So we've been talking about purpose in real life, talking about purpose among college students, among military, veterans. We've been talking about employees and workplaces. Now I'd like to talk about retirement and aging. Really, really important subject because when you retire, you may need to re-purpose your life. I mean, suddenly you may think, "I'm going to retire and golf all the time now." Then after about five days, you realize you suck at golf. In fact, you're just going to watch the golf channel. "Maybe I'll watch a lot of sports channels and other things," and that's okay. It's just if that's all you're doing and you're just eating chips and hanging out and doing nothing else, you're going to start getting problems in your life. So it's really important to find some way to re-purpose your life with some type of self-transcending purpose. So we're going to cover a little bit of that today. We're going to start with Simone de Beauvoir. Simone de Beauvoir was an existential philosopher and she said this amazing thing. She wrote this book later in her life about purposeful aging. She said this, "There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning." It's essential that we do that. Here's what happens when people start to retire. Over time, their purpose in life starts going down. People start getting tired. They have less energy, or maybe they didn't think about how they might re-purpose their life in the first place. Maybe they had some expectations that they'd start doing certain things, but then those things start becoming less and less important to them over time. So their purpose diminishes. Here's what actually happens. This is only an average, but you know what? Nobody is average. Here's what's really happening with 100 different older people as they're aging. You see that purpose is going all over the place. For a while, a person may have a very high purpose, then maybe they get sick or something happens and they reduce their purpose. So it's bouncing all over the place. So one of the questions that we might have is, how do I build a stronger self-transcending purpose in life in this later chapter of my life? How do I make that a consistent purpose over time? Very important. Here's what happens if you can't maintain a purpose over your life. This is a study that was done at the Rush Alzheimer's Center in Chicago, looking at people who were in this retirement phase who had a lower or higher purpose in life. It turns out that over time, people with a lower purpose in life were 2.4 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than people with a high purpose in life. This is after statistically controlling for health status and cognitive deficits at time 1. Even after all of that was statistically controlled for, they couldn't get rid of this effect. People with a strong purpose in life seemed to be more protected from Alzheimer's disease than people with a weak or low purpose in life. So in interviewing Jim Loehr, I wanted to find out what he's doing in this chapter of his life, and first of all he's not retired at all. He will work until he dies, I'm pretty certain. He talks a lot about stress and he has a really unique perspective on stress that I just love. He also has a number 1 objective of any retired person. Am pretty much convinced that our bodies were purpose-driven species. When we are without a purpose, we're pretty much designed to self-destruct. This is built in the evolutionary cycle where if you're not contributing something, then you're consuming resources that really should be devoted to someone who has a purpose to make the world better. So there may actually be a natural selection component of this? I'm convinced it is. I really believe there is, and I believe that the trigger is old man stress. That when you get out from the reach of old man stress, it means you no longer really are a productive, vital force. You have to seek stress. I wrote a whole book on it where, Stress For Success, the whole idea that we have to seek stress, then recover from it, seek it. When we no longer seek stress, when we're simply sitting on the sidelines, we go to the beach and drink martinis, you're going to check out much sooner. You're going to lose your capacity. If you don't use that brain, you're going to lose it. You want to be challenged? You have to go out and do something, or your system will take over and you'll be forced to the side line in a permanent way. Which is what a purpose does. That's exactly right. Right. Okay. So I believe that the more people begin to understand, like first my mom lived to be four days from 100. Her sense of purpose, and I always was questioning her because she was another one of my living laboratories that I had access to all the time. So I would ask my mom, "Why do you fight so hard? You could have died much younger." She said she would be going in her late '80s to the nursing home, administering to other people, and they would come to her and go, "Mary how old are you? You're 10 years older than I am and you're here helping me." She goes, "No. No." She was an extremely religious person. If you look at the data, we know that people have strong religious backgrounds tend to whether because they have the sense that if they're still here, the good Lord wants them to be here. So they have a purpose and all their suffering, all their ailments, she had two hip replacement, all kinds of issues, but she just continued to truck along. She drove her own car. She never wanted anyone to have to take care of her and she felt like, for her, life is about dedicating yourself to something much bigger, and hers was a spiritual dimension. I believe that, whether we call it a religious spiritual dimension, we have to have some sense that our purpose is really, really powerful for this stage in my life. There has to be a purpose and it's always evolving. So a retired person, their number 1 objective is not to retire and go to the beach, but to go out and reflect on what is this next chapter? How can I become fully engaged, seek stress again, do something that will actually turn all the lights on, make me feel like I'm actually worth something again and make sure my system goes, "I'm not going to allow this guy or this woman to checkout now. They obviously are serving a useful purpose and let's keep them here longer."? So for me, purpose is the thing that ignites all the cells. We have 50 trillion cells and they're all operating from purpose.
