Retirement: a new way of living

Host Walter Isaacson and guests discuss retirement’s roots and how life expectancy, the workforce and technology impact how we experience life after work.
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In this episode:

  • Webb of opportunity (0:00)
  • Hard times (4:02)
  • A golden age (11:29)
  • Retiring "retirement" (13:23)
  • Working to live (16:52)
  • Call it co-housing (20:37)
  • Innovation against isolation (24:01)
  • Predicting possibilities (27:48)

retirementThe passage of the Social Security Act and the establishment of the Old Age Insurance Program in 1935 helped usher in a golden age of retirement for Americans. Now, more Americans are staying in the workplace past the age of 65, learning new skills and discovering new ways of living. And with advances in technology, they can find different ways to interact and connect. Hear all about the evolution of senior living on this episode of Trailblazers.

Modern Elders are always learning. Take a page out of there book and listen for more.

The workforce is changing. So is the office.

Retirement and aging often go hand in hand. Hear more about what it means to get old.

Advances in healthcare could help us live longer, fuller lives. Learn more in our healthcare episode.

“I think as we get older, we become alchemists. We learn how to mix curiosity and wisdom, extroversion and introversion, gravitas and levity.”

— Chip Conley, hotelier, author and founder of the Modern Elder Academy

Guest List

  • retirement Dor Skuler is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded five ventures, the most recent being Intuition Robotics, following his passion to develop artificial intelligence-driven robotics that addresses major social issues of the 21st century, such as loneliness.
  • retirement W. Andrew Achenbaum is a semi-retired professor of history and gerontology in Houston's Texas Medical Center, has studied U.S. retirement patterns for fifty years. He is currently finishing his seventh book, Leaving a Legacy in an Aging Society: Safeguarding Social Security for Future Generations.
  • retirement Katie McCamant brings the depth and diversity of her 35 years of experience as a developer, architect, and cohousing resident to benefit her clients. Coauthor of Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, and more recently, Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities, Katie co-founded McCamant & Durrett Architects/The CoHousing Company with Charles Durrett.
  • retirement Joseph F. Coughlin PhD is Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab. He teaches in MIT's Department of Urban Studies & Planning and the Sloan School's Advanced Management Program. Coughlin conducts research on the impact of global demographic change and technology trends on consumer behavior and business strategy.
  • retirement Chip Conley His bestselling book "Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder" is a testament to rethinking the value of having 5 generations in the workplace and why more companies are doing their best to encourage their older workers to stay in the workplace longer. Chip's Modern Elder Academy has more than 2,000 alums who've come to the Mexican beachfront campus and MEA will be opening two campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico soon.

Walter Isaacson:

Del Webb was a man with an uncanny ability to see opportunities and make the most of them. In 1928, Webb was a carpenter for a construction company, building a grocery store in Phoenix. One day, the owner of the company disappeared. Webb stepped in and finished the job. That was the start of the Del E. Webb Construction Company. By 1935, it was a $3 million business on its way to becoming one of the largest construction companies in America. In 1945, Webb, a big baseball fan had the opportunity to become one of the owners of the game’s most iconic franchise, the New York Yankees. He bought the team for $2.8 million, won 10 World Series, and eventually sold it for $14 million. Then in the 1950s, Webb saw another opportunity. For the first time in American history, there was a large group of older Americans who were active, healthy, and ready to stop working. And thanks to social security, private pensions, and other retired plans, they had money to spend.

Walter Isaacson:

But these seniors weren’t just looking to retire from work, they also wanted to have some fun, and Webb thought he could meet that need. So Webb bought 20,000 acres of farmland in the outskirts of Phoenix and began construction of a planned community for people over the age of 55. He started with a 9-hole golf course, a shopping plaza, a recreation center, and five model homes. He called it, Sun City. On January 1st, 1960, Sun City opened its doors to the public and it quickly became apparent that Del Webb had struck gold once again. An estimated 100,000 people visited the site on that first weekend and 237 homes were sold. In August 1962, Time magazine put Webb’s picture on its cover. With the caption, The Retirement City, a new way of life for the old.

