2055. That is potentially 35+ years of retirement! And a lot of telegrams for the Queen to send!

5. Many people don’t transition well to retirement

The Harvard School of Public Health studied 5422 ageing individuals and found those who had retired were 40% more likely to have had a heart attack or stroke than those who were still working. This mostly happened soon after retirement.

6. Large numbers are already working longer

The number of Australians working beyond the traditional “early” retirement age of 55 has almost doubled in just one decade, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Even more telling, the ABS estimates that a quarter of Australians aged 65 to 69 are already still working.

7. Many people just expect to keep working

The Suncorp report Rise of the Grudge Workforce, found a quarter of Australia's baby boomers expected to work into their eighties due to their financial situations. The same report warned that only 20% of baby boomers had saved enough to retire.

8. Stressful jobs and long life often go hand in hand

There is a common myth that stressful jobs lead to early deaths. This is not necessarily so. American presidents are a good case in point. A 2011 study by Chicago demographer S. Jay Olshansky found presidents generally lived longer than expected for men of the same age and era. In fact, 23 of the 34 US presidents who died from natural causes lived longer than statistically expected. The average lifespan of the first eight presidents was 79.8 years at a time when the life expectancy for the average man was 40! Modern presidents have also enjoyed long lives. Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford both lived to 93. George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter are both 89. In Australia Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen lived to 94 and Sir Robert Menzies to 83. Gough Whitlam is 97 and Malcolm Fraser (83) and Bob Hawke (84) are both still active in public life.

What does this mean?

The long life of many world leaders highlights one of the key lessons about aging and retirement. Clearly wealth, privilege and access to top medical care can extend your life no matter how stressful some of your jobs.

It is also clear that there are jobs, and jobs. Mentally stimulating jobs performed in a climate of general good health, proper eating, genetic luck, physical activity and supportive friends and family don’t seem to have a use-by date.

But who would begrudge the man I interviewed 30-odd years ago having a comfortable retirement at 65 after so many years of physical work in dark and dusty coal mines?

The retirement debate should not be about picking a magical age at which all humans become unable or disinclined to be in the workforce.

It should be about developing a flexible system that gives people whole-of-life options - working, winding down, winding back up and retirement options. We need to end the traditional hard-wired notion of a national retirement age. It results in a chronic waste of skills, experience and opportunity, and sits awkwardly with the human condition and aspiration in the third millennium.

Shane Rodgers is a writer, marketer and business executive with a special interest in societal change. He is the author of the satirical e-book Tall People Don’t Jump – the curious behaviour of human beings.