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Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

343 points by littlexsparkee 6mo ago

random_savv 6mo ago
[flagged]
goda90 6mo ago
I believe there have been studies into how social life impacts longevity, and probably cognitive decline as well. For some people, like my great-grandmother who kept working well into her 80s by choice, jobs can be a big social outlet. For others a job can be very socially isolating. Those factors probably matter a lot. Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.
- appreciatorBus 6mo ago
  Your side note implies this would be a bad or nefarious thing? What if it's actually a good decision for both individuals and the public at large?
  - goda90 6mo ago
    I doubt it would be a good decision for all individuals. Maybe the public at large, but I question if that would be what motivates the people who seek such changes the most.
  - Retric 6mo ago
    The issue is using a single factor to push change does not mean that change is a net good. Nobody talks about windmills killing birds because that’s what they actually care about, instead there are so few downsides they needed to find something no matter how meaningless in context. As such single issues are often a fake justification for what they want to happen for other reasons.
  - AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
    "Good for both individuals and the public at large" is one thing. "We found a club to beat you into doing what we want you to" looks very similar, but is quite different in how it feels and how it works out.
  - keybored 6mo ago
    What’s so difficult to understand? The state or lobbying groups want to raise the retirement age which then correlates with studies on how raising the retirement age has “good effects”.[1] The goal isn’t to find out what is good for senior people. It’s to find reasons to enact the policy that they wanted. Surprisingly, men ages 51–64 (this was specifically about men) “need” their jobs for their own health. We could imagine studies done in more patriarchal cultures: unmarried women over the age of 40 suffer from psychological and physical health problems more than married women over the age of 40. We’ll just leave out the parts about how unmarried women are penalized socially, constantly. Policy recommendation: we should get women married, it’s just good for them. [1] This was the hypothetical laid out in the original comment.
  - xp84 6mo ago
    I mean, it could be both good and bad depending on the person. My Dad worked physically demanding jobs, and would have been happy to retire and spend his time working on personal projects at age 60, and his health and well-being would have been better if he had not had to keep doing exhausting work for at least 8 more years for money reasons. So, I think people feel justifiably protective of our elders when people talk about raising the retirement age. Honestly, the jobs where the benefits of stimulation and social interaction outweigh the physical and or mental stress of the job are not the kind of jobs most people have. So if you wanted to do what’s really best for most older people, it would be better to find ways to engage them other than financially forcing them to keep working whatever job they can get - which is what raising retirement age does. What would be really killer would be finding more ways to enlist retirement-age professionals in training young people, in a variety of occupations from carpentry to programming. The young have the stamina and strength but lack wisdom; the older people have learned a lot and could share that knowledge and wisdom.
    - zelphirkalt 6mo ago
      This. I feel like we are wasting tons of human potential due to ageism and not finding good ways for letting experience trickle down.
- cableshaft 6mo ago
  Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it. But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life. But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.
  - dempedempe 6mo ago
    What card games do you play? Do you have any recommendations?
    - cableshaft 6mo ago
      My main card game lately has been the Legendary system of games, in particular the Marvel version (although I did just order the James Bond version this morning too after playing the app version this past week). I like to play it with two players and alternate hands, but you can play it solo too. Another one I like to play is Ashes, which has solo enemies you can play against. It's entry point nowadays is called Ashes Ascendancy. And I play a lot of cooperative card games by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games, namely Marvel Champions, Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, and Arkham Horror - The Card Game. Lord of the Rings is starting to go out of print, and the older content for the other two is out of print, but the other two are still coming out with new content (and I have all the old stuff so I can still play them). All of these have a ton of content with them, so I can play a bunch of games and not get bored of them. I've played each of them over 50 times, and some as many as 150 times, and yet there's still plenty I haven't played for each of them.
  - stringfood 6mo ago
    Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job, and not nearly as fulfilling. You get to see smiles and frowns and everything in between in a job and there is no board game that can match the complexity and novelty of random humans asking you to solve their problems.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  > Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future. I'm sure you could do that just with basic math today.
LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
It's 48 pages and I haven't read it fully, but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable: "Does Unemployment Make It More Likely for Late Middle-Aged People, Particularly Men, To Drink Alcohol? Evidence From We Obviously Should Have Considered This In The Paper, Perhaps We Are Too Sheltered" To be clear I am not being pedantic. The paper explicitly endorses the policy of pushing back the retirement age specifically because doing so likely reduces cognitive decline. I agree with this, in the same sense that shooting car thieves in the street without a trial reduces automotive theft. "Reducing cognitive decline in people near retirement age" might be better met with psychiatric intervention, so that unemployed people also get some of the benefits. Ignoring this confounding variable and prattling about "causal explanation" - while endorsing the policy of snatching away people's pensions until they work a few more years - is evil born from ignorance.
- littlexsparkee 6mo ago
  I have to wonder how much of this is socialization and the valorization of having a job (and the detrimental health effects due to lack). We don't really paint a good picture of what else people could do with their time that's respected or interesting. So many people retire early but not to something - expressing feelings of loss, idle uses of time like TV watching because they haven't developed hobbies / interests due to hegemony of work. We've killed boredom with devices and work, now people can't deal with silence and the existential questions it raises - more comforting to just be told what to do.
- gruez 6mo ago
  >but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable: I thought that's the reason why they used "Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"? The idea is that when "Labor Market Shocks" (ie. mass layoffs) happen, the people who lose their jobs are somewhat random, so there isn't the confounding variable of low performers/sick people.
  - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
    It's not about "low performers / sick people," it's unemployment itself (especially sudden layoffs) making people more susceptible to substance abuse, regardless of their health when they're unemployed.
jdw64 6mo ago
I finally found the reason why my cognitive function feels like that of a 7years old child.
rts_cts 6mo ago
A strangely click-baity title for an academic paper. What's next? "Four crazy macroeconomic predictions. You won't believe what's number four!"
- jonas21 6mo ago
