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professional longevity of college professors, three quarters of whom plan to retire after age sixty-five (while the average retirement age in America is sixty-two).
Older professors take up faculty lines that could otherwise be used to hire young scholars hungry to develop their research agendas (and who are overflowing with fluid intelligence). But therein lies an opportunity. The question is not how to stimulate older faculty to write more complicated academic journal articles; it is how to adjust their work portfolio toward teaching without loss of professional status.
“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”[*] Or more biblically, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”[12] If you’re experiencing decline in fluid intelligence—and if you are my age, you are—it doesn’t mean you are washed up. It means it is time to jump off the fluid intelligence curve and onto the crystallized intelligence curve.
First, I will show you the three forces holding you back, and how to remove them. They are your addiction to work and success, your attachment to worldly rewards, and your fear of decline. Then I’ll show you the three things you need to do starting right now to make the second curve better than the first: develop your relationships, start your spiritual journey, and embrace your weaknesses.
Workaholism feeds fear and loneliness; fear and loneliness feed workaholism. Therapists generally diagnose workaholism with three questions: 1. Do you usually spend your discretionary time in work activities? 2. Do you usually think about work when not working? 3. Do you work well beyond what is required of you?[4]
Here are, in my opinion, better questions: 1. Do you fail to reserve part of your energy for your loved ones after work and stop working only when you are a desiccated husk of a human being? 2. Do you sneak around to work? For example, when your spouse leaves the house on a Sunday, do you immediately turn to work and then put it away before she or he returns so that it is not apparent what you were doing? 3. Does it make you anxious and unhappy when someone—such as your spouse—suggests you take time away from work for activities with loved ones, even when nothing in your work is unusually
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Economists consistently find that our marginal productivity tanks with work hours beyond eight or ten per day.[7]
What workaholics truly crave isn’t work per se; it is success. They kill themselves working for money, power, and prestige because these are forms of approval, applause, and compliments—which, like all addictive things, from cocaine to social media, stimulate the neurotransmitter dopamine.[8]
Apart from a few reality TV stars and accidental celebrities, success is brutal work and takes sacrifices.
My father went to great pains to impress on me that as a man growing up, I was never to consider others—especially women—primarily in terms of their physical characteristics. To do so is to dehumanize them, which we believed was a grave sin.
a measure of objectification in the workplace based on the feeling of being used as a tool and not being recognized as an agent in the working environment.[15] As they note, workplace objectification leads to burnout, job dissatisfaction, depression, and sexual harassment.
Buddhists use the word māna, which in Sanskrit refers to an inflated mind that disregards others in favor of the self and leads to one’s own suffering. Thomas Aquinas defined it as an excessive desire for one’s own excellence, leading to misery.[22] In Dante’s
90 percent of CEOs “admit fear of failure keeps them up at night more than any other concern.”[25]
perfectionism and the fear of failure go hand in hand: they lead you to believe that success isn’t about doing something good but about not doing something bad.
Meanwhile, perfectionists view themselves as different—research shows they believe they have higher ability, higher standards, and are capable of greater accomplishments than others. This is often true! And this favorable comparison with others gives them a momentary fix, but the idea of falling behind creates a sense of panic, like facing the prospect of catastrophic failure. When I consider myself better than others—when “better” is at the core of my identity—then failure is unthinkable.
Success is fundamentally positional, meaning it enhances our position in social hierarchies. Social scientists for decades have shown that positional goods do not bring happiness.
getting and staying famous is a miserable combination of boredom and terror.
Art mirrors life, as usual. In the West, success and happiness come—or so we believe—by avoiding losses and accumulating more stuff: more money, more accomplishments, more relationships, more experiences, more prestige, more followers, more possessions. Meanwhile, most Eastern philosophy warns that this acquisitiveness leads to materialism and vanity, which derails the search for happiness by obscuring one’s essential nature.[1] We need to chip away the jade boulder of our lives until we find ourselves. As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our
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In my fifties, my life is jammed with possessions, accomplishments, relationships, opinions, and commitments. I asked myself, “Can the right formula for a happy life really be to add more and more, until I die?” Obviously, the answer is no.
To get off the first curve and onto the second, instead of adding more and more to our lives, we need to understand why this doesn’t work and then start taking things away.
