Jack Lack's Listening Chair

Category: Commentaries

  • Social Connection

    Take a seat.

    The previous Commentary attended to the deep and specific relationships that retirement tests and transforms. This one is concerned with something broader — the wider web of engagement with community, with acquaintances, with the world beyond the intimate circle — and with what happens to that web when the structure that previously maintained it is no longer there.

    For most of the working years, social connection arrived largely without effort. The workplace provided it daily — colleagues, conversations, the incidental human contact of a shared environment. Parenthood provided it. Community structures, neighbourhood routines, the organisations and institutions that structured adult life — all of these generated social engagement as a byproduct of simply showing up.

    Retirement removes much of that scaffolding, often more completely than people anticipate, and what remains requires deliberate maintenance in ways it never previously did.

    The consequences of failing to maintain it are serious and well evidenced. Loneliness and social isolation have measurable effects on physical and cognitive health that are now understood to be comparable in seriousness to smoking or chronic physical inactivity. They accelerate cognitive decline, compromise immune function, increase the risk of depression, and shorten life. These are not soft social concerns. They are health outcomes, and they deserve to be treated accordingly.

    It is worth distinguishing between the quantity of social contact and its quality. A crowded calendar is not connection. Superficial engagement — the interaction that fills time without nourishing the person — fails to deliver the same benefits as contact that is meaningful, reciprocal, and felt. What constitutes quality varies considerably between individuals.

    Some people are fully sustained by a small number of deep connections. Others need broader engagement to feel alive in the world. Neither is wrong. What matters is knowing which you are, and arranging your social life accordingly rather than having your retirement days happen by default.

    The risk most worth naming is withdrawal. For those who have experienced significant loss, whose mobility has reduced, or who simply find the effort of maintaining connection more demanding, the path of least resistance means a gradual narrowing of the social world. This narrowing can feel manageable at each small step but over time, can add up to something more serious. Recognising the pattern early — in oneself or in someone close — is a really useful form of attention.

    Social connection, like physical health, does not maintain itself in retirement. It requires intention, some creativity, and the willingness to build new sources of engagement when old ones dissolve. That is not always easy. It is usually worthwhile.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.

  • Relationships

    Take a seat.

    Retirement changes relationships in ways that catch most people unprepared — not because the changes are unforeseeable, but because they are rarely discussed honestly before they arrive.

    Some of those changes are losses. The relationships sustained by proximity — the colleagues seen daily, the work community that provided a kind of family whether or not it was ever named as such — largely dissolve when the job ends.

    This was touched on in the Commentary on Identity, and it bears repeating here: the loss is real, and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than minimised. Friendships that felt solid turn out to have been held in place by shared routine rather than by real connection, and their absence leaves a gap that surprises many people who thought themselves well supplied with relationships.

    As we age, loss becomes more inevitable. Friends and contemporaries die or become incapacitated. The social world of a person in their eighties is necessarily smaller than it was in their fifties — not through any failure of character or effort, but simply through the arithmetic of a long life. That reality is worth facing clearly, because people who face it clearly are better placed to respond to it thoughtfully than those who are ambushed by it.

    The loss of a long term partner is of a different order entirely. Among older people, and perhaps especially among women who have outlived a spouse, the absence is felt most acutely in the quiet hours — at night, in the small rituals that were once shared, in the particular quality of a life lived alongside another person for decades.

    No retirement plan addresses this adequately, because no plan can. What can be said is that it is a reality for a significant number of people in later life, that it deserves honest acknowledgement, and that the isolation it produces has consequences for health and wellbeing that are as serious as any physical condition.

    There are also pressures that arrive in relationships that remain intact. Two people who have organised their lives around the structure of work can find themselves suddenly in each other’s company for most of every day. That is a significant adjustment. Long standing partnerships that functioned well within the working structure may need deliberate renegotiation when that structure disappears.

    One of the most practical responses to that pressure is the development of multiple common interests — not merely tolerating each other’s separate pursuits, but genuinely growing together into new territory. Developing together, as a shared project rather than two parallel individual ones, is both a practical strategy and one of the more significant opportunities that retirement offers.

    It is also worth understanding that every stage of life — and there are several distinct ones — brings changes in both capability and attitude. Those changes alter relationships whether or not the people within them acknowledge it. A relationship that adapts consciously to each new stage can be strengthened by the transition. One that does not will eventually be strained by it.

