‘My remaining 13 million minutes’: productivity, ambition and being realistic in older age

The three-stage life – learn, earn, retire – seems outdated, but what model should we replace it with?

When my mother died and my own “mortality alarm” went off, I found myself thinking deeply about ageing and the best approach to engage with it. My mum was nearly 100 when she died and my dad is alive and well in his 90s. With a bit of luck and if I stay fit and look after my health, I have a good chance of surviving into my 90s too. But is long life, as increasing numbers of us are experiencing, a blessing or a curse? I’d happily accept just 25 more years which would take me to 85. But I don’t just want a long life, I want to be productive to society. In fact, I’m committing to using my remaining 13 million minutes to age as productively as possible.

But in 2023 and following the disruption of the pandemic, what does productivity mean? Is retirement, in the traditional sense of taking a step back, still an aspiration? As a self-described Juvenile Geriatric – someone who’s begun their ageing journey but isn’t officially “old” (in Australia an ‘older adult’ is 65+) – I was brought up in the culture of a three-stage life: learn, earn and retire. But for many of us, that model feels like an outdated version. So what does the new model look like?

What I wanted was something no ongoing employment could give me. I wanted freedom. I wanted to reinvent myself

Occasionally I ponder whether I left my career too early. I had four employers over 35 years. I resigned in my 50s because I felt burned out and was no longer challenged. Then several shiny offers were dangled in front of me. This gave me the confidence to find stimulating work until the time I could access superannuation. Of course, the pandemic derailed that for a while, but it felt normal because the upheaval was global.

I can’t use the word “retire”, because retiring was never my intention.

A few years before quitting, I watched a show about the human body that featured the ironman Lew Hollander. I looked him up recently. He’s about to turn 93. “There’s a time in everyone’s life when you resign yourself,” Lew says. “I haven’t resigned myself yet. ‘When are you old?’ is really the question. And, when you stop dreaming of what you can do, then you’re old. I haven’t stopped dreaming yet.”

I wrote down those words, deeply connecting with the idea that I would not be retiring and that I had much more to give. Just as Lew says, I hadn’t resigned myself yet. But what I wanted was something no ongoing employment could give me. I wanted freedom. I wanted to reinvent myself. I didn’t want to stumble blindly through old age with a sense that it was all over and that i had nothing left to give or learn.

Dr Vas Yiengprugsawan is an associate investigator with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Population Ageing Research (Cepar). In Asia, she says, particularly in Buddhist societies, people are taught to accept life’s impermanence and the cycle of birth, ageing, disease, death. Ageing in Asia she says is seen as a continuance. She opens her lectures to postgraduate students by asking “what do you want to be when you grow old?” The most common responses are that they want to age well, not be a burden to loved ones and be financially secure. Asian students often mention the importance of family caregiving.

“What do you want to be when you grow old?” is a question we should all ask ourselves. Often. Broader conversations about ageing in Australia are focused on quality, costs and staffing in the aged-care sector. We talk about ‘the sector’ rather than people who are ageing, this natural thing that happens to all of us. What we can’t deny is that we are all living longer. Children born today are tomorrow’s centenarians. As a society and as individuals we have to adapt.

Already international experts are debating the policy implications of the “100 Year Life” and “60 Year Career”. Longer lifespans will also have revolutionary implications for our lives, our families, our careers and our future. According to Kate O’Loughlin, an honorary associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at University of Sydney, “the notion of living longer is still one that I think we are grappling with ... There’s no particular recipe or prescription for ageing. It is a changing process for everyone.”

What could a productive older life look like? It’s different for all of us depending on our circumstances and needs. It could be about surviving, reckoning with cost-of-living pressures, or on another level, late-life recognition, learning or a desire to contribute.

