Boredom, Cognitive Ability, and the Mental Retirement Effect

Anybody bored these days? Me, neither. Things have been moving a good-but-hectic pace the last few months. Between all our house stuff, making a farmhouse table (credit to Mrs. Done by Forty for the cool stain and finish and our friends for all the distressing), work deciding to pick up out of nowhere, and learning how to maintain a pool on the fly, I don't have the gall to feel bored. At all. Every day has a list of things to keep me occupied, and I kind of like it.

But on Sunday, an old Freakonomics episode put a bit of fear into me. The show does that, as it makes me question the things I think I know are true. Give that link a listen if you have an hour and are in need of some complications for your early retirement plans.

The basic idea of the last segment in the podcast is that there are some observable negative impacts from retirement. There seems to be something about work, or the work environment, which keeps us engaged mentally, socially, and psychologically. One theory is that, once you leave the struggle of work and succumb to the sweet embrace of rest, then you're more susceptible to boredom, which is associated with all kinds of bad stuff: like depression.

We do poorly when we organize our lives around rest, because as Dan Gilbert, one researcher in the podcast, noted, rest is not the thing that makes us happy. And yet some form of rest is what we commonly aspire to reclaim in retirement: golf, walks on the beach, and if we're being brutally honest, naps. From the transcript:

GILBERT: Rest is the wrong answer. And we even know why from these data. When people rest, their minds wander. And when the mind wanders, it doesn’t usually go to a happy place. People who are engaged in an activity are almost always happier than people who are not. So any retirement you plan that doesn’t have you engaged in activities is probably not one that’s going to make you happy....

GILBERT: When you look at what people are doing and how they’re thinking and how they’re feeling as they go about living their everyday, normal lives, you find that people are obviously very happy when they’re doing things like eating and having sex. They’re not very happy when they’re doing things like working or commuting.

And what about when they’re just resting, like Satchel Raye hanging, out on the beach in Florida?

GILBERT: The answer is about as unhappy as when they’re working or commuting.

When we rest, we're as unhappy as when we're stuck in a car commuting to work? Or even at work? Yikes. Still, that's not really all that scary of a conclusion: just schedule some activities in early retirement, avoid boredom as much as you can, and you're set, right?

Well, not totally. Then Dubner hits us early retirees with a terrible finding: early retirees, in particular, also seem to be more susceptible to cognitive decline. Through a memory test, researchers observed that countries that encouraged citizens to retire early, such as France or Italy, had citizens who had a much harder time remembering a series of words than those in America, whose citizens usually work well into their sixties. Americans scored twice as well on this test as the Spanish, for whom less than than 30% of 60-64 year-olds work.

The study found that early retirees had lost some cognitive ability, and the researchers feel fairly strongly that this is causal: that retirement is causing the mental decline. They call it the "mental retirement effect". And while being able to recall random words might seem like an acceptable and narrow consequence for leaving the rat race, my feeling is that the memory test signals the tip of an iceberg: a small sign of a larger mental decline.

WILLIS: The basic idea is that if you exercise your mind and you’re in a stimulating environment and you’re motivated to use your mind that you’ll maintain your cognitive abilities. Conversely, if you are in an unstimulating environment, don’t exercise your mind, the effect would be negative on cognition. So in that sense it’s very much like the idea that physical exercise leads to physical fitness.

Willis also found that retirees became more bored after they stopped working. How did they come to this conclusion? With an almost unbelievably large longitudinal study called the "Health and Retirement Study" (HRS) with over 20,000 individuals in the data set, from all sorts of starting retirement ages. So it's not so easy for me to just dismiss the study or its conclusions.

These negative consequences have an obvious and somewhat serious implication for my early retirement plan. I like having my faculties. I like my brain (link is NSFW, but it's so good), just the way it is, and would like to keep it that way for as long as I can.

The predictable counter is to focus on the ways in which extreme early retirees are different: "By retiring so early, we will have lots of things to keep us engaged! This study might be interesting, but that's not going to impact us in the same ways because we're more active, we have a community of friends and family, and we're engaging in all these stimulating activities already. Did I mention that I read a lot? And blog? And hang out with friends all the time?"

But this is a bit of a trap, and a good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. We like to assume that we are not part of the observed trend. That we, as usual, are special in some way, and for a bunch of valid reasons we won't succumb to the same problems that others will. We're better prepared, better educated. Smarter. Just like the children of Lake Wobegone, we're all above average.

But what if those early and traditional retirees also thought they were engaging in activities to keep them socially, physically, and mentally engaged? I doubt early retirees in France thought they were pursuing a retirement filled with boredom and mental stagnation. What if they really were engaging their minds, but there's something special about a profession, some sort of of yet-undetermined purpose or stimulation that isn't easily replicated in retirement?

Why are we going to be proven right when they were proven wrong?

When it comes to things like mental health and cognitive abilities, I don't want to play it fast and loose. I've seen in some family members what it looks like when you don't have full control of your mind, and it is not great.

I don't want to say that this podcast spooked me and now I plan on working until traditional retirement age. That's not happening. But I'm not as keen on the idea of "just figuring this early retirement thing out as I go", either. I need to do a better job of mapping out what this next life is going to look like, and how I'm going to keep my mind sharp without all the benefits of a structured work environment.

I need a better plan, man.