    Relationships do not maintain themselves. They require intention, honesty, and consistent attention — the same standards that apply to everything else in a life well lived. The difference in retirement is that the excuse of insufficient time is no longer available.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.

  • Spirituality and Philosophical Orientation

    Take a seat.

    Retirement has a way of making some questions louder. Not because they were not there before — they were — but because the activity and structure of working life provided a reliable background noise that kept them manageable. When that noise subsides, the larger questions of existence move closer.

    Who am I, really? What has my life meant? What do I believe, and why? What remains, and what am I still for?

    These are not questions that practical retirement planning addresses. They are not answered by a financial plan or a fitness regime, however well-constructed. They belong to a different order of human need — one that is no less real for being harder to quantify.

    Spirituality, in the broadest and most honest sense, is the serious engagement with those questions. It is not the exclusive territory of organised religion, though religion could probably not exist without it.

    It is available to anyone willing to attend to the larger dimensions of their own existence — the sense of connection to something beyond the immediate and the personal, the recognition that a human life is embedded in a context that extends well beyond any individual biography.

    In retirement, that engagement becomes both more available and more pressing. The time is there. So, increasingly, is the occasion.

    Philosophical orientation is a related but distinct matter. It is the framework — conscious or not — through which a person makes sense of their experience, holds their beliefs, and navigates uncertainty. Everyone has one, whether they have examined it or not. The question is whether yours has been arrived at deliberately or simply accumulated by default.

    The most useful orientation, in this author’s view, is that of the open minded sceptic. Not the closed sceptic, who dismisses whatever cannot be immediately measured or proved, and in doing so forecloses possibilities that deserve honest consideration. Neither is it for the uncritical believer, who accepts whatever is on offer without subjecting it to the scrutiny it deserves. It is real substance for someone who brings genuine critical thinking to their beliefs — including the belief that they might be wrong — and remains willing to revise their understanding when good reason presents itself.

    This combination of rigour and openness is harder to maintain than either alternative. It requires the intellectual honesty to say “I don’t know” and mean it, and the courage to change position when the evidence warrants it. At any age, that is a worthwhile standard to hold. In later life, when the questions become more insistent and the time for evasion shorter, it is close to essential.

    Everyone arrives at this territory differently. What matters is that they arrive at it — thoughtfully, honestly, and on their own terms.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.

  • Personal Genome

    Take a seat.

    For most of the history of medicine, treatment has been built on averages. A drug is tested on a population, a recommended dose is established, a guideline is issued, and that guideline is applied — more or less uniformly — to individuals whose biology may differ from an average for which the guideline was designed. This approach has produced remarkable results. It has also reached the limits of what averages can do for individuals.

    The next significant development in medicine is already underway. It is the shift toward treatment and intervention based not on what works for most people, but on what is appropriate for a specific person’s specific biology.

    At the centre of that shift is the genome — the complete set of genetic instructions that makes you, in biological terms, uniquely you.

    Genomic sequencing — reading that genetic code in full — is no longer the exclusive territory of research laboratories. It is becoming increasingly accessible through medical channels and a growing number of reputable providers, at costs that continue to fall. What it offers is biological self-knowledge: an understanding of your individual predispositions, vulnerabilities, and the specific ways in which the hallmark processes of ageing are most likely to affect you.

    That knowledge has direct practical implications for the interventions, medications, and lifestyle choices most likely to be effective for you — as distinct from the population average.

    The case for individual medicine is perhaps most starkly illustrated by cancer. Tumours are approximately 97% genetically distinct — and sometimes from each other, even within the same body. The idea that a single treatment protocol is the optimal response to what is, in biological reality, a highly individual disease is one that oncology is already moving away from. 

    The development of individually tailored cancer vaccines — treatments designed around the specific genetic profile of a patient’s own tumour — is not a distant prospect. It is happening now, built on the mRNA technology that most people encountered for the first time during the COVID pandemic.  mRNA was developed to assist with individual medicines for the treatment of cancer  just in time to be adapted to the Covid pandemic

    It had been in development for cancer treatment for years before COVID presented an urgent new application. The speed with which mRNA vaccines were deployed for COVID surprised many people. It should not have — the platform was already mature. It is now returning to its original purpose, and the implications for individually targeted cancer treatment are considerable.

