Anti retirement support

In My Humble Opinion
121

Serious question: other than being on the look out for decline in skills or performance what do you suggest?

I know of someone working into her late 70s (she may even early 80s) with no declines in either, definitely better judgement, and even better productivity than the vast majority, painful knee limiting her mobility be damned. And those who are much younger than me who, well …

For me, I have a tight group of partners in the office and we see what each other do, discuss regularly. That provides some oversight and the opportunity to be, politely and respectfully, called out when the time comes, or with any times one of us might make a retrospectively questionable call. My wife? She is thinking about it harder. She is in solo practice. If starts to lose her edge who is there to call her out on it? A client? Just me noticing if when her memory starts to slip?

I don’t have a good answer. I don’t think a number is the good answer though.

122

1. Work isn’t fulfilling. Eh. GIS can be very, very cool. But I was past my ‘sell by’ date. 36 years in mapping. Enough.

2. Tech fatigue. Totally agree here. One of the reasons I left. Every damn year I would need to learn a new application and keep my skills up on the old ones.

3. Promotions aren’t exciting. Not why I was there. I do NOT want to be in a suporvisory spot

4. Sunday dread starts early. Yes for me.

5. You’re always checking your retirement accounts. I do that. It’s a good idea to.

6. Hobbies and volunteering dominate your daydreams. Not really. It’s just real nice to not have to cram everything on a weekend. Though one thing I’m going to do is learn the piano.

7. You notice a generational gap at work. We’ve always been a broad age group in our office.

8. You’re jealous of retired friends or partners. Don’t know any. I’m the first to go.

9. Your boss is unbearable. Previous boss was bad. Gave me a ton of shit for going to my FIL’s funereal. New boss was someone I trained. She I like and consider her a friend.

10. Physical signs are unavoidable. Not a physical job, but I wanted to let go and let others do all the new shit coming down the pike. They where doing great. I just wasn’t interested anymore. And, I was kinda becoming a glass ceiling. Time to go.

123

A number is definitely not the answer- but in addition to a decline in skills/performance, I would look for a change in attitude. One of the things that really prompted me to retire was the new legislation that would completely change my job. Whether I agreed with the goals or not, it would require me to learn a lot of new procedures and processes and teach them to the others in my office. I’d been through something similar before and didn’t want to learn something new at that age. I’ve known lots of people who didn’t want to learn anything new anymore - and they made themselves and everyone around them miserable as they refused to use email and were trying to find an actual typewriter to use. And plenty of them were in fact old enough to get their pension and Social Security - someone who is 40 probably can’t just stop working but someone who is 70 plus at my job probably could have retired. .

124

Work isn’t fulfilling. It is. At least, it was with my last two jobs. This one may have more “finding the right numbers” and less “analyzing the numbers” than i like. The jury is out.

Tech fatigue. Not wild about interacting with OneDrive, but the primary tools are in my wheelhouse. Not a problem.

3. Promotions aren’t exciting. I haven’t aspired to more than my current level in decades. I decided i was paid enough, and preferred fewer hours and less management responsibilities.

4. Sunday dread starts early. Nope

5. You’re always checking your retirement accounts. Nope. My husband does that for me. And i already decided i have enough money to retire.

6. Hobbies and volunteering dominate your daydreams. I have thought more about my hobbies than my job in my spare time for ages. But I’ve also learned that if i don’t have structure in my life, i fritter away my time doing stuff like posting on the SDMB, or watching YouTube. I get more done in my hobbies when i have deadlines and competing priorities than i do when I’m on vacation, or retired.

7. You notice a generational gap at work. Hmm. I may currently be the oldest on the team, but not by much. Also, i like working with and socializing with younger people. (And older people.) I certainly don’t feel socially out of it when interacting with coworkers, if that’s the question. I have a much bigger generation gap with one of my hobbies, and i consider it a benefit, as it keeps me somewhat up to date.

8. You’re jealous of retired friends or partners. Nope.

9. Your boss is unbearable. This is why i retired, in part. But i haven’t had any problems with the current job. I’m not actually sure who’s i report to, as it’s a consulting firm and stuff is done by pools and teams.

10. Physical signs are unavoidable. It’s a desk job. If i stop being capable intellectually, i suspect I’ll get fired. Or encouraged to quit. I think this is someone else’s problem, honestly. (Which wouldn’t be a major problem. I’ve already retired and am collecting a pension from the job i had for more than 25 years. This is just a part time hourly gig.)

125

Yeah those are several of the items in that list, and easy to be self aware of honestly.

Creeping cognitive decline, when/if it happens, may be harder to self detect. Pretty comfortable that it is not imminent, but possibly should just pick arbitrary years to gather my partners round and ask for bluntly honest assessments. Maybe every three or four years starting at 70? Assuming my joy of working etc. all stay the same … And open to possibilities it could change. The business is likely to change hands soon. Physicians equity share will become even less (doubt zero). Probably no worse a corporate masters circumstance than present, but you never know!