  Seems like a fairly conventional economics paper title. Perhaps you're misparsing the second sentence? "Shocks" is not used as a verb here -- it's a noun, part of the phrase "labor market shocks," which refers to sudden events that disrupt the labor market.
dec0dedab0de 6mo ago
I think employment may set us up for rapid cognitive decline when we finally become unemployed. As in, working 40+ hours a week makes us over-value "vegging out", which sets us up for failure post-employment.
- funimpoded 6mo ago
  Yeah, questions I have: 1) what’s the effect for countries with humane amounts of paid leave (e.g. France’s 7ish weeks plus ten or so holidays) and working hours; and 2) so how about, you know, the idle rich? Should we be forcing them to work 40 hours as gas station clerks, for the good of their mental health? Should we forcibly deny them access to their money sometimes so they have to get a job every now and then? I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”
  - triceratops 6mo ago
    > so how about, you know, the idle rich? They get together a few times a week for golf and tennis with their other idle rich friends. Skiing in the winter.
- globular-toast 6mo ago
  Interesting. As soon as work is done I'm either outside walking, in the garden or workshop etc. I did a PhD which actually did consume my whole life until I finished it. Every job I've had since then seems so easy in comparison. I'm never "vegging out".
  - rullelito 6mo ago
    Do you think you are the typical person?
nate 6mo ago
We probably all have anecdotal evidence here, but my father is a perfect example of being no longer employed and a ton of stuff declining. Yes, cognitively, but a lot of health. We're talking not just your "career". He was a commercial real estate agent. But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker. And it kept him busy. Getting out of the house. Figuring things out. Meeting and talking to people. Walking. Talking. Scheduling things. He'd even tell us that if he stopped, things would just descend. And he was so right. He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked. Sample size of 1. A ton of confounding variables. But definitely wasn't his choice to stop working at a place because of health. The poor health came after being forced to quit. Does make me worry about "taking it easy" when I get older whatever that means :)
- steveBK123 6mo ago
  Saw similar with my grandmothers. One had a busy social live and volunteer schedule for 20+ years, the other.. did not. A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc). There's always more opportunities in the community than there are volunteers, so look around.
  - wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
    >A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc). Yeah, my guess is that someone retiring early to pursue their hobbies and interests is going to be much better off than a blue collar worker made redundant or disabled in his 50's. I always see these sort of studies used to slam the idea of FIRE, but I very much have my doubts that these findings apply equally to everyone.
    - CydeWeys 6mo ago
      Retiring TO something is important, but ideally it needs to involve a lot of in-person socializing, which many hobbies do not have. Golfing, for example, is pretty much the platonic ideal of a hobby that involves both socialization and old-person-friendly exercise.
Bender 6mo ago
I've been retired for about 5 years and I am just as loony now as I was when employed. HN, my own silly hobby sites, flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.
- seattle_spring 6mo ago
  > I am just as loony now as I was when employed ... flirting with the gals in town and wildlife Flirting with the wildlife certainly does fall into the "loony" bucket in my book. Make sure to stay safe!
  - Bender 6mo ago
    [dead]
- pugworthy 6mo ago
  Taking my companies EER package in a few months - you give me cause for cheer.
- BeetleB 6mo ago
  > flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active. Let me write a memo to myself: Try flirting with wildlife to ensure longevity!
  - snek_case 6mo ago
    Nickname checks out
giantg2 6mo ago
I feel like this is less about employment and more a factor of money and engagement. You need some amount of money for good health insurance, healthier foods, lower stress, etc. You need engagement, but that could be found in volunteering and sufficiently complex hobbies. The trend seen with employment cycles might just be picking up that many people lack these.
- gwbas1c 6mo ago
  Thanks for saying that. My dad volunteers and gets involved with social clubs. I think he'll keep doing it as long as he's able to. BUT: I don't think it's the work / volunteering that keeps his mind, I think it's that for people like him, they stop when their mind can no longer handle it.
josefritzishere 6mo ago
This feels like propaganda, like a peice from the Economist.
- RankingMember 6mo ago
  Propaganda to what end, the global cabal to...encourage people to stay busy in retirement?
  - moneycantbuy 6mo ago
    no to work for someone else forever
  - keybored 6mo ago
    The propaganda around propaganda is working so well. The idea that propaganda is someone with an agenda to promote Canned Beans just shouts that Canned Beans are the best and tries its best to censor any promotion of any other foodstuff. In reality it can be more direct than that. There are thousands of ways to approach problems that the elderly and soon-to-be elderly have and will develop. This research chose to pursue the theory about how specifically wage labor is something that guards against cognitive atrophy. Why? This could achieve many goals. - The solution is about economic activity, including increased wage labor taxing - The solution does not involve any increase in government spending on the elderly - It valorizes wage labor as an age-protecting activity - That wage labor could contribute to ill effects is excluded by the framing: why do some people vegitate in front of the TV after working their normal hours?
bitwize 6mo ago
Anecdata: My dad started experiencing memory problems in his early 70s. When he got back into engineering as a part time consultant, those memory problems went away.
tombert 6mo ago
Interesting. I haven't read the paper yet so forgive a bit of ignorance here, but I feel like when I'm unemployed, I actively spend all my time trying to learn new things. This is no small part because otherwise I get depressed because I am spending all my time on YouTube and there are only so many "documentaries" about Lolcows that I can stomach, so I dive head first into projects, usually buying a few cheap textbooks in the process to play with new things. The days are way too long if I don't have something interesting to occupy my time, and I feel less guilty if that time is spent doing something quasi-intellectual instead of playing Donkey Kong Country again. I didn't think I was an outlier with this, but maybe I am?
- seattle_spring 6mo ago
  I think you might be. Most retired folks I know just end up watching TV all day. Not even "good" TV-- it's mostly game-shows and 24-hour news cycles.
  - wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
    I've heard that you can expect your retirement to look a lot like your average weekend. If your weekends naturally fill with your hobbies and interests, I don't think you have much to worry about.
    - david-gpu 6mo ago
      My experience has been exactly that: retirement = uninterrupted weekend. I can't understand people who can't conceive of a healthy fulfilling life that does not involve work or volunteering. There is more to life than laboring.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    If I'm anything like my parents, I don't think that's something I have to worry about. My dad is constantly buying new textbooks and trying to teach himself different types of physics. Either that, or he's designing new things to be 3D printed. He's not retired yet but I suspect that when he is he'll find a way to keep himself entertained with stuff that isn't terrible game shows.
summarybot 6mo ago
[flagged]
animitronix 6mo ago
Classic "use it or lose it". No big surprise here.
keybored 6mo ago