    All of this is relevant to anyone thinking seriously about their health in retirement. Understanding your own genome is not a guarantee of anything. It is not a medical intervention in itself. But it is a foundation — a piece of self-knowledge that is likely to become increasingly useful as individual medicine develops, and which very few people have yet thought to acquire.

    That will change. Being already in possession of this knowledge in the future is likely to be as invaluable to your medical advisers  as removal of the delay might be to you.  The question is whether you are among those who act early or among those who wonder later why they waited.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.  

  • Hallmarks of Ageing

    Take a seat.

    Ageing has long been treated as a single, undifferentiated process — an inevitable and largely mysterious decline that begins at some point in midlife and proceeds on its own terms regardless of what we do. That understanding is now significantly out of date.

    In 2013, a research team led by Carlos López-Otín published a landmark paper in the journal Cell -identifying nine distinct biological mechanisms underlying the ageing process. These became known as the Hallmarks of Ageing. 

    A decade of intensive research followed, and in 2023 the same team published an updated framework expanding the hallmarks to twelve.

    What this work established, with scientific rigour, is that ageing is not one thing. It is a collection of identifiable, measurable, and in a growing number of cases, addressable biological processes — each distinct, each consequential, and each increasingly the subject of serious research into intervention.

    The twelve hallmarks as they currently stand are these:

    Genomic Instability — accumulating damage to DNA over time. 

    Telomere Attrition — the shortening of protective caps on chromosomes with each cell division. 

    Epigenetic Alterations — changes in how genes are expressed without changes to the DNA sequence itself.

     Loss of Proteostasis — the breakdown of the system that maintains healthy protein production and clearance. 

    Disabled Macroautophagy — the declining ability of cells to clean out damaged components.

     Deregulated Nutrient Sensing — the loss of precise cellular responses to nutritional signals. 

    Mitochondrial Dysfunction — declining efficiency of the cellular energy production system. 

    Cellular Senescence — the accumulation of aged cells that stop dividing but remain within the body and cause inflammation.

     Stem Cell Exhaustion — the declining capacity of stem cells to repair and renew tissues.

     Altered Intercellular Communication — disruption of the signalling systems between cells. 

    Chronic Inflammation — persistent low grade inflammation that accelerates tissue damage. 

    Dysbiosis — imbalance in the microbial communities, particularly in the gut, that affect overall health.

    Each of these is important and each will receive its own Commentary in due course. 

    For now the important point is the framework itself: ageing is not a single event but a set of distinct processes, operating simultaneously and interacting with each other, each of which is now understood well enough to be named, studied, and properly addressed.

    That is a different picture from the one most people know. It does not promise immortality or the reversal of time. 

    What it does offer is more useful — the understanding that how we age is not entirely beyond our influence, and that the choices made across the other Commentaries in this series are not merely lifestyle preferences. They are, in a number of cases, direct interventions in the hallmark processes themselves. 

    The connections between sarcopenia and stem cell exhaustion, between diet and deregulated nutrient sensing, between deep sleep and cellular repair, are not coincidental. They are biological.

    The next Commentary will take this one step further — into the territory of the individual. Understanding the hallmarks in general is one thing. Understanding which of them is most relevant to your particular biology is another, and  this knowledge is now within reach.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.

  • Place and Environment

    Take a seat.

    Where you live matters more to the quality of your retirement than most planning conversations acknowledge. The physical environment you inhabit daily — its layout, its proximity to the people and services that sustain you, its capacity to support movement and social connection — shapes almost everything else.

    A good environment quietly enables. A poor one quietly undermines. The difference accumulates over time in ways that are easy to miss until they become difficult to reverse.

    Most people, given the choice, do not simply stay where they are when retirement arrives. The decision about where and how to live in later life is one that thoughtful people take seriously — and rightly so. It deserves the same deliberate attention as financial planning or health, not the passivity of default.

    The governing reality for most people, however, is affordability. Where and how you can afford to live is frequently the determining factor, and there is little to be gained from retirement planning literature that ignores this. The practical question is how to make the best available choice within real constraints — and that question is worth engaging with honestly and early.

    Early is the operative word. This is a decision best made by around the age of sixty, while the full range of options remains open and the capacity to implement a considered choice is intact. Decisions about where to live that are made significantly later tend to be reactive — driven by health events, bereavement, financial pressure, or diminishing mobility rather than genuine preference. The difference between a chosen environment and an imposed one is important and it affects everything from mood to independence to how long a person can remain active in the world.

