Having reached a stage of life in which my narrowing social circle has become inundated with retirees, I find my septuagenarian self regularly defending my decision to remain gainfully employed. While these friends and relatives regale me with tales of leisurely mornings, exotic travel, and carefree rounds of golf — lots of carefree rounds of golf — I can only counter by expressing my fondness for magazine work and reminding these pensioners that monthly Social Security checks and a fragile IRA do not contribute to a sunny financial outlook.
“If you don’t work, you don’t eat,” I have been known to claim.
That may be a bit of an exaggeration. My Lovely Wife and I have been socking money away for several years now, and it’s theoretically conceivable that we could keep up with our mortgage payments and avoid starvation if I tired of my current full-time gig and wrangled some regular freelance work. Some serious budget slashing would be required, and I suspect more than a little sleep would be lost over unanticipated expenditures, but MLW and I have navigated plenty of lean years in the past, so we’d probably survive.
It’s not just about the money, though. Retirement could be bad for my brain.
As Mohana Ravindranath reports in The New York Times, recent research suggests that retiring from the workaday world may hasten an older adult’s journey toward cognitive dysfunction. She cites a 2017 study showing an accelerated decline in verbal memory among 8,000 European retirees and an English survey of the same year that reaffirmed those findings.
“There’s some evidence out there that retirement may be bad for cognition, because when you retire, you don’t challenge your brain as much,” Guglielmo Weber, PhD, coauthor of the European-retiree study and a professor of econometrics at Italy’s University of Padova, tells Ravindranath.
But there’s an intriguing caveat: For those whose work was more menial than mental, retirement was actually a healthy cognitive choice — especially if it occurred at an early age, Weber notes. Why that may be the case remains a mystery, though he theorizes that retirees whose jobs required more cognitive effort may have more trouble adjusting to a life requiring less thinking.
“While these differences are significant and help explain the different retirement age chosen by or imposed to older European workers, further research is needed to characterize the mechanisms driving the heterogeneity we find in the link between retirement and cognitive decline,” he writes in the Journal of Health Economics.
I’m not sure I need a stronger argument for remaining employed. I can imagine myself becoming cognitively complacent without the regular editorial assignments and strict deadlines that have governed my work life for nearly a half century. MLW will testify to my occasional aimlessness while vacationing; leisurely mornings can make me a bit antsy.
And, knowing my general aversion to social interaction, I need a reason to get out of the house and connect with other humans. Retirement would yank me from my routine contact with coworkers and force me to forge new connections — a skill that I’ve never fully developed.
There are volumes of research showing the emotional and cognitive effects endured by seniors who find themselves socially isolated due to poor health, mobility issues, or a simple lack of contact with the outside world. Protracted bouts of loneliness can lead to depression, and a 2024 study found that loneliness heightened the risk for Alzheimer’s by 14 percent, vascular dementia by 17 percent, and cognitive impairment by 12 percent.
And it’s a particularly acute danger for retirees who decamp from their established communities to some imagined paradise where they hope to live out their golden years. Esma Betul Savaş, MSc, and her team of researchers at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute surveyed nearly 5,000 Dutch retirees who migrated to other countries and compared their levels of loneliness to 1,338 of their counterparts who remained in the Netherlands.
Their results, published earlier this month in the journal Psychology and Aging, found that the migrants reported higher levels of social loneliness — defined as a lack of community — than those who stayed home. On the emotional loneliness scale, which measures the salutary presence of close friends or a partner, researchers found no difference between the two groups, probably because retirees seldom migrated alone.
“Older adults may face double jeopardy in retiring to a new country as they are vulnerable to both age-related and migration-related risk factors for loneliness, and loneliness is itself a risk factor for adverse health outcomes,” Savaş explains. “It’s important for people considering retirement migration to think about how they can maintain their social ties in their origin country and make new ones in their destination country.”
I’m happy to report that no members of my growing “retirement community” are currently considering a move to somewhere beyond our borders. They’re enjoying their travels but always seem happy to return home — and tell me what I’m missing. I can’t complain, though. I get to go to the office tomorrow and, as the weather warms, I’m sure some of those retirees will let this working stiff join them for a few rounds of carefree golf.