Walter Isaacson:

Over the next couple of decades, this new way of life built around the idea of active leisure and age restricted communities would transform America’s idea of retirement. Today, hundreds of thousands of seniors live in similar planned communities scattered throughout Arizona, Florida, and California. But many retirees are looking for something more than a place to play pickle ball. Baby boomers, whose grandparents were that first generation of active seniors, are the new retirees. They’re living longer, healthier lives. And while they may have stopped working, there’s lots they still want to accomplish. And once again, they’re redefining the idea of retirement in America. I’m Walter Isaacson, and you’re listening to Trailblazers, an original podcast from Dell technologies.

Speaker 2:

If you ever figure out what you’d be like in a few years, you still need a plan.

Speaker 3:

A man, your age, shouldn’t be lifting a heavy motor.

Speaker 4:

This is the home office of the American Social Security program that affects practically every American family.

Speaker 3:

All you got to do is sit and wait for the fish to bite.

Speaker 5:

Time to enjoy yourself.

Walter Isaacson:

Until the middle of the 20th century, most Americans never had the luxury of considering what they would do when they retired. The average life expectancy for men in colonial times was only 38 years. Most of these men were farmers, who worked until they dropped. But by the end of the 19th century, about one third of Americans were living in cities. Many were working in large industrial factories, where neither the air they breathe, the water they drank, or the work they did were conducive to a long and happy life.

Andy Achenbaum:

If I’m not a farmer but a worker, and I’m working on a railroad or working in a steel mill, the odds of me be getting disabled are huge. And as soon as I’m disabled, I’m going to sit outside the mill and ask for money. That’s hardly a nice retirement.

Walter Isaacson:

Andy Achenbaum is a professor emeritus of history and gerontology at the University of Houston.

Andy Achenbaum:

There are a few companies in 1875, which would give me a gratuity, not a pension, but a gratuity. If I made it to a certain age and had certain years of service. So if I were 60 and had worked for them for 20 years, I might get a gratuity doing good times. But if I fell ill or if I were disabled, too bad.

Walter Isaacson:

Average life expectancy at the turn of the 20th century was still only 48 years. So there weren’t many older workers to look after and those who did need help were left to their own devices.

Andy Achenbaum:

This individualism and self reliance stuff is really serious as part of the middle class mentality of Americans. And so, people really expected me to get by, unless it was clear, I wasn’t getting by. And then the next recourse really was the family. And if there was no family around, there would be this hope that the local community would take care of you.

Walter Isaacson:

Many older workers who fell through the holes in this very porous social safety net were institutionalized, not in homes with other seniors, but in poor houses. Here, healthy people in their 50s and 60s were lumped in with the sick, the disabled, and the mentally ill. And there wasn’t a great deal of sympathy for their plight.

Joe Coughlin:

The story of old age and the story of retirement was made up by British medical science in the 1800s, and even stuck around in the 1900s and is still imprinted on our minds, well now and into the future, probably.

Walter Isaacson:

This is Joe Coughlin. He’s the founder and director of the MIT AgeLab. In his research, he has tracked many of our attitudes towards retirement, back to a widely held belief that originated in 19th century England. The idea was, that we’re all born with a fixed amount of vital energy that dissipates over time. The longer you worked, the more energy you’d lose.

Joe Coughlin:

Keep in mind, labor was almost universally about physical strength. You were a cog in the wheel. So it only made sense that young people, particularly young men, were able to do all that heavy lifting in work that was labor. And as they got older, they were less able to do it, or they were slower or it started to hurt more. So the way they explained that away was, “Well it’s age. You’re running out of the vital force. The vital energy you need to be a worker.” And so retirement became a way of, “Well, you need to retire because there’s this long line of younger people with more vital force, more energy and speed and efficiency to take your job.” And that’s why even today we are left with this notion that there’s a long line of people just waiting for you to get out of the way. And so what it became was not just social welfare policy to support the population because of their needs, it became an economic philosophy based on antiquated science.

Walter Isaacson:

United States wasn’t the only newly industrialized country trying to figure out what to do with its growing army of older workers. In 1889, German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, alarmed by the growing appeal of Marxism among the working class, announced the world’s first pension for older and disabled workers. But at what age did someone become an older worker?

Joe Coughlin:

Bismarck, who essentially the chancellor of Germany, asked his actuaries, “Gee, what is life expectancy?” And they said, “Well, sir, it’s roughly 46 to 47 years old.” And he said, “Great, we’ll make it 65. We will never run out of money.” But it gave, shall we say, an end point where governments and employers did not have to quibble with a older worker to move aside. We actually made it into a ritual and we’ve done it so well for well over a hundred years, that you would think that everyone believes they’ve got a biological clock that ticks starting at 60, and ticks off at 65.