> Nevertheless, our group-average findings, if replicated by others, would hold clear policy implications. Federal efforts to promote work at pre-retirement ages would not only reduce reliance on SSDI and enhance retirement security, but would also promote healthy aging through delaying cognitive decline. Fuck you. Christopher Lasch wrote that our “culture of narcissism” detests aging. Unsurprisingly we, the narcissists, are horrified when we ourselves become old. Because there is hardly anything left for us. You can subtract pure biology, i.e. normal bodily degradation. But you can also subtract respect, esteem, wisdom (because who cares what grandpa has to say?), family (see care homes), and socializing.[1] You’re not an “asset” (to use familiar language[2]) to anyone. Just a burden. What becomes the solution to any of that? No, no. We don’t need solutions to old people problems. We need solutions to them being burdens. So how to make them less of a drag on our collective selves: encourage them to work at their shitty jobs for longer. [1] See the old man who meets you again after six months and talks way too much about what he’s up to. Does he have any other outlets? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873477
b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job. We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- tootie 6mo ago
  I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
  - bilsbie 6mo ago
    Hey I’m in the same boat! (Except the grad school.) feel free to email (in profile) if you want to chat.
- breezybottom 6mo ago
  That sounds exactly like it's a problem with retirement.
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives
    - 6mo ago
moneycantbuy 6mo ago
Does slavery slow cognitive decline? Capitalist propaganda says being a wagie is good for us. That being said people are so indoctrinated that they have no idea what to do without an employer. pretty fucked up society and culture we now find ourselves in.
gcheong 6mo ago
I would hypothesize that this is strongly correlated to where a person's sense of purpose comes from. If someone gets most of their sense of purpose from their job then you would expect to see a decline once they leave their job if they can't replace it with something else. For those whose sense of purpose is derived mainly outside of work and can continue to derive that sense of purpose in retirement, I would expect less of a decline in retirement other than normal aging.
ecshafer 6mo ago
There have been studies that show that elderly who interact with children are cognitively healthier compared to their counter parts.
logickkk1 6mo ago
I don't think this is "work is medicine." It's that too much of normal life depends on having a job, so policy lands on working longer.
kelvinjps10 6mo ago
It reminds of my grandparents that refuse to stop working my grandma 65 and grandfather 73. My grandma has like a stand where she sells candies and coffee and for her is just a way for socializing. And my grandpa he's still trying businesses out he thinks that there is still time for him to become rich, he's still very sharp and active he currently sells car tools and he's walking everyday
TheGRS 6mo ago
I know I interact with people on the daily with my remote job, but would love to know if that's potentially an issue too. Decent reason to get back in the office. I also miss my daily office bike rides to a certain extent, at least it was healthy for me, now I do exercise by choice and I don't always keep up with it.
whatever1 6mo ago
Averages make sense only when the distribution looks like a normal. But after 60ish the health of people has such a high variance that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the average retiree. Some of them are healthy and sharp. Others have disabling health problems
dominictorresmo 6mo ago
brain is the same as a muscle: if you don't use it he will deteriorate
gste 6mo ago
Is there any evidence in this paper or elsewhere that this is causation rather than correlation? For example, it seems logical to me that people with worse health and failing mental faculties will already be feeling more motivation to retire earlier, as opposed to very healthy people who will keep on working forever. That would be pure correlation
- verteu 6mo ago
  Yes - very roughly, they find that regions with lots of layoffs show an increase in subsequent cognitive decline: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35117/w35117.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35117/w351... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable Not perfect, but less vulnerable to the correlation issue you mentioned.
999900000999 6mo ago
Allegedly my great grandfather was building a deck at the age of 90. This might also be survivorship bias. I’d like to say people need purpose and challenges. This is probably why rates of depression tend to be much lower in “poor” countries where people have to depend on each other more. In the west everything is an abstraction. If you would imagine a baker in a small town, if she doesn’t feel like baking that day, the town doesn’t get bread. Therefore, everyone in the town has an incentive to actually check on her, and get her back on her feet. In the modern west who cares, surely another bakery will provide. I believe automation will reduce the need for human labor very very soon. We can all find meaning in arts, dance and play. If not just the gift of this experience. Or we can point fingers as no one has work or money
- setsewerd 6mo ago
  To your point about automation, I'm increasingly wondering whether the "post-labor economy" would be anywhere near as idealistic as it's typically presented. If people aren't working, they're presumably not paying taxes, and without taxes, there's much less incentive for a government to make choices in the people's best interest. Or put another way, perhaps there's no representation without taxation.
  - 999900000999 6mo ago
    >Gilens and Page: Average citizens have little impact on public policy https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-little-impact-on-public-policy/ https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-... You can argue we're already there. Politicians don't do anything for their constituents if big money disagrees. I still remember when Obama was first elected and we thought we'd get something close to European style health care. Nobody was like oh gosh, golly I'm getting a subsidy to afford for profit health care insurance. From technological point of view robo communism is very possible. I just don't know if it's what we're going to get. The alternative is an endless spiral downward. You have fast food restaurants in NYC where outsourced customer service takes orders. Having a robot flip patties isn't hard. You could end up turning 6 jobs into 1. Which on its surface is a good thing. Food service is ultimately a very dangerous job, and wouldn't it be great if those other five people could be working on art or something else. We need to rethink what makes a person valued. I'm not religious, but from that angle, as a child of God you have inherit value. This value exceeds any network you can seek to obtain. Then again, economics isn't a simple thing.
tsoukase 6mo ago
Dementia, at least of Alzheimer's type, starts at least 20 years before symptom onset and is multifactorial, so much that no single factor plays a role ("explains the variability") more than 5%. Employment, as almost all other factors, like having family/kids, higher education, wealth etc etc, might be a correlative or a confounding variable, depending on the study design because the disease mechanisms are so long and convoluted. In the egg and chicken dilemma, I believe that the cognitive decline causes the social inactivity and not the reverse. Get your retirement because that will not cause your dementia.
psychoslave 6mo ago
No, but the lake of activity and intellectual challenges will certainly accelerate it, even for someone middle age with an official employment! Wrote this just by reading the title, and past the summary it clearly lean into that direction.
Havoc 6mo ago
Regardless of whether this is true I do think there is a risk of overdoing it. My dad firmly believes in the "when people quit work they decline" theory. Which may be fair, but he's not in great health and still charging hard. Definitely think you can overdo that & end up working till you drop