    Three considerations deserve particular care. The first is mobility — not merely whether you can get around your immediate environment, but whether the broader location supports independence as physical capacity changes over time.

    The second is social connection — whether the place you live makes it easy or difficult to maintain existing relationships, encounter new people, and remain or become, part of a community.

    The third is the environment itself — the immediate physical surroundings, access to nature, to amenities, to the small daily pleasures that make a place feel like home rather than simply a residence.

    These three are not independent of each other. A place that scores well on all of them is worth effort to find and, where necessary and possible, to afford.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.

  • Exercise

    Take a seat.

    Most people are aware that exercise matters. Fewer people do enough of it, and fewer still understand why it matters in ways that go beyond weight management or cardiovascular fitness. In later life, the stakes are higher than is generally appreciated — and so is the potential.

    One point before anything else. For anyone who is not accustomed to regular exercise, professional advice before beginning is not a suggestion — it is a real necessity.

    Existing conditions, whether cardiac, related to balance, joint health, or others, can make some forms of exercise inappropriate or requiring careful modification. A conversation with a doctor or qualified exercise professional at the outset is time well spent and might matter considerably.

    With that clearly stated, here is something worth knowing. A recent study found that even people in their nineties can achieve meaningful, lasting benefits from High Intensity Interval Training — HIIT — with as little as twelve weeks of consistent work.

    Twenty-four weeks would be better.

    Another point worth considering is that moderate intensity exercise is often said to be best. Some advisers say that one result of the common prescription that prefers moderate exercise is that moderate exercise may not be enough to make any difference.

    These findings challenge the widespread assumption that serious physical improvement is the exclusive territory of the young. The body’s capacity to respond to appropriate exercise does not simply expire at a certain age. It may take more care, more professional guidance, and more attention to recovery — but it remains.

    There is a condition, however, that exercise directly addresses that deserves to be named with the same seriousness we reserve for cancer and cardiac disease. It is called sarcopenia — the progressive loss of muscle mass that begins, for most people, around the age of forty and accelerates through the decades that follow. Sarcopenia is not merely an inconvenience. It is a significant, life-impacting, and potentially life-ending condition that receives a fraction of the public attention it deserves.

    What is particularly worth understanding is that not all muscle tissue is lost equally. The body contains different types of muscle fibre, and it is the Type 2 fast-twitch fibres — responsible for speed, power, and rapid response — that are disproportionately affected.

    This is part of why older people typically move more slowly, react less quickly, and are more vulnerable to falls. It is not simply ageing in a general sense. It is a specific, nameable process with specific, addressable causes.

    Exercise — the right kind, undertaken consistently and with appropriate guidance — is the most effective intervention available. Not as a cure, but as a meaningful defence.

    The connections to diet, sleep, and the broader biology of ageing run directly through this. Exercise does not operate in isolation, and neither does sarcopenia. Both will reappear when we turn to the Hallmarks of Ageing.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.

  • Sleep

    Take a seat.

    Sleep is having a moment. After decades of being treated as a negotiable item in a busy life — something to be compressed when necessary and caught up on at weekends — it is now recognised as one of the most consequential things a person can do for their health. The evidence is substantial and still accumulating: sleep affects cognitive function, physical repair, emotional regulation,  pattern recognition, immune response, and the consolidation of memory and learning. Sleep is not optional.

    Most people know this by now. Fewer people sleep well — and in retirement, the reasons for that are worth understanding rather than simply managing.

    Sleep patterns change with age in ways that are normal and predictable, but are widely misinterpreted. The deep, uninterrupted sleep of younger years tends to give way to lighter, more fragmented patterns. Waking earlier, taking longer to fall asleep, or waking briefly during the night are not necessarily signs that something is wrong. These may be  signs that the brain and body are ageing normally. Treating every departure from your sleep of years gone by as a problem to be fixed — usually with medication or supplements — can create its own problems.

    Understanding your sleep pattern is more useful than measuring it against any population average. The commonly cited figure of six and a half to seven hours is a general recommendation, not a personal prescription. Everybody is different and every body carries a brain that has been fairly described as  maddeningly unique. The right amount of sleep for one person may be quite different from the right amount for another.

    The more productive question is not whether you are meeting the recommended figure, but whether you are waking reasonably restored, sustaining your energy and concentration through the day, and recovering sufficiently from physical exertion.