Walter Isaacson:

It would take more than 40 years and a catastrophic economic collapse before the US followed Germany’s lead and created a national old age social insurance program. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit older Americans, especially hard. Those who were working, lost their jobs. Those who were retired or close to it, watch the lifetime of savings disappear as the stock market crashed and the banking system collapsed. So Americans looked to Washington for help. And in 1935, President Roosevelt responded with the passage of the Social Security Act. It created the Old Age Assistance program to address the immediate crisis by providing cash payments to poor seniors, regardless of their work history and to meet the long term needs of older Americans, it established something else, an Old Age Assistance program. This program was funded by contributions from workers wages and employer payrolls. Social Security was a game changer, for the first time, most middle aged workers could leave the workforce by 65 and not live an abject poverty.

Walter Isaacson:

Many also saw their retirement savings bolstered by private pension, which most big employers began to offer as a postwar economy boom. The rate of older Americans living in poverty, fell from 50% in 1935 to around 15%, 40 years later. This amounted to, what historian Andy Achenbaum calls, the golden age of American retirement.

Andy Achenbaum:

The country was booming, relatively speaking. The unions were powerful back then. In 1948, the United Auto Workers and United Mine Workers said, “We want health benefits and we want bigger pensions.” And they got them. And so I would argue that between 19, say 44, until about 1974, it was really possible for the middle class to enjoy the benefits of retirement. People were not buying condos in Palm Beach, but they could become snowbirds. People had leisure, the 40 hour week was established, vacations were increasing. And part of that collateral benefit was this retirement.

Walter Isaacson:

This was the first generation to retire with Social Security benefits, private pensions, life insurance, and eventually Medicare. These were the people with money in their pockets, who flocked to Sun City and other retirement communities in the 1960s. Everything about their retirement would be different, from their parents and their grandparents and they were living longer too. Today, people over age 65 represent about 15% of the American population. That’s an all time high and their numbers are growing quicker than any other age group. In fact, life expectancy has risen to nearly 80 and this generation of seniors is, once again, changing the way we think about retirement.

 Chip Conley:

Yes, I would like to retire the word retirement. I think it was very necessary in the 20th century. I think it is less necessary in the 21st century.

Walter Isaacson:

That’s Chip Conley, who, at the age of 61, refers to himself as a modern elder. He spent 24 years running a boutique hotel called Joie de Vivre. After he sold it in 2010, Conley was approached by the founders of a San Francisco startup, Airbnb. They wanted to bring him on board to share his knowledge of the hospitality industry. He was 52. The guys running Airbnb were in their twenties.

 

Chip Conley

So about three months into it, they said, “Oh, chip, you’re our modern elder.” And I said, “Oh my God, that’s a curse word. What are you saying, I’m a modern elder?” I didn’t like what they were saying. And then one of the founders said, “Chip, you’re as curious as you are wise. And that’s our definition of a modern elder.”

Walter Isaacson:

Ever since, Conley has been exploring the idea of what it means to be a modern elder in the workplace and beyond. He’s even founded something called the Modern Elder Academy, which he describes as a midlife wisdom school. He’s done a lot of thinking about why 20th century ideas about retirement don’t make sense today. And it begins with some basic math.

 Chip Conley:

Very few people have done this math calculation, but it’s one that was done for me by a friend when I was starting the Modern Elder Academy. And he said, “Chip, I’m 54 years old. And I think I’m going to live till about age 90. And if I live till age 98, I have 36 years of adulthood behind me, 18 to 54. And I have 36 years of adulthood ahead of me. So at age 54, I am in exactly halfway through my adult life.” Now, when you recognize that in your mid-fifties, that, in fact, you have as much adulthood ahead of you, as you have behind you, the last thing you’re going to want to do is to retire or just basically say, “I am going to bide my time playing bingo and playing golf.” So I think that there’s a growing number of people who realize that if you’re going to live longer, you’re likely going to work longer as well.