Unbeliever69 6mo ago
I voluntarily retired at age 55 after a startup I was a principal in for five years ran out of money (raising funds was not my responsibility). Having worked from home during most of that time, and having nobody to report to other than myself, I decided I couldn't go back to the grind. I was fortunate enough that my wife earns enough and has good enough benefits that I don't need to work. It took a lot of paying down debt and massaging our finances, but it's worked out swimmingly. We're doing far better on one income than we ever did on two. Obviously, at my age, there are no kids in the picture. Not only am I her personal assistant (she's a teacher), but I take care of the household, which takes a ton of stress off her plate. I could see a world where cognitive decline takes place, but it's actually been the opposite for me. When I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities as my wife's assistant and taking care of the household, I have many hours during the day to pursue my own passions. I've also been much more structured with my time. I actively journal. I spend time with friends and family. I occasionally do things for fun like fly fishing. I set aside a specific time to read every day for pleasure and learning. I go to bed at a set time and wake up at 5am. I probably log anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day doing agentic AI coding and design in Claude Code. Freed from the treadmill of employment and the grind of keeping up with the fast pace of deeply learning new technology, I feel sharper than I have in decades. It also doesn't hurt that my passion projects are generating income, which keeps me highly motivated and mentally engaged. I'm sure those of you that read this probably think that I didn't retire. I think an argument can be made for and against this. I feel retired. I just don't fill all of my time with leisure which I think is the trap that many retired people fall into. The things that I do to keep mentally sharp are intentional choices. It just so happens that those things are things that resemble work.
doc_ick 6mo ago
How much of this article is written by ai?
hirako2000 6mo ago
What many comments miss is that society is heavily structured around work. If we didn't work, or simply worked far less, we wouldn't be atomized units not quite finding what to do. There would be more structure of volunteering projects, cafés would be laid out for people having time, instead of for quick grab. Fastfood and drive through may end up being far less common.
SilentM68 6mo ago
The primary argument of this NBER working paper is that "employment, particularly near retirement age, can slow the rate of cognitive decline." Would this not depend on the type of work being done and type of working conditions? Doesn't working in a boring, unchallenging, repetitive, dead-end job, dull the senses? Also, now a day, people continue to work even into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s, at least those that can find work. I don't see many people opting to retire when they have bills to pay. Stan Lee used to say something along the lines of: “I’m not working, I’m playing!” If the job feels like fun, then the primary argument makes more sense to me. Based on past experience, however, I can relate to the later as my senses definitely got dulled, add to that compounding age-related health problems which did not help. I try to do some Sudoku & Mahjongg puzzles at least twice a day, in my Linux machine, just to keep my mind awake.
harrall 6mo ago
I was under the impression that you delay cognitive decline (and keep brain plasticity) by learning new things. So you need to be learning new skills, trying new sports, entering new circumstances continuously. If you’re good at something already, it’s not enough. Employment is one of many ways of keeping things fresh because it’s easy but I see no reason why you can’t keep yourself busy too.
trashface 6mo ago
Or people who have cognitive issues have trouble staying employed...
cathyreisenwitz 6mo ago
I bet another reason women suffer less cognitive decline from early retirement than men is that women are less lonely and more integrated into their extended families and communities.
lenerdenator 6mo ago
More evidence that the US desperately needs to raise the retirement benefits age to 70 or 75. Memory care is one of the most expensive types of eldercare.
da_chicken 6mo ago
This still smells like the kind of paper that a think tank would fund to justify their billionaire-backed policy that social security should be abandoned and the retirement age moved to 75.
zoom6628 6mo ago
Retirement is an artificial modern construct to create jobs. People are supposed to be active until they die. Hobbies are just a replacement activity. I have no intention of retiring (over 60 already). I work in tech and learning new skills and my income feeds and houses my family and pays for my running shoes. As other commenters have noted folk in some places don't have anything but work. That is a global social issue that needs addressing first.
didip 6mo ago
As someone who recently retired early, you really need to have a solid game plan on what you want to do with all the time you have. Spend a solid 3-6 months planning and mocking your post retirement days while still working. The more detailed the plan the better. If you want to go to the gym, what will you do there and for how long and how many days a week? If you want to have a tech side project, how many hours do you plan on spending on this project? And be reasonable. Don't trade one burnout over another. If you are planning to learn something new, what are those? and don't just learn one thing. 8 hours plus is a crazy amount of time. One of those plan should include making new friends post retirement, revolving around activities that are not work related. It is far too easy to lose track of time without a brand new schedule to fill the void.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
m463 6mo ago
Go and read the book or audiobook "Younger Next Year" great book. Explains the biology of aging, how to delay/reverse it and how to retire well. Good background and good advice.
kleiba2 6mo ago
The job I'm currently at definitely does the opposite.
danielovichdk 6mo ago
I think better when I have been off work for 4 weeks and beyond. My mind is dancing into new and glorious places, not being caught or dumbed down by idiotic automative repetitions, inhumane and corporate politics so dumb, walled-off-elite and cargo-cult like that no one can ever convince me that humans in an office space has decreased declining cognitive abilities. People in the workforce are dumber than people outside, no doubt.
tokkkie 6mo ago
Most people don't need a 0 or 100 work-life balance. Maybe just 10% work and 90% life is enough.
jpfromlondon 6mo ago
My own job is accelerating my cognitive decline and destroying my mental wellbeing.
- snek_case 6mo ago
  I can sympathize... I got to the point where I was sleeping only 5 hours a night, having digestive issues and tinnitus.
kevin_T 6mo ago
[dead]
bcjdjsndon 6mo ago
Interestingly rich people who've never worked a day in their life dont have this problem... I wonder what the link could be
- gowld 6mo ago
  I didn't see that in the OP document. Is that mentioned in the document, or pure speculation on your part?
  - bcjdjsndon 6mo ago
    Call it an educated guess.
- rootusrootus 6mo ago
  I have met people in that situation, and "well adjusted & normal" is often not the description I would use for them.
WalterBright 6mo ago
"Use it or lose it" applies to the brain as well as your muscles. This was well known before this paper.
itrunsdoomguy 6mo ago
Just retire and play Doom.
- snek_case 6mo ago
  Make it a personal goal to beat every game and expansion pack on nightmare.
pengaru 6mo ago
A lot of comments in here are obviously describing Americans, as if that's representative of some global human reality, without acknowledging the elephant in the room is a cultural problem. Americans in particular tend to have a highly entitled and confused "time is money" view governing their existence that enables them to do nothing except when paid by employers, which obviously results in doing absolutely nothing in retirement.
felishiagreen12 6mo ago
[dead]

