Woking Longer Conducive To Better Health

[ponytrekker]

When I retire only work I am going to do is finding the cable remote.

[Nightengale212]

Originally Posted by silibran

There are two big problems with that though: it gets harder to hold and find a job after age 55, and many of us in the workforce simply wear out with issues relating to our jobs.

You hit the nail on the head!!! Despite my top notch infection control practices I was out of work most of last week as I and nearly 1/2 of my department contracted the flu. My primary care department is configured in a way that does not promote good infection control, so sick coughing patients are allowed to wander around instead of being contained to a designated area to reduce the spread of infection. I have not been this sick for a very long time, and it angers me because if my leadership did their jobs and implemented appropriate policies and practices, flu spread to both employees and patients could have been reduced. I am still not back to my baseline health, and I am really started to think about ways I can exit earlier this petri dish of a place I work in.

[MillennialUrbanist]

This study was brought to you by the 1%-ers' Association of America.

[Serious Conversation]

Originally Posted by Suzsilk

The original post was about how working longer could be conducive to better health, and personally I disagreed. Work, for me, was challenging and stressful. Sometimes I had to manage large groups of children--up to 135--at the same time. Sorry if a different opinion, with some examples to show a different point of view, is so offensive. Retirement is great and no one should be afraid to retire because they think it means they're going to die a slow death or that their health is going to deteriorate. You health in retirement is up to you.

Which is why I think headline correlations like these are extremely misleading, at best.

My mother is pushing 300 pounds at 5'2, has a myleodysplastic syndrome, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, and a range of other health issues. She's going to the doctor, on average, one to two times per week. She'll be 60 this year. I wouldn't say she seems "elderly," but she is in poor health. She was at a general practitioner Monday, a hematologist yesterday, and will be going to the ophthalmologist Thursday.

She's likely to retire when she reaches 62 and take SS. If she's still around at 70, one could imply from the article's conclusion that she'd have been healthier had she kept working longer, which may be true, though not because "work makes you healthy." For people like her, work is the only thing not keeping them from vegetating in front of the TV all day and being even more sedentary.

Her father was much the same way, though he had significant heart issues in his 50s. He was "old" in his early 60s. Once he retired, he had no defined schedule, nothing to keep him accountable, and become less and less willing, then less able, to do anything. I don't know if it shortened his life or not, but I don't think he would have been any worse off had he taken up a lighter schedule with a hobby, volunteering, or easy, part-time work.

There are plenty of professions where work breaks the body down, but plenty of others that do not. My mother works in loan documents at a local bank. It's office work. She hasn't followed medical advice to improve her diet (lunch was a Burger King Whopper and dinner was Arby's yesterday), get more active, lose weight, and generally take better care of herself. Her habits account for a far greater portion of her health outcome than simply working or not working.