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Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

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Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#211

Post by didip »

As someone who recently retired early, you really need to have a solid game plan on what you want to do with all the time you have. Spend a solid 3-6 months planning and mocking your post retirement days while still working.

The more detailed the plan the better. If you want to go to the gym, what will you do there and for how long and how many days a week?

If you want to have a tech side project, how many hours do you plan on spending on this project? And be reasonable. Don't trade one burnout over another.

If you are planning to learn something new, what are those? and don't just learn one thing. 8 hours plus is a crazy amount of time.

One of those plan should include making new friends post retirement, revolving around activities that are not work related.

It is far too easy to lose track of time without a brand new schedule to fill the void.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#212

Post by djeastm »

SupremumLimit wrote: post #155
andix wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three activities are hobbies. Things people mostly do when they feel good. It's nothing that gives life a purpose. In the past a lot of activities connecting different age groups was a job or job-like too. Working on a farm or a family business together. Running a household and childcare together.

I disagree quite strongly. I derive a lot of meaning from these types of activities (in addition to family and friends of course) and zero meaning from my job. It's the narrow focus on work to the exclusion of everything else in life that is the problem - and that's what the comments above highlight.

I would suggest that it's the fact your job has no meaning to you that raises the meaning the other things have in your life. That's a good thing. When people really love their job, it lowers the meaning the other things have in their life (I won't say family, necessarily, though it can, but also things like hobbies or friends often suffer, because the job is all-encompassing).

There's only so much meaning one can feel in a life.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#213

Post by aaarrm »

devilsdata wrote: post #158
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #35

The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job. We have created people that never develop as human…

The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. And then on retirement, people would still have their hobbies and passion projects they had been working on their entire life. Th…

I lay down and close my eyes (and sometimes nap) pretty much every day for like 20 min. When the mid afternoon slump hits, instead of trying to fight it or use caffeine I just lay down. Does wonders for my energy levels afterwards.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#214

Post by aaarrm »

Aurornis wrote: post #175
devilsdata wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. And then on retirement, people would still have their hobbies and passion projects they had been working on their entire life. Th…

> The reason people go from work to nothing on retirement is because work fills up the nearly all of the productive hours of a person's life. If it were to take, let's say 4 days, or six hours a day, people would be so bored, they would be making projects, business ventures, or volunteering. I don't buy this construction of the workday where spending 50% of your awake hours at work leaves people so exhausted they can…

Jobs that you want to do vs jobs that you have to do are entirely different levels of motivating and result in completely different energy levels for people.

If I have to do a job I hate for the rest of my life I would eternally be low energy. If I could do the thing I loved every day, the thing I truly wanted to do, I would get up excited every day and would have high energy throughout.

Having more free time, yes people would get bored. But the resulting things that they work on would be things that invigorate them.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#215

Post by spartanatreyu »

Aurornis wrote: post #181
spartanatreyu wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no sudden outbreak of productive activity because people have more free time. I can't recall which studies they were, but I was under the impression that with a sudden expansion of free time, the earliest productivity gains don't occur until months later at the earliest. I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, and those that acquired sudden wealth from inheritance / lottery / stocks…

> I think the effect came up in long-term UBI trial participants, The failure of UBI trials to show these effects has been one of the noteworthy developments in the UBI topic in recent years. There were several studies that tried really hard to demonstrate that UBI would increase the rate of business creation and similar metrics. The last one I remember reading was trying to show that the long-term cash recipients re…

As I remember it, there were four kinds of UBI trials:

- Low UBI, short term

- Low UBI, long term

- High UBI, short term

- High UBI, long term

Both low UBI kinds did little except provide a little better food/medical security for poor folks.

High UBI short term mostly only led to people either saving or spending the money immediately.

High UBI long term was the only one where the effect I was talking about showed up. Most people carried on as they did, some reduced hours, there was an increase in people switching jobs, and an increasing in people leaving work to get a degree.

I also remember the difference between the first three kinds and the last kind led to confusion between UBI trials.

Admittedly I haven't looked in a few years, so I'll have to check again.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#216

Post by jandrewrogers »

Aurornis wrote: post #180
qwerpy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours. Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more…

> I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement). The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate. Then they get to retirement and realize that…

The people that make it work usually take RE to mean “recreationally employed”. They aren’t sitting on a beach. They have a challenging project they are personally obsessed with that also generates income, but the income is largely just a way to keep score for them.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#217

Post by deadbabe »

gyomu wrote: post #167
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #35

The problem isn't retirement per se, it is that people don't have things to occupy themselves with. They retire and they vegetate. I worked with a lady that was in her 70s who was deathly afraid of retiring because she didn't have anything to do. That's beyond depressing to me, to be incapable of even conceiving of doing something that doesn't involve going to a job. We have created people that never develop as human…

> We have created people that never develop as human beings outside the context of their being economic entities in the workforce What do you think people did with their lives before retirement became a thing? My great grandparents worked the fields and took care of the animals till they dropped. I did have one great grandma who spent the last few years of her life vegetating in a chair because she literally couldn’t…

Based on my grandmothers I’d say they mostly sat around and gossiped, went on walks together, ate meals together, did fun stuff together and then talked about stuff. Repeat until they die off.

Socializing with friends every day can be very fulfilling and doesn’t require to actually produce anything or do any work.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#218

Post by antisthenes »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #156
antisthenes wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tragedy is that people who are most likely to successfully FIRE have spent so long being laser-focused on making money to FIRE, that they neglected their (hobbies, social circle, health - underline as needed), so they find themselves in such a predicament. Personally, I'd love to FIRE. I have at least 5-10 years of personal projects in my head that I would do if I didn't have a 9-5 job. Unfortunately, graduating…

FIRE isn't about job market, you can't control that. Though in tech most people are still making quite large incomes which does help. Rather it is about controlling expenses. The thing you can actually control. My sister's family of 5 lives on less than 50k CAD / year, because they simply must (low income) so if one is making a 100k white collar salary (for example) one can live a lifestyle higher than hers while sti…

FIRE is definitely about income just as much as it is about being frugal and saving. Having a high income is what enables the RE part.

There is a base level beyond which you can't save much, so first order of business is maximizing your income (e.g. better job/raise/promotion) without going bananas and sacrificing your health for it.

Re: Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

#219

Post by x-complexity »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #187
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've built a society where our only consistent interaction with community (for many people) is via the labor market Modern society arguably has more opportunity for play–and evidence of adults playing–than ancient socities. We also have a larger fraction of labor that one can genuinely like doing, versus being forced to do.

I think you should really look up the amount of work the average european peasant was doing in the middle ages, and the amount of free time they had off. Or how much time hunter gatherers spend actually hunting or gathering. Or how meaningful any of that was, compared to what we do today... Our conditions are better today than in the early industrial revolution, but that's not saying much.

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