[Galatians328]

Interesting discussion on dealing with not being your best professionally.

[econjack]

...senior citizens who rarely or never “felt useful” were nearly three times as likely as those who frequently felt useful to develop a mild disability, and were more than three times as likely to have died during the course of the study.

A very LONG read that essentially says: Find something you love to do before retirement and then enjoy doing it after retirement. The unhappy retirees who I know are those who don't have anything to do all day and just sit at home hoping someone will come by who they can bitch to. If you're unhappy, it's your problem and you need to do something about it.

[jimtorr]

Speaking as someone who decidedly overworked and burned out - and speaking only about the excerpt - usually it is best to slow down and take longer to get where you want to go. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Run slower, and stay at your best longer.

[glorgau]

Hah! happened years ago. Just working for a paycheck and that is exactly what I told my boss after a 1.5% cost of living raise. ;-)

[mjp]

Was there anything I could do, starting now, to give myself a shot at avoiding misery—and maybe even achieve happiness—when the music inevitably stops?

As long as the future remains open-ended, there is possibility, and where there is possibility, there is hope. Hope turns to hopelessness when the future is perceived as being as unchangeable as the past.

When you believe that a particular occurrence in the present will necessarily lead to certain future occurrences,you are generating a present-to-future cause-effect relationship between those occurrences. Doing X now will result in being happy in the future. Cause-effect relationships are part of the internal processes that are required to achieve desired outcomes.

[SolidRedState]

I am at this point in my career where I feel there is nothing left to accomplish. I have no challenges other than to get out of bed and make it to the office in the morning.

There is plenty happening, but I am now on the sidelines of the action and feeling left out.

Time to move on and just enjoy life I guess.

[dfwgator]

Prepare to work for yourself by the time you reach 40. Start preparing while you are in college.

[agere_contra]

Good article, thanks for posting!

My contribution would be to recommend that men develop an absorbing hobby while they are still working hard professionally.

A hobby that they wish they could spend more time with.

Then one day they will get the chance to move from their old, absorbing work to concentrate on what they love.

[Lazamataz]

I disagree with this article. As a professional hit-man, I feel my body count is increasing every year as I enter dotage.

Who expects a really old guy to kill you with his jello cup?

[A_perfect_lady]

Okay, my bet is that the man on the plane was Buzz Aldrin.

[Our man in washington]

The problem is we don’t know when decline will happen or in what form. My view is do the best you can and if you don’t have the mental agility you once had, don’t worry about it. God still loves you. There’s no point in saying “i’m 60.My best engineering days are over.” You might still be a pretty good engineer but not what you once were. We don’t have to spend every moment in life on the peak. Somebody at 80 percent of their peak is still someone who is useful.

[discostu]

I’ve never had that much of my sense of self worth tied to my job. I do it, I’m good at it, I go home.

[Agatsu77]

Get a hobby. Travel. Start thinking now about what you WANT to do rather than “how bad can it get”.

[Billthedrill]

For those of us blessed by modern medicine with the expectation of a life longer than our predecessors, the answer may be as simple as Retire And Then Do Something Else. It seems to be working for me.

Still, I'm minded of one of Neil Peart's best lyrics:

The writer stares with glassy eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage
Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision

And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more

Sadder still to watch it die
Than never to have known it
For you, the blind who once could see
The bell tolls for thee, bell tolls for thee...

He's my age, it turns out. Says he's retired. Last I heard he was still pretty damn good.

[Dr. Sivana]

“Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy,” Alex Dias Ribeiro, a former Formula 1 race-car driver, once wrote. “For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line. His destiny is to die of bitterness or to search for more success in other careers and to go on living from success to success until he falls dead. In this case, there will not be life after success.”

As I read the article, I couldn't help but think of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Del Shannon, who had continual boughts of depression and finally took his own life at the age of 61, right before his final album was due to come out.

He hit a huge with "Runaway" in 1961, at the age of 26, and never could quite match that initial success. Even his last album's release for a single was a tune called "Walkaway".

Similarly, Danny of Danny and the Juniors (At the Hop, Rock 'n' Roll is Here to Stay). I imagined him, a talented guitarist who hit big early, performing to shrinking, aging audiences who just wanted to hear "At the Hop".

[Dr. Sivana]

There are some well known exceptions to the early decline rule. The writer Rex Stout didn’t create Nero Wolfe until well into his 40s, and the stories remained solid until the last few years when Stout was in his ‘80s. Colonel Sanders didn’t hit it big with Kentucky Fried Chicken until he was well into his ‘60s.

[Mr. Jeeves]

A potential answer lies in the work of the British psychologist Raymond Cattell, who in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems—what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s. This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.

Companies with large tech-oriented workforces are well aware of this - and address it in ways that tend to be criticized as age discrimination.