Walter Isaacson:

For millions of Americans, working longer is a necessity, not a choice. Today, the golden age retirement security has given way to a new era of considerable insecurity. Those fully funded company pension plans, that once supplemented social security benefits are increasingly rare. Instead, over the past few decades, there’s been a dramatic shift towards individual retirement accounts. People are now responsible for accumulating their own retirement savings. But putting enough money aside to fund a retirement that could last 20 years is a luxury many American families simply can’t afford. According to the Economic Policy Institute, nearly half have no retirement savings at all. But it’s not just money that’s keeping many Americans in the workforce past their retirement age. It’s also the very real way that work can contribute to their mental and physical health.

 Chip Conley:

If you want to increase your mortality rate or how quickly you will die, you’ll actually increase that by two years when you retire. And it’s a strange thing because the three things people need after age 50 are purpose, community, and wellness. But when you retire, you lose the purpose often, you definitely lose your work community. And strangely enough, with more time on your hands, you often lose your wellness, partly because you don’t have the disciplinary structure you had when you were working. So work provides sort of a scaffolding for how you live your life. So if they’re going to live till age, let’s say early 80s, that means they’ll maybe work till their early 70s. And it’s not just the fact that they have to do it for financial reasons, for many people, it’s the thing that actually gives them a reason to get up in the morning.

Walter Isaacson:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the year 2000, about 5% of the American workforce was age 75 or older. Today, that percentage has nearly doubled. There are still problems of ageism in many workplaces, but attitudes towards older workers are beginning to change.

 

Chip Conley

We’re already starting to see more and more companies look at older workers as a resource, as opposed to somebody who needs to retire.

Walter Isaacson:

Today is not unusual for company’s workforce to include five generations of workers. Managing that kind of diversity can be a challenge. But Conley believes that in a world where wisdom is becoming as important as knowledge, the presence of modern elders in the workplace benefits both younger and older workers.

 Chip Conley:

I think as we get older, we become alchemists. We learn how to mix curiosity and wisdom, extroversion and introversion, gravitas and levity. And that all chemical wisdom allows us to know when we need a little more of one versus the other. So a modern elder generally is somebody who’s going to be learning from younger people as much as they are teaching. It’s very different than a traditional elder. That traditional elder had all the power and all the wisdom and it just flowed downhill to the younger people. Today, it’s the physics of wisdom, in my opinion, moves in both directions. So modern elder learns as much as they teach it.

Walter Isaacson:

At Chip Conley’s Modern Elder Academies in Mexico and Santa Fe, the average age is 54 and participants learn skills that will help carry them through the second half of their adult life. Whether they remain in the workforce or not, the emphasis is on regeneration rather than retirement. You can also buy a home and live at the Modern Elder Academy, just like you can at Sun City. But instead of a fairway in front of your house, you’ll find a farm, instead of bingo and bridge, there’ll be yoga and workshops on wellness. Retirement living is clearly not what it used to be. Many older Americans are looking for something more meaningful than the perpetual leisure offered by traditional retirement communities. Baby boomers now make up the majority of that 50 plus crowd. And true to their 1960s roots, many of them are forming so-called intentional communities. These are communities where they can grow old, surrounded by people who share their ideals and values and who are committed to looking after each other.

Katie McCamant:

I wasn’t looking for anything new. Because I was young, I just assumed that all those fancy architects and the US know all about this, because it seems so obvious. And then I was quite shocked when I got back to UC Berkeley and which is one of the more progressive architecture departments in the country. And nobody knew anything about co-housing there.

Walter Isaacson:

This is Katie McCamant in 1980, she was as a young architecture student at UC Berkeley. When she and her partner traveled to Denmark to study Danish housing. It was there that she discovered neighborhoods unlike any she had seen in the US. There was no name for it in English, so McCamant decided to call it co-housing.

Katie McCamant:

In your typical co-housing community, what you’ll find is the cars are off to the side. So the space between the houses is people, kids playing, gardens, people hanging out. And so there really is a strong life between the houses, not just in the houses. And with that, really creates a much stronger sense of neighborhood. So it’s really a neighborhood where people actually know each other and work in a collaborative way.

Walter Isaacson:

McCamant returned to the United States. And in 1991 designed Muir Commons in Davis, California. Based on the Danish model, it was America’s first, newly constructed co-housing community. Residents own their own homes, complete with kitchens and yards. But there was also a large common house for communal dining, as well as many other shared facilities. Katie McCamant now runs a consulting company, called CoHousing Solutions, and lives in a co-housing community with about a hundred other residents that she designed in Nevada City, California. Like most of the roughly 200 co-housing communities in the US, Nevada City is intergenerational. The youngest resident is six months old, about 10% are over 80. There’s nothing new about intergenerational living. Millions of older Americans move in with their grown children, sometimes by choice, often by necessity. But today, more than 16% of American adults over age 55 have no children. That percentage is due to increase over the next 20 years. That’s one big reason that Katie McCamant is convinced we need more co-housing communities like Nevada City.