343 points by littlexsparkee 6mo ago

[flagged]

I believe there have been studies into how social life impacts longevity, and probably cognitive decline as well. For some people, like my great-grandmother who kept working well into her 80s by choice, jobs can be a big social outlet. For others a job can be very socially isolating. Those factors probably matter a lot. Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future.

appreciatorBus 6mo ago
Your side note implies this would be a bad or nefarious thing? What if it's actually a good decision for both individuals and the public at large?
- goda90 6mo ago
  I doubt it would be a good decision for all individuals. Maybe the public at large, but I question if that would be what motivates the people who seek such changes the most.
- Retric 6mo ago
  The issue is using a single factor to push change does not mean that change is a net good. Nobody talks about windmills killing birds because that’s what they actually care about, instead there are so few downsides they needed to find something no matter how meaningless in context. As such single issues are often a fake justification for what they want to happen for other reasons.
- AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
  "Good for both individuals and the public at large" is one thing. "We found a club to beat you into doing what we want you to" looks very similar, but is quite different in how it feels and how it works out.
- keybored 6mo ago
  What’s so difficult to understand? The state or lobbying groups want to raise the retirement age which then correlates with studies on how raising the retirement age has “good effects”.[1] The goal isn’t to find out what is good for senior people. It’s to find reasons to enact the policy that they wanted. Surprisingly, men ages 51–64 (this was specifically about men) “need” their jobs for their own health. We could imagine studies done in more patriarchal cultures: unmarried women over the age of 40 suffer from psychological and physical health problems more than married women over the age of 40. We’ll just leave out the parts about how unmarried women are penalized socially, constantly. Policy recommendation: we should get women married, it’s just good for them. [1] This was the hypothetical laid out in the original comment.
- xp84 6mo ago
  I mean, it could be both good and bad depending on the person. My Dad worked physically demanding jobs, and would have been happy to retire and spend his time working on personal projects at age 60, and his health and well-being would have been better if he had not had to keep doing exhausting work for at least 8 more years for money reasons. So, I think people feel justifiably protective of our elders when people talk about raising the retirement age. Honestly, the jobs where the benefits of stimulation and social interaction outweigh the physical and or mental stress of the job are not the kind of jobs most people have. So if you wanted to do what’s really best for most older people, it would be better to find ways to engage them other than financially forcing them to keep working whatever job they can get - which is what raising retirement age does. What would be really killer would be finding more ways to enlist retirement-age professionals in training young people, in a variety of occupations from carpentry to programming. The young have the stamina and strength but lack wisdom; the older people have learned a lot and could share that knowledge and wisdom.
  - zelphirkalt 6mo ago
    This. I feel like we are wasting tons of human potential due to ageism and not finding good ways for letting experience trickle down.
cableshaft 6mo ago
Yeah I work from home. Except for 1-2 short zoom calls a day or talking with my wife, who also works from home, I can go pretty much the whole week without talking to anyone. I try to make sure I go out with friends at least once on the weekends, though, to sort of make up for it. But I do wonder if that's going to be a bad thing for me later in my life. But I also play a lot of board games, including somewhat complicated solo card games, in my spare time. So I'm hoping that helps counteract things a little bit too.
- dempedempe 6mo ago
  What card games do you play? Do you have any recommendations?
  - cableshaft 6mo ago
    My main card game lately has been the Legendary system of games, in particular the Marvel version (although I did just order the James Bond version this morning too after playing the app version this past week). I like to play it with two players and alternate hands, but you can play it solo too. Another one I like to play is Ashes, which has solo enemies you can play against. It's entry point nowadays is called Ashes Ascendancy. And I play a lot of cooperative card games by the publisher Fantasy Flight Games, namely Marvel Champions, Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, and Arkham Horror - The Card Game. Lord of the Rings is starting to go out of print, and the older content for the other two is out of print, but the other two are still coming out with new content (and I have all the old stuff so I can still play them). All of these have a ton of content with them, so I can play a bunch of games and not get bored of them. I've played each of them over 50 times, and some as many as 150 times, and yet there's still plenty I haven't played for each of them.
- stringfood 6mo ago
  Having done both, playing complex board games and card games is not nearly as complicated and engaging for the mind as a full time customer facing job, and not nearly as fulfilling. You get to see smiles and frowns and everything in between in a job and there is no board game that can match the complexity and novelty of random humans asking you to solve their problems.
lenerdenator 6mo ago
> Side note: I'm sure we'll see research into these areas used to propose delaying retirement age more in the near future. I'm sure you could do that just with basic math today.

LeCompteSftware 6mo ago

It's 48 pages and I haven't read it fully, but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable: "Does Unemployment Make It More Likely for Late Middle-Aged People, Particularly Men, To Drink Alcohol? Evidence From We Obviously Should Have Considered This In The Paper, Perhaps We Are Too Sheltered" To be clear I am not being pedantic. The paper explicitly endorses the policy of pushing back the retirement age specifically because doing so likely reduces cognitive decline. I agree with this, in the same sense that shooting car thieves in the street without a trial reduces automotive theft. "Reducing cognitive decline in people near retirement age" might be better met with psychiatric intervention, so that unemployed people also get some of the benefits. Ignoring this confounding variable and prattling about "causal explanation" - while endorsing the policy of snatching away people's pensions until they work a few more years - is evil born from ignorance.

littlexsparkee 6mo ago
I have to wonder how much of this is socialization and the valorization of having a job (and the detrimental health effects due to lack). We don't really paint a good picture of what else people could do with their time that's respected or interesting. So many people retire early but not to something - expressing feelings of loss, idle uses of time like TV watching because they haven't developed hobbies / interests due to hegemony of work. We've killed boredom with devices and work, now people can't deal with silence and the existential questions it raises - more comforting to just be told what to do.
gruez 6mo ago
>but it seems almost childlike that the paper doesn't address the obvious confounding variable: I thought that's the reason why they used "Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"? The idea is that when "Labor Market Shocks" (ie. mass layoffs) happen, the people who lose their jobs are somewhat random, so there isn't the confounding variable of low performers/sick people.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
  It's not about "low performers / sick people," it's unemployment itself (especially sudden layoffs) making people more susceptible to substance abuse, regardless of their health when they're unemployed.

jdw64 6mo ago

I finally found the reason why my cognitive function feels like that of a 7years old child.

rts_cts 6mo ago

A strangely click-baity title for an academic paper. What's next? "Four crazy macroeconomic predictions. You won't believe what's number four!"

jonas21 6mo ago
Seems like a fairly conventional economics paper title. Perhaps you're misparsing the second sentence? "Shocks" is not used as a verb here -- it's a noun, part of the phrase "labor market shocks," which refers to sudden events that disrupt the labor market.

dec0dedab0de 6mo ago

I think employment may set us up for rapid cognitive decline when we finally become unemployed. As in, working 40+ hours a week makes us over-value "vegging out", which sets us up for failure post-employment.