126

I had worked with this individual for quite a few years, so the decline was obvious to me. He was highly skilled and he was still useful till he retired, but his output declined quite a bit so I ended up taking on the parts he wasn’t doing (I’m grateful for that now since I now do all of that work and I love it). It was when he had to start taking the RMDs from his 401 that he started thinking about retiring. He had plenty of money and should’ve retired years earlier but I don’t think he had much outside of work. I saw him a couple of years later and he had obvious memory issues (Alzheimer’s or dementia) which was very sad to see. I’m on that path and another reason I’m retiring early (60).

127

Why? Okay less productive but you say

Did he make mistakes that caused harms? That would be my nightmare scenario. I produce less I get paid less and no harm to anyone unless I am forcing others to carry my weight. I have numbers to watch for that.

128

My dad was an extreme workaholic. He could have retired in his mid50s like I did or ever earlier but work was all he had. Also drinking. He was a very high functioning alcoholic. He worked 80+ hours a week for most of his life. As he got older he somewhat slowed down and by the time he finally died just before turning 80 he was down to 20-30 hours/week. There were things that he loved to do when he was young like sailing and going to Laker games but that all fell away as did his friends because he never had time for them and they were sick of his shit. He was certainly starting to decline cognitively at the end but he was still consulting at Rand (a very high end think tank) and they kept renewing his contract every year which certainly wasn’t them being charitable. He loved it all but barely knew his family. It’s a choice.

129

No harm, but he was highly paid (no reduction in pay) and I started doing his work for him. He was useful, but his output seriously declined but he still got paid the same. For the period of this decline before he finally retired, I did a lot of his work. But, I formally took over that portion later which was a benefit to me.

130

In my biz you can tell they’re getting past their sell-by date when their hearing goes, short term memory for arbitrary facts goes, and the ability to remain focused goes bad. Loss of night vision and alertness when working overnight get strongly worse. Adapting to timezone chsnged gets hard too.

@Llama_Llogophile and @Richard_Pearse will have more details; they both work with more elderly pilots than my situation did.

131

I am probably past my sell-by date for a pilot. My night vision has noticably declined. My hearing is still okay, but not what it was. My short term memory for anniversary facts has always been terrible, but it’s getting worse. My recall of words has always been terrible (i first noticed real problems with it at age 6, when i couldn’t recall the name of my best friend, as she approached my house) but has declined.

But actuaries don’t need good reflexes, generally work in well-lit areas, and can take notes and Google words and names if they need to.

Also, actuaries’ work gets peer-reviewed, and while it’s helpful for the long-term health of a company, no one dies if they make a mistake.

132

As does keyboarding.

133

I’m on my phone the next few days. Gonna be uncaught typos.

134

My larger point was poor vision, poor hearing, losing track of what you’re doing, are all signs every occupation can look to as signs of declining capacity. How bad they have to get befor the job of MD, actuary, musician, whatever becomes untenable surely differs.

But if your goal is to not be an ineffectual duffer like @wguy123’s colleague, those are the signs to watch for and quit before you start feeling like they’re obstacles to whatever your work tasks are.

135

I made it a point as a manufacturing engineer to not ever work in an industry where a screw up would kill people (like medical devices) or doing a great job would kill people (like weapons).

136

You have my sympathy. I’ve given up trying to post on da Dope on my phone, my eyesight just isn’t good enough or my fingers are too fat, not sure which.

137

So if I can manage to use my phone to post, as I typically do, I’m good to work! :grinning_face:

138

I had another actuary peer review your numbers. There is actually a slight chance someone might die if you make a mistake. :smiley:

139

That was another reason for me. One on one, face to face is fine, but team meetings sucked. Even when I worked from home. Actually it got worse. The rest of my team would meet around a table and use ONE laptops mic. And of course I could only see one person. Jesus, get a headset and and a camera for your desk PC and everyone use their own.

They felt that the one laptop mic and speaker was fine. We are a tech group. For gods sake use technology.

They didn’t even use headsets when on the phone and having to type. Say a tech support call. Well one guy did. But sheessss.

140

Why would i use a headset just because i need to do a little typing? Typing isn’t very loud. The built in mike is as good as the one in the headset. I’ve had two coworkers with flaky headsets, who were really hard to hear and sounded distorted, or the sound just cut out altogether. Both had completely fine sound when they removed the headsets. I often urge them to remove their headset so i could hear them.

If you are in a noisy environment, and you don’t want the person next to you to hear your call, and you don’t want the guy you are working with to hear the person next to you, you need a headset. But many people working from home don’t have that kind of issue. I don’t.

I assume the people in the same room shared the one laptop mike because otherwise you get echos and other problems that make the meeting untenable. We used to all use our own laptop for hybrid meetings, so the remote people could see all the faces. But we muted all the microphones except the one that belonged to the conference room. Otherwise it didn’t work. I suppose we could have all worn our own headphones, but that would have been really weird when we were in the same room.