Katie McCamant:

And so as you have more and more single person households or couples that don’t have kids, they’re looking at new ways of how do you create your family, your tribe. Who’s there for you when things get tough or when you need a hand? So in our society, American society, we count on the kids to keep an eye on you as you get older. And I just think we need to, in modern society, be much more deliberate about doing that. It doesn’t happen naturally. I hear from people all the time saying, “Oh, I’m not ready yet.” And I’m here to say by the time you think you’re ready, it’s too late. You have to build your community long before you need it.

Walter Isaacson:

Co-housing is also designed to address, but many experts believe may be the greatest danger facing American seniors today, an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation. According to a survey by the American Association of Retired Persons, one in three Americans aged 50 to 80 report feeling lonely. The Centers for Disease Control reports that the lack of meaningful social connections increases the risk of premature death at a risk level that may rival smoking, obesity and physical inactivity. More than a quarter of America over the age of 60 live alone and alternative living arrangements, such as co-housing are one way of tackling that problem. But even co-housing supporters can see that it’s not for everyone, which is why many people are looking to technology for an answer to loneliness or to be more specific looking at robots, meet ElliQ.

Dor Skuler:

ElliQ is a care companion that enters the home of the older adult and builds a relationship with them. She’s proactive. She initiates the interactions with them, ask them about their day and builds trust.

Walter Isaacson:

That’s Dor Skuler, the Israeli entrepreneur behind ElliQ. Thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence, ElliQ may be the friendliest robotic companion on the market today. ElliQ’s story began when Dor Skuler went looking for a caregiver for his grandfather. The first person he hired was highly qualified, but this caregiver and his grandfather just didn’t get along. The second person proved to be a perfect match. She was just as qualified as the first person, but she also laughed at his jokes.

Dor Skuler:

And it really struck me that the difference between success and failure is not the ability to provide utility, but the ability to project empathy and meet a social need we have as people. And when you look at today’s technology, they don’t do that. You look at Alexa, you look at Siri or Google Home, these are AI assistance that wait for us to give it a command and they execute it. But they’re not a companion, they don’t provide any sense of projection of empathy. They’re not there for the journey we go through as humans and to me for the next level of AI to really reach the promise, we all hope for it. We need to create those type of capabilities and where better than to start with the aging population that have a lot of their social needs unmet.

Walter Isaacson:

ElliQ doesn’t look the way we think a robot should look. It doesn’t walk. It can’t move objects around, doesn’t even have a face. It actually resembles a desk lamp that can light up when it’s talking to you. It has a screen where it can share information. It uses AI to project empathy, to be cognitive and proactive, and try to create a meaningful relationship between itself and its the human friend.

Dor Skuler:

So for example, a common first interaction of the day with ElliQ for the older adult, is ElliQ noticing you when you walk into the room for the first time in the morning and greeting you and saying, “Good morning, how did you sleep last night? Yesterday, you told me you didn’t sleep well. We did some meditation before bed time. I’m curious, was it helpful?” Which is a very, very different type of interaction than we’re used to with technology.

Walter Isaacson:

So what does the future of retirement look like? Will there be more empathetic talking robots? Possibly, but one thing is certain, it will definitely be more tech in the home to keep seniors safe and better connected. There will also be a great range of options for seniors, regarding where and how to live. And of course, people are going to be living a lot longer. According to the Census Bureau, the number of Americans, age 100 or over, will rise from 90,000 today to 130,000 in 2030. By 2060, there’ll be nearly 100 million Americans over the age of 65, including 600,000 at the century mark. That will create challenges for the healthcare system and possibly for Social Security, too.

Walter Isaacson:

Many of them will want to remain in the workplace as long as possible and live active and purposeful lives when they leave. And they will demand that our ideas about retirement are reinvented once again. I’m Walter Isaacson and you’ve been listening to Trailblazers, an original podcast from Dell Technologies, who believe there’s an innovator in us all. If you’d like to learn more about any of the guests on today’s show, please visit delltechnologies.com/trailblazers. Thanks for listening.