In his view, people who opt for the worldly path choose “substitutes for God”: idols that objectify the idolater and never satisfy the craving for happiness.[5] Even if you are not a religious believer, his list rings true as the idols that attract us. They are money, power, pleasure, and honor.
that release from suffering comes not from renunciation of the things of the world, but from release from attachment to those things. A Middle Way shunned both ascetic extremism and sensuous indulgence, because both are attachments and thus lead to dissatisfaction. At the moment of this realization, Siddhartha became the Buddha.
The term was introduced in 1932 by a physician named Walter Cannon in his book The Wisdom of the Body, where he showed that we have built-in mechanisms to regulate temperature, water, salt, sugar, protein, fat, calcium, and oxygen levels.[8]
Scholars show that participating in “keeping up with the Joneses” creates anxiety and even depression.[9] In
are three formulas that explain both our impulses and the reason we can’t ever seem to achieve lasting satisfaction. Satisfaction = Continually getting what you want Success = Continually having more than others Failure = Having less
wisdom of Siddhartha and Thomas and the best modern social science: Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want
As you increase your haves without managing your wants, your wants will proliferate and sprawl. You can easily be less and less satisfied as you move up the success ladder, because your wants will always outstrip your haves. And when they do, your satisfaction will fall. I have seen
“He has most who needs least. Don’t create needs for yourself.”
1. Ask why, not what
2. The reverse bucket list
look at the counsel we get that is making us into dissatisfied Homo economicus, and simply doing the opposite.
Each year on my birthday, I list my worldly wants and attachments—the stuff that fits under Thomas’s categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor. I try to be completely honest. I don’t list stuff I don’t actually want, like a boat or a house on Cape Cod. Rather, I go to my weaknesses, which usually involve the admiration of others. I’m embarrassed to admit that, but it’s true.
ponder how empty they are by comparison. I imagine myself sacrificing my relationships to choose the admiration of strangers and the result down the line in my life. With this in mind, I confront the bucket list. About each item, I say, “This is not evil, but it will not bring me the happiness and peace I seek, and I simply don’t have time to make it my goal. I choose to detach myself from this desire.”
A third method that helps break the habit of adding brushstrokes to an already full canvas is to start focusing on smaller things in life.
“cultivate our garden.” Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.
the fear of death has eight distinct dimensions: fear of being destroyed, fear of the dying process, fear of the dead, fear for significant others, fear of the unknown, fear of conscious death, fear for body after death, and fear of premature death.
One of the most common strategies to avoid the agony of being forgotten is by trying to engineer a professional legacy. In my conversations for this book, many people in the end stages of their careers talked about how they wanted to be remembered. But it doesn’t work: they forget you.
one retired CEO told me as I was writing this book, “In just six months I went from ‘Who’s Who’ to ‘Who’s He?’
If you love your work so much, you might as well enjoy it while you are doing it. If you spend time thinking about and working on your legacy, you are already done.
“résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”[10] Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual and require no comparison.
We want to be good people, of course, but focusing on eulogy virtues feels just so . . . not special.
You lose your edge on those résumé skills, as everyone reading this book either knows or fears. Meanwhile, the eulogy virtues can get stronger and stronger, all the way up the crystallized intelligence curve and beyond.
keeping and building your eulogy virtues is inherently rewarding.
On the Sunday afternoon before the first day of each month, contemplate these questions: If I had one year left in my career and my life, how would I structure this coming month? What would be on my to-do list? What would I choose not to worry about?
the writing of those temporarily imagining death was three times as negative as that of those actually facing it—suggesting that, counterintuitively, death becomes scarier when it is abstract and remote than when it is a concrete reality.[13]
E. M. Forster put it, “Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.”[15] Why? Simply put, scarcity makes everything dearer to us. Remembering that life won’t last forever makes us enjoy it all the more today.
I practice a version of maranasati, in which I mindfully envision each of the following states: 1. I feel my competence declining 2. Those close to me begin to notice that I am not as sharp as I used to be 3. Other people receive the social and professional attention I used to receive 4. I have to decrease my workload and step back from daily activities I once completed with ease 5. I am no longer able to work 6. Many people I meet do not recognize me or know me for my previous work 7. I am still alive, but professionally I am no one 8. I lose the ability to communicate my thoughts and ideas
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The true master, when his or her prestige is threatened by age or circumstance, can say, “Don’t you see that I am a person who could be utterly forgotten without batting an eye?”
Adaptive coping style. That means confronting problems directly, appraising them honestly, and dealing with them directly without excessive rumination, unhealthy emotional reactions, or avoidance behavior.
“Happiness is love. Full stop.”[7] He elaborates a little: “There are two pillars of happiness. . . . One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”
