KEY POINTS:
Work until you drop - you might drop happier.
Work until you drop is an ethos being adopted by more people. It sounds like cruel and unusual (albeit self-inflicted) punishment, but it might be good for you.
A recent study by the Australian Psychological Society has shown that about one-fifth of baby boomers plan to never retire. This is a plan that the other four-fifths of the population need to consider adopting.
Empirical findings about the nature of the human condition suggest that you should seriously consider working much longer - and in fact never retiring - if you want to maintain your psychic wellbeing.
There are two caveats. You should only continue to work so long as you actually enjoy the activity. You don't need to be wildly passionate about it, but at the minimum it must give you more pleasure than pain. Moreover, it's good to be challenged by your work but once it starts defeating you, it's time to take the gold watch. The reason that work is normally good for you has very little to do with fattening up your wallet. Once people are on about average incomes, more money has almost a negligible impact on their wellbeing.
Projects, however, especially in the form of focused pursuits, are key to happiness.
The more challenged a person is, whether by a job, hobby or sport, the happier he or she is likely to be. Happiness is far more likely to be derived from intellectual and physical challenges as opposed to mindless passivity, such as watching television.
To this end, the nature of the project doesn't seem to be that important. Medical researchers and prime ministers don't obtain greater fulfilment or satisfaction than car mechanics, cleaners or zookeepers. The key thing is to stay active and apply your energies to something that shapes the world, as opposed to just being moulded by it.
The sense of purpose and fulfilment derived from work need not come from a paid activity. It can just as readily come from a hobby, such as gardening or playing a guitar. But absent the structure and expectation of a work environment, and most people lack the discipline to constantly and routinely participate in such activities.
That's why the near-daily ritual of work can pay dividends. A wide-ranging survey of people in 16 industrialised nations showed that people report lower levels of wellbeing if unemployed. On average, the unemployed were approximately 20 per cent less satisfied with life than white-collar workers and 15 per cent less satisfied than manual workers.
Accordingly, there is no reason to hang up the work boots simply because the calendar happens to flip to a pre-determined date. The odds are that if you leave a job just because society thinks it's about time you moved on, you will come to regret it.
It's not surprising that the Citibank retirement index in 2007 showed that almost one million retirees have restarted work. The notion of going from 100 to zero work intensity the day one reaches 60 or so should be retired. To the extent that the notion of retirement remains part of our terminology, it should be seen in an incremental sense.
As a rule of thumb, people should reduce their weekly hours from say 40 to 30 at 60 years old, then to 10 to 20 hours at 65 and four to 10 hours thereafter. In essence, people should be encouraged to perform the amount of hours that is commensurate with their physical and mental capacity and the satisfaction they derive from the work.
Too many of us are overstretched by work in our mid-years, partly because we want to accumulate enough assets for retirement. If we abandon the notion of full retirement, we release this pressure. The way to maximise the economic and psychic benefits from work is to spread out our working years, facilitating a work-life balance during our entire adult life. A strong reason to start working four-day weeks.
If, however, after 30 or so years you still haven't found your niche in the workplace, the writing is pretty much on the wall.
Do yourself a favour and enjoy the splendour of not working as you are working on the serve and the putting.
* Mirko Bagaric is a lawyer and author of How to Live: Being Happy and Dealing with Moral Dilemmas (University of America Press, 2006).