I once met Jean Corston, the author of a landmark review of women in the UK criminal justice system. Jean was made a life peer in 2005 after stepping down from her parliamentary career. When I asked what it was like to be in the House of Lords, she spoke of her fellow peers as individuals who were defined by their contribution to society. “The House was for people who would have never stood for election but who were remarkable: one of the greatest fertility experts in the world, the Astronomer Royal, the most brilliant lawyer of our generation ... I began to realise that these were people who had nothing to prove. They didn’t want anything from anybody. They were beyond ambition.”

I used to think of ambition as something like a tank of petrol, which over the course of a life, eventually runs out. “When we talk about ambition, we talk about getting ahead, going up the ladder. But I think that’s a very-old fashioned view. I think as we mature we go into things with our eyes wide open. We don’t get less ambitious, we become more realistic.” says Prof Joanne Earl, a psychologist and retirement planning and adjustment researcher at Macquarie University.

When we talk about ambition, we talk about getting ahead, going up the ladder ... that’s a very old-fashioned view

“I think people like to collect experiences, new skills, tools and opportunities in a way that doesn’t necessarily mean [ambition] is linear and upward.”

Earl says as people get older they should understand what their strengths are and what motivates them, and also what gets them down about work. She says, “if you could throw anything off your plate and give it to someone else, what would you want to throw and what would you want to keep? So you try to build up a picture of what motivates [you].”

She often sees people exiting work because of pent-up frustration or burnout. They might leave because they feel they are escaping from something. “I often wish that if people understood what really motivates them and what they could still enjoy in their work, they might be able to stay working for longer,” she says.

Earl says in some professions, work and identity are so central to people’s lives that in retirement it’s difficult to disconnect and create new identities. This comes into play in family businesses and with professions such as medicine, law, academia and corporate executives. It’s also true of journalists.

However if those same people can view life beyond their careers not as a loss, but as the beginning of something new, then the shift is easier.

“We know from the research that when people go into retirement seeing it as an opportunity to reinvent themselves, that’s when we see better adjustment and more engagement ... Retirement should be an opportunity to reinvent, re-evaluate, re-engineer your life, repurpose your time. You’re not at the end of anything.

Researchers are quick to point out that late-life productivity isn’t always a choice or desire. According to Dr Diane Hoskings, head of research at the advocacy organisation National Seniors, “the whole idea of healthy ageing is very privileged. You have to be able to afford good food. You have to live in a good location where you can walk in green places and for many people, they just don’t have access to these things.”

More older Australians than ever are working. In the past 20 years older Australians (65+) have more than doubled to 15% of the workforce, or 619,000 people. Almost half are employed full-time. But even more would work if they were offered jobs. There are 171,000 people between 55 and 64 looking for work. Earlier I mentioned the desire to contribute. Each year Australians over 55 contribute $74.5bn in unpaid caring and voluntary work

A recent report by National Seniors found that those wanting to return to paid work, “face barriers of ageism, pension disincentives, inflexible employers, skillsets in need of updating and more. The persistence of these barriers makes no sense ... when businesses are crying out for workers.”

An urgent conversation we need to have is why many Australian companies support diversity, equity and inclusion but exclude older workers. Bunnings is an outlier, with 30% of its staff over 50. Research shows that ageism is ingrained in hiring practices. The idea of the “older worker” is getting younger and younger. Ask anyone job-seeking after turning 50 – few companies are recruiting from that age bracket .

“One of the most challenging things around ageing is that it’s so invisible,” says Diane Hosking of National Seniors. “It’s really rare to see older people in the media. I mean typical older people who are ageing naturally.. It’s something we’re very uncomfortable with.”

From the perspective of a Juvenile Geriatric facing my ageing journey, there are many more conversations we need to have. For me, being productive is about redesigning my career where I make projects with collaborators who help me learn as a writer, broadcaster and a performer. The work has to be flexible, to fit in with my other responsibilities as the daughter to an ageing parent, partner, and a mum to my teen. I still have dreams and I still want to contribute, but I also want to be more present, focused and enjoy what’s in front of me. Perhaps I’ll discover that the lens of ageing productively isn’t the right one? Whatever the case, in the words of Lew Hollander, I definitely haven’t resigned yet.