funimpoded 6mo ago
Yeah, questions I have: 1) what’s the effect for countries with humane amounts of paid leave (e.g. France’s 7ish weeks plus ten or so holidays) and working hours; and 2) so how about, you know, the idle rich? Should we be forcing them to work 40 hours as gas station clerks, for the good of their mental health? Should we forcibly deny them access to their money sometimes so they have to get a job every now and then? I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”
- triceratops 6mo ago
  > so how about, you know, the idle rich? They get together a few times a week for golf and tennis with their other idle rich friends. Skiing in the winter.
globular-toast 6mo ago
Interesting. As soon as work is done I'm either outside walking, in the garden or workshop etc. I did a PhD which actually did consume my whole life until I finished it. Every job I've had since then seems so easy in comparison. I'm never "vegging out".
- rullelito 6mo ago
  Do you think you are the typical person?

nate 6mo ago

We probably all have anecdotal evidence here, but my father is a perfect example of being no longer employed and a ton of stuff declining. Yes, cognitively, but a lot of health. We're talking not just your "career". He was a commercial real estate agent. But in his 80s he was working at Menards as a greeter and stocker. And it kept him busy. Getting out of the house. Figuring things out. Meeting and talking to people. Walking. Talking. Scheduling things. He'd even tell us that if he stopped, things would just descend. And he was so right. He had to stop to help take more care of my mom, and quickly, he just fell out of all these things. Cognitively. Health. Ability to do anything decision wise or to better himself just tanked. Sample size of 1. A ton of confounding variables. But definitely wasn't his choice to stop working at a place because of health. The poor health came after being forced to quit. Does make me worry about "taking it easy" when I get older whatever that means :)

steveBK123 6mo ago
Saw similar with my grandmothers. One had a busy social live and volunteer schedule for 20+ years, the other.. did not. A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc). There's always more opportunities in the community than there are volunteers, so look around.
- wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
  >A reminder that you cannot simply retire FROM something (work, commuting, etc) but must retire TO something (hobbies, social life, second career, volunteering, etc). Yeah, my guess is that someone retiring early to pursue their hobbies and interests is going to be much better off than a blue collar worker made redundant or disabled in his 50's. I always see these sort of studies used to slam the idea of FIRE, but I very much have my doubts that these findings apply equally to everyone.
  - CydeWeys 6mo ago
    Retiring TO something is important, but ideally it needs to involve a lot of in-person socializing, which many hobbies do not have. Golfing, for example, is pretty much the platonic ideal of a hobby that involves both socialization and old-person-friendly exercise.

Bender 6mo ago

I've been retired for about 5 years and I am just as loony now as I was when employed. HN, my own silly hobby sites, flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.

seattle_spring 6mo ago
> I am just as loony now as I was when employed ... flirting with the gals in town and wildlife Flirting with the wildlife certainly does fall into the "loony" bucket in my book. Make sure to stay safe!
- Bender 6mo ago
  [dead]
pugworthy 6mo ago
Taking my companies EER package in a few months - you give me cause for cheer.
BeetleB 6mo ago
> flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active. Let me write a memo to myself: Try flirting with wildlife to ensure longevity!
- snek_case 6mo ago
  Nickname checks out

giantg2 6mo ago

I feel like this is less about employment and more a factor of money and engagement. You need some amount of money for good health insurance, healthier foods, lower stress, etc. You need engagement, but that could be found in volunteering and sufficiently complex hobbies. The trend seen with employment cycles might just be picking up that many people lack these.

gwbas1c 6mo ago
Thanks for saying that. My dad volunteers and gets involved with social clubs. I think he'll keep doing it as long as he's able to. BUT: I don't think it's the work / volunteering that keeps his mind, I think it's that for people like him, they stop when their mind can no longer handle it.

josefritzishere 6mo ago

This feels like propaganda, like a peice from the Economist.

RankingMember 6mo ago
Propaganda to what end, the global cabal to...encourage people to stay busy in retirement?
- moneycantbuy 6mo ago
  no to work for someone else forever
- keybored 6mo ago
  The propaganda around propaganda is working so well. The idea that propaganda is someone with an agenda to promote Canned Beans just shouts that Canned Beans are the best and tries its best to censor any promotion of any other foodstuff. In reality it can be more direct than that. There are thousands of ways to approach problems that the elderly and soon-to-be elderly have and will develop. This research chose to pursue the theory about how specifically wage labor is something that guards against cognitive atrophy. Why? This could achieve many goals. - The solution is about economic activity, including increased wage labor taxing - The solution does not involve any increase in government spending on the elderly - It valorizes wage labor as an age-protecting activity - That wage labor could contribute to ill effects is excluded by the framing: why do some people vegitate in front of the TV after working their normal hours?

bitwize 6mo ago

Anecdata: My dad started experiencing memory problems in his early 70s. When he got back into engineering as a part time consultant, those memory problems went away.

tombert 6mo ago

Interesting. I haven't read the paper yet so forgive a bit of ignorance here, but I feel like when I'm unemployed, I actively spend all my time trying to learn new things. This is no small part because otherwise I get depressed because I am spending all my time on YouTube and there are only so many "documentaries" about Lolcows that I can stomach, so I dive head first into projects, usually buying a few cheap textbooks in the process to play with new things. The days are way too long if I don't have something interesting to occupy my time, and I feel less guilty if that time is spent doing something quasi-intellectual instead of playing Donkey Kong Country again. I didn't think I was an outlier with this, but maybe I am?

seattle_spring 6mo ago
I think you might be. Most retired folks I know just end up watching TV all day. Not even "good" TV-- it's mostly game-shows and 24-hour news cycles.
- wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
  I've heard that you can expect your retirement to look a lot like your average weekend. If your weekends naturally fill with your hobbies and interests, I don't think you have much to worry about.
  - david-gpu 6mo ago
    My experience has been exactly that: retirement = uninterrupted weekend. I can't understand people who can't conceive of a healthy fulfilling life that does not involve work or volunteering. There is more to life than laboring.
- tombert 6mo ago
  If I'm anything like my parents, I don't think that's something I have to worry about. My dad is constantly buying new textbooks and trying to teach himself different types of physics. Either that, or he's designing new things to be 3D printed. He's not retired yet but I suspect that when he is he'll find a way to keep himself entertained with stuff that isn't terrible game shows.

summarybot 6mo ago

[flagged]

animitronix 6mo ago

Classic "use it or lose it". No big surprise here.