    Sleep  is also directly connected to learning, on which the earlier commentary on Mental Acuity touched. Sleep is not passive. During sleep the brain actively consolidates the day’s learning, processes experience, and clears metabolic waste that accumulates during waking hours.

    Sleep operates in cycles. This is especially important in the clearing of metabolic waste. The fewer the completed cycles the greater the opportunity to miss out on a cycle that might clear waste. Skimping on sleep does not simply leave you tired — it compromises the  processes that keep the mind sharp and the memory reliable.

    Retirement does not always improve sleep. The loss of routine, changes in physical activity, and the psychological adjustments that accompany this stage of life can all affect sleep quality in ways that are worthy of  thoughtful attention.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.

  • Diet and Nutrition

    Take a seat.

    Almost everyone knows, in broad terms, what a reasonable diet looks like. Fewer people follow their reasonable diet  consistently. The gap between knowing and doing is not a knowledge issue — it is a motivation challenge. The most important single factor in changing a poor diet to a better one is straightforward but rarely stated:  first, you have to actually want to , then you have to follow it consistently.

    The wanting to rarely  arrives on its own. It usually comes from somewhere specific — a health scare, a conversation, a quiet recognition that the body is asking for something different, or simply the decision that the years ahead deserve better fuel than the years behind received. Whatever the source, without it, no dietary advice is of much practical use. With it, almost any reasonable change becomes possible.

    Retirement is a natural moment to reconsider. The structure that regulated eating during working life — regular hours, predictable routines, the social rhythm of shared meals — can dissolve when the job goes, and its absence is easy to underestimate. Habits that maintained themselves effortlessly within a working routine may need deliberate attention to survive without it. It is more useful to start , and become consistent, before retirement than to discover the need after retirement has  suddenly arrived.

    What makes this more complex, and more interesting, is that nutritional needs do change with age. The body at sixty-five or seventy is not simply an older version of the body at forty — it has different requirements, different capacities for absorption, and different vulnerabilities. Protein needs, for instance, tend to increase with age even as appetite sometimes decreases. Certain vitamins and minerals become harder to obtain from diet alone. These are not minor adjustments, and they are not widely understood.

    This is where supplements and other interventions may have a role — not as a substitute for a reasonable diet, but as a considered response to specific individual needs. What those needs are varies from person to person, and is worth establishing with appropriate professional guidance rather than making assumptions.

    Diet also does not operate in isolation. What the body needs nutritionally is shaped by how it is being used — by the demands of exercise, by the underlying biological processes as time passes, and by the interaction between the two.

    Those connections will be explored in the Commentaries that follow. For now the point is simply this: diet is not a fixed prescription. It is a responsive, individual matter that rewards attention and repays the effort of getting it reasonably right.

    The wanting to is where it begins.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.

  • Physical Health

    Take a seat.

    Consider for a moment what your body has actually done for you.

    It has regulated, repaired, compensated, and persisted through decades of demands, neglect, poor decisions, and some circumstances entirely beyond your control. It has healed wounds you have forgotten, fought infections you never knew you had, and maintained complex systems without ever asking for your conscious help. In many cases it has done all of this in spite of an owner rather than because of one.

    That is worth thinking about a while. People generally, give more deliberate attention to their finances and their careers than they ever give to their own physical system that makes everything else possible. The irony is real.

    Retirement changes the equation. Not because the body suddenly becomes fragile — though some slowing and adjustment might be a natural feature — but because the conditions that sustained physical health during working years often disappear along with the job. 

    The incidental exercise of a work routine, the structure that regulated sleep and meals, the social engagement that kept the mind active and the mood steady — all can quietly dissolve, and  the consequences of their absence can accumulate gradually and be easily missed until they are difficult to reverse.

    Physical health in retirement is not about performance. It is not about recapturing what the body could do at thirty, or measuring yourself against  any standards intended for younger people. It is about maintaining the capability to live the life you want,  independently, for as long as possible, on your own terms. This is a different and more honest ambition — it is also a more achievable one.

    The specifics of how to support that — through what you eat, how you sleep, how you move — will be addressed in the Commentaries that follow.

    The foundation is a shift in orientation: from taking the body for granted, as most of us have done for most of our lives, to extending it, something it has arguably always deserved 

    Not admiration. Not obsession. Simply consistent, unglamorous attention — the same kind you might finally be giving to the rest of your life.

    Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.