keybored 6mo ago

> Nevertheless, our group-average findings, if replicated by others, would hold clear policy implications. Federal efforts to promote work at pre-retirement ages would not only reduce reliance on SSDI and enhance retirement security, but would also promote healthy aging through delaying cognitive decline. Fuck you. Christopher Lasch wrote that our “culture of narcissism” detests aging. Unsurprisingly we, the narcissists, are horrified when we ourselves become old. Because there is hardly anything left for us. You can subtract pure biology, i.e. normal bodily degradation. But you can also subtract respect, esteem, wisdom (because who cares what grandpa has to say?), family (see care homes), and socializing.[1] You’re not an “asset” (to use familiar language[2]) to anyone. Just a burden. What becomes the solution to any of that? No, no. We don’t need solutions to old people problems. We need solutions to them being burdens. So how to make them less of a drag on our collective selves: encourage them to work at their shitty jobs for longer. [1] See the old man who meets you again after six months and talks way too much about what he’s up to. Does he have any other outlets? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873477

b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago

The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job. We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce and that's not something to celebrate.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
tootie 6mo ago
I retired recently in my late 40s (FIRE). Work was occasionally fulfilling, but mostly just a drag and when I didn't need it anymore, I was more than happy to stop. I've been raising my kids which is stimulation enough, but they are teens now and don't need such constant attention. Most of my other interests got swallowed up by career and kids and I don't really have the urge to go back to them. Actually thinking about going to grad school.
- bilsbie 6mo ago
  Hey I’m in the same boat! (Except the grad school.) feel free to email (in profile) if you want to chat.
breezybottom 6mo ago
That sounds exactly like it's a problem with retirement.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  It sounds like a problem with a society that more or less forces people to make work their only focus for their entire lives
  - 6mo ago

moneycantbuy 6mo ago

Does slavery slow cognitive decline? Capitalist propaganda says being a wagie is good for us. That being said people are so indoctrinated that they have no idea what to do without an employer. pretty fucked up society and culture we now find ourselves in.

gcheong 6mo ago

I would hypothesize that this is strongly correlated to where a person's sense of purpose comes from. If someone gets most of their sense of purpose from their job then you would expect to see a decline once they leave their job if they can't replace it with something else. For those whose sense of purpose is derived mainly outside of work and can continue to derive that sense of purpose in retirement, I would expect less of a decline in retirement other than normal aging.

ecshafer 6mo ago

There have been studies that show that elderly who interact with children are cognitively healthier compared to their counter parts.

logickkk1 6mo ago

I don't think this is "work is medicine." It's that too much of normal life depends on having a job, so policy lands on working longer.

kelvinjps10 6mo ago

It reminds of my grandparents that refuse to stop working my grandma 65 and grandfather 73. My grandma has like a stand where she sells candies and coffee and for her is just a way for socializing. And my grandpa he's still trying businesses out he thinks that there is still time for him to become rich, he's still very sharp and active he currently sells car tools and he's walking everyday

TheGRS 6mo ago

I know I interact with people on the daily with my remote job, but would love to know if that's potentially an issue too. Decent reason to get back in the office. I also miss my daily office bike rides to a certain extent, at least it was healthy for me, now I do exercise by choice and I don't always keep up with it.

whatever1 6mo ago

Averages make sense only when the distribution looks like a normal. But after 60ish the health of people has such a high variance that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the average retiree. Some of them are healthy and sharp. Others have disabling health problems

dominictorresmo 6mo ago

brain is the same as a muscle: if you don't use it he will deteriorate

gste 6mo ago

Is there any evidence in this paper or elsewhere that this is causation rather than correlation? For example, it seems logical to me that people with worse health and failing mental faculties will already be feeling more motivation to retire earlier, as opposed to very healthy people who will keep on working forever. That would be pure correlation

verteu 6mo ago
Yes - very roughly, they find that regions with lots of layoffs show an increase in subsequent cognitive decline: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35117/w35117.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35117/w351... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable Not perfect, but less vulnerable to the correlation issue you mentioned.

999900000999 6mo ago

Allegedly my great grandfather was building a deck at the age of 90. This might also be survivorship bias. I’d like to say people need purpose and challenges. This is probably why rates of depression tend to be much lower in “poor” countries where people have to depend on each other more. In the west everything is an abstraction. If you would imagine a baker in a small town, if she doesn’t feel like baking that day, the town doesn’t get bread. Therefore, everyone in the town has an incentive to actually check on her, and get her back on her feet. In the modern west who cares, surely another bakery will provide. I believe automation will reduce the need for human labor very very soon. We can all find meaning in arts, dance and play. If not just the gift of this experience. Or we can point fingers as no one has work or money

setsewerd 6mo ago
To your point about automation, I'm increasingly wondering whether the "post-labor economy" would be anywhere near as idealistic as it's typically presented. If people aren't working, they're presumably not paying taxes, and without taxes, there's much less incentive for a government to make choices in the people's best interest. Or put another way, perhaps there's no representation without taxation.
- 999900000999 6mo ago
  >Gilens and Page: Average citizens have little impact on public policy https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-little-impact-on-public-policy/ https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-... You can argue we're already there. Politicians don't do anything for their constituents if big money disagrees. I still remember when Obama was first elected and we thought we'd get something close to European style health care. Nobody was like oh gosh, golly I'm getting a subsidy to afford for profit health care insurance. From technological point of view robo communism is very possible. I just don't know if it's what we're going to get. The alternative is an endless spiral downward. You have fast food restaurants in NYC where outsourced customer service takes orders. Having a robot flip patties isn't hard. You could end up turning 6 jobs into 1. Which on its surface is a good thing. Food service is ultimately a very dangerous job, and wouldn't it be great if those other five people could be working on art or something else. We need to rethink what makes a person valued. I'm not religious, but from that angle, as a child of God you have inherit value. This value exceeds any network you can seek to obtain. Then again, economics isn't a simple thing.

tsoukase 6mo ago

Dementia, at least of Alzheimer's type, starts at least 20 years before symptom onset and is multifactorial, so much that no single factor plays a role ("explains the variability") more than 5%. Employment, as almost all other factors, like having family/kids, higher education, wealth etc etc, might be a correlative or a confounding variable, depending on the study design because the disease mechanisms are so long and convoluted. In the egg and chicken dilemma, I believe that the cognitive decline causes the social inactivity and not the reverse. Get your retirement because that will not cause your dementia.

psychoslave 6mo ago

No, but the lake of activity and intellectual challenges will certainly accelerate it, even for someone middle age with an official employment! Wrote this just by reading the title, and past the summary it clearly lean into that direction.

Havoc 6mo ago

Regardless of whether this is true I do think there is a risk of overdoing it. My dad firmly believes in the "when people quit work they decline" theory. Which may be fair, but he's not in great health and still charging hard. Definitely think you can overdo that & end up working till you drop

Unbeliever69 6mo ago

I voluntarily retired at age 55 after a startup I was a principal in for five years ran out of money (raising funds was not my responsibility). Having worked from home during most of that time, and having nobody to report to other than myself, I decided I couldn't go back to the grind. I was fortunate enough that my wife earns enough and has good enough benefits that I don't need to work. It took a lot of paying down debt and massaging our finances, but it's worked out swimmingly. We're doing far better on one income than we ever did on two. Obviously, at my age, there are no kids in the picture. Not only am I her personal assistant (she's a teacher), but I take care of the household, which takes a ton of stress off her plate. I could see a world where cognitive decline takes place, but it's actually been the opposite for me. When I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities as my wife's assistant and taking care of the household, I have many hours during the day to pursue my own passions. I've also been much more structured with my time. I actively journal. I spend time with friends and family. I occasionally do things for fun like fly fishing. I set aside a specific time to read every day for pleasure and learning. I go to bed at a set time and wake up at 5am. I probably log anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day doing agentic AI coding and design in Claude Code. Freed from the treadmill of employment and the grind of keeping up with the fast pace of deeply learning new technology, I feel sharper than I have in decades. It also doesn't hurt that my passion projects are generating income, which keeps me highly motivated and mentally engaged. I'm sure those of you that read this probably think that I didn't retire. I think an argument can be made for and against this. I feel retired. I just don't fill all of my time with leisure which I think is the trap that many retired people fall into. The things that I do to keep mentally sharp are intentional choices. It just so happens that those things are things that resemble work.

doc_ick 6mo ago

How much of this article is written by ai?

hirako2000 6mo ago

What many comments miss is that society is heavily structured around work. If we didn't work, or simply worked far less, we wouldn't be atomized units not quite finding what to do. There would be more structure of volunteering projects, cafés would be laid out for people having time, instead of for quick grab. Fastfood and drive through may end up being far less common.

SilentM68 6mo ago

The primary argument of this NBER working paper is that "employment, particularly near retirement age, can slow the rate of cognitive decline." Would this not depend on the type of work being done and type of working conditions? Doesn't working in a boring, unchallenging, repetitive, dead-end job, dull the senses? Also, now a day, people continue to work even into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s, at least those that can find work. I don't see many people opting to retire when they have bills to pay. Stan Lee used to say something along the lines of: “I’m not working, I’m playing!” If the job feels like fun, then the primary argument makes more sense to me. Based on past experience, however, I can relate to the later as my senses definitely got dulled, add to that compounding age-related health problems which did not help. I try to do some Sudoku & Mahjongg puzzles at least twice a day, in my Linux machine, just to keep my mind awake.

harrall 6mo ago

I was under the impression that you delay cognitive decline (and keep brain plasticity) by learning new things. So you need to be learning new skills, trying new sports, entering new circumstances continuously. If you’re good at something already, it’s not enough. Employment is one of many ways of keeping things fresh because it’s easy but I see no reason why you can’t keep yourself busy too.

trashface 6mo ago

Or people who have cognitive issues have trouble staying employed...

cathyreisenwitz 6mo ago

I bet another reason women suffer less cognitive decline from early retirement than men is that women are less lonely and more integrated into their extended families and communities.

lenerdenator 6mo ago

More evidence that the US desperately needs to raise the retirement benefits age to 70 or 75. Memory care is one of the most expensive types of eldercare.

da_chicken 6mo ago

This still smells like the kind of paper that a think tank would fund to justify their billionaire-backed policy that social security should be abandoned and the retirement age moved to 75.

zoom6628 6mo ago

Retirement is an artificial modern construct to create jobs. People are supposed to be active until they die. Hobbies are just a replacement activity. I have no intention of retiring (over 60 already). I work in tech and learning new skills and my income feeds and houses my family and pays for my running shoes. As other commenters have noted folk in some places don't have anything but work. That is a global social issue that needs addressing first.

didip 6mo ago

As someone who recently retired early, you really need to have a solid game plan on what you want to do with all the time you have. Spend a solid 3-6 months planning and mocking your post retirement days while still working. The more detailed the plan the better. If you want to go to the gym, what will you do there and for how long and how many days a week? If you want to have a tech side project, how many hours do you plan on spending on this project? And be reasonable. Don't trade one burnout over another. If you are planning to learn something new, what are those? and don't just learn one thing. 8 hours plus is a crazy amount of time. One of those plan should include making new friends post retirement, revolving around activities that are not work related. It is far too easy to lose track of time without a brand new schedule to fill the void.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

m463 6mo ago

Go and read the book or audiobook "Younger Next Year" great book. Explains the biology of aging, how to delay/reverse it and how to retire well. Good background and good advice.

kleiba2 6mo ago

The job I'm currently at definitely does the opposite.

danielovichdk 6mo ago

I think better when I have been off work for 4 weeks and beyond. My mind is dancing into new and glorious places, not being caught or dumbed down by idiotic automative repetitions, inhumane and corporate politics so dumb, walled-off-elite and cargo-cult like that no one can ever convince me that humans in an office space has decreased declining cognitive abilities. People in the workforce are dumber than people outside, no doubt.

tokkkie 6mo ago

Most people don't need a 0 or 100 work-life balance. Maybe just 10% work and 90% life is enough.

jpfromlondon 6mo ago

My own job is accelerating my cognitive decline and destroying my mental wellbeing.

snek_case 6mo ago
I can sympathize... I got to the point where I was sleeping only 5 hours a night, having digestive issues and tinnitus.

kevin_T 6mo ago

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bcjdjsndon 6mo ago

Interestingly rich people who've never worked a day in their life dont have this problem... I wonder what the link could be

gowld 6mo ago
I didn't see that in the OP document. Is that mentioned in the document, or pure speculation on your part?
- bcjdjsndon 6mo ago
  Call it an educated guess.
rootusrootus 6mo ago
I have met people in that situation, and "well adjusted & normal" is often not the description I would use for them.

WalterBright 6mo ago

"Use it or lose it" applies to the brain as well as your muscles. This was well known before this paper.

itrunsdoomguy 6mo ago

Just retire and play Doom.

snek_case 6mo ago
Make it a personal goal to beat every game and expansion pack on nightmare.

pengaru 6mo ago

A lot of comments in here are obviously describing Americans, as if that's representative of some global human reality, without acknowledging the elephant in the room is a cultural problem. Americans in particular tend to have a highly entitled and confused "time is money" view governing their existence that enables them to do nothing except when paid by employers, which obviously results in doing absolutely nothing in retirement.

felishiagreen12 6mo ago

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