Jack Lack's Listening Chair

Category: Commentaries

  • 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 considerably 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 certain forms of exercise inappropriate or requiring of careful modification. A conversation with a doctor or qualified exercise professional at the outset is time well spent and could 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 preferring moderate exercise is that it 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 requires 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 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.

    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 of ageing, 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 systems of extraordinary complexity without ever asking for your conscious assistance. In many cases it has done all of this in spite of an owner rather than because of one.

    That is worth sitting with. 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 considerable.

    Retirement changes the equation. Not because the body suddenly becomes fragile — though some slowing and adjustment might be a natural feature of ageing — 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. That 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.

  • Learning and Curiosity

    Take a seat.

    There is a widespread belief that serious learning belongs to the young — that by the time retirement arrives, the capacity to acquire new knowledge or develop new skills has largely passed its use by date. That belief is  completely wrong. Accepting it uncritically is one of the most consequential mistakes a person can make in later life.

    The brain retains a remarkable capacity for learning and development well into advanced years. The pace may change. The ease may change. But the capacity itself, in the absence of specific cognitive impairment, remains. There are some capabilities — among them executive function, learning and memory and creativity —  that can be actively developed and improved at any age, and are worth developing improving and maintaining with the further benefit that improving them makes all subsequent learning easier. Curiosity is not just a pleasant quality. It is a practical asset, and one worth deliberately cultivating.

    That said, learning in later life is most effective when it works with the brain rather than against it. Two things are worth understanding clearly.

    The first is capability. The guidance here assumes intact cognitive function. For those already managing conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease or significant memory impairment, the situation may be quite different, so  professional advice is the appropriate starting point. For everyone else, the question is not whether learning is possible, but how to make it as effective as possible.

    The second is the forgetting curve. Most people are unaware that they have a personal forgetting timeline — a point at which newly acquired information, if not revisited, simply disappears. If something remains in memory for more than about 30 seconds, it is probably not short-term memory. The most efficient way to move something from short term into long term memory is through repetition timed to just before that point of forgetting. Not repeated immediately, and not left so long that the material is already gone, but revisited at the moment it is about to slip. This is not a complicated technique. It does require paying attention to your own patterns of retention, which most people have never been encouraged to do. How much time does it take you to forget?

    There are other keys to effective learning in later life — some  are well evidenced, others  are still debated — and this is a developing field that continues to develop. What is not debatable is the value of  staying engaged. Curiosity keeps a person connected to the world, to other people, and to the ongoing experience of  personal growth. Its absence, by contrast, works toward withdrawal — a narrowing of the world with consequences  that go well beyond the merely intellectual.

    The connection to mental acuity is direct. The connection to purpose, to relationships, to engagement with life on its own terms — all of that runs through this as well. Learning is not preparation for something else. It is worthwhile in itself and achievable at any age,

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

  • Emotional Intelligence and Intuition

    Take a seat.

    More than sixty years ago, a professor addressing a first-year psychology class of some three hundred students made an observation that has stayed with me ever since. He was speaking about the work of Erik Erikson — the developmental psychologist whose research into the stages of human life remains among the most influential in the field today.

    Almost in passing, he remarked that people past seventy were well worth listening to because they intuitively knew things — things that could only be known through a long experience of life. He said it without sentimentality. He said it as a fact.

    Erikson had arrived at something similar through decades of careful research. His framework of eight psychosocial stages placed later life at the pinnacle rather than the periphery of human development. The final stage — which he called “Ego Integrity versus Despair” — described the challenge of later life as one of integration: bringing together the whole of a lived experience into something coherent and meaningful.

    Those who achieved it, he argued, possessed a form of wisdom that was not available to the young regardless of their intelligence or education. It could only be earned. It could only come from having lived.

    That idea ran against the current of a culture that prizes the quick mind over the seasoned one, the data point over the lived experience, the algorithm over the instinct. The older I have become, the more certain I am that both Erikson and that professor were right — and that all of the research since, looked at carefully, continues to agree with them.

    The conventional view of emotion and reason places them in opposition. Reason is steady, reliable, and trustworthy. Emotion is volatile, subjective, and to be managed. We are encouraged from an early age to keep feeling in its place and to let thinking lead.

    The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent much of his career dismantling that assumption. Studying patients with damage to the emotional centres of the brain, he found something unexpected: they did not become more rational. They became unable to decide at all. Presented with choices — even simple ones — they could analyse endlessly but could not conclude.

    The emotional signal that marks one option as preferable to another, that tells the body this is the right direction, was gone. Without it, reason spun without traction.

    His conclusion was that emotion is not the enemy of good decision-making. It is its necessary foundation. Every decision a human being makes is, at its root, an emotional one. Reason provides the analysis; emotion provides resolution.

    This is not a licence for impulsiveness. It is something more interesting than that. It is an argument that emotional capacity — the ability to recognise, interpret, and act on feeling with accuracy and wisdom — is one of the most important forms of intelligence a person can develop. And it is a form of intelligence that only develops over time.

    What we call intuition in later life is not mysticism. It is not a sixth sense or a gift distributed unevenly at birth. It is the distillation of decades of emotional experience into something that operates faster than conscious thought.

    The older person who walks into a room and knows within moments that something is wrong, or who meets someone and senses immediately whether they can be trusted, is not guessing. They are drawing on an emotional archive built across a lifetime — pattern recognition that operates below the level of awareness, shaped by thousands of encounters, outcomes, and corrections.

    Given the similarities, we are left to wonder whether the emotional intelligence, accumulated by humans over decades, is all that different, although some differences seem clear, from the “Artificial Intelligence” a machine can now acquire when it views, and draws on, vast quantities of data in a shorter time.

    The researcher Gary Klein, who spent years studying how experts make decisions under pressure, found that experienced practitioners rarely analyse their way to a conclusion as the textbooks suggest.

    They recognise a pattern without realising it. Something in the situation matches something in memory, and they know what to do. That knowing is emotional intelligence in its most refined form — and it is precisely what Erikson meant when he spoke of the wisdom that later life, at its best, produces.

    This has particular meaning for those in later life, and for those watching later life approach.

    If you are already there, you may recognise what is being described — the sense that you sometimes know things without being entirely able to explain how. That is not a failure of articulation. It is the operation of something real. The culture may not have given you a framework to value it, but the framework exists, and serious researchers have spent entire careers establishing it. What you carry is worth more than you may have been led to believe.

    If you are approaching later life, this is worth holding on to: the emotional intelligence you are building now — through every difficult relationship navigated, every loss absorbed, every decision made and learned from — is accumulating into something. It will not feel like accumulation. It will feel like living. The professor was right. Erikson was right. There is a point at which living a lengthy life brings a form of knowing that no younger person, however clever, can shortcut.

    That is no small thing. In a culture that worships novelty and speed, it may be one of the most undervalued things there is.

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

  • Mental Acuity

    Take a seat. 

    There is not much point being the fittest person on the planet if you have already lost your marbles. 

    That is said with a smile, but it is meant seriously. Of all the prospects that retirement-age people quietly dread, the gradual erosion of mental sharpness — memory slipping, words escaping, the fog that wasn’t there before — ranks among the most feared and the least openly discussed. 

    We talk about our knees, our cholesterol, and our superannuation. We rarely talk about our minds. Yet cognitive health is as responsive to care as physical health, and the evidence is both encouraging and clear. Sleep, regular physical activity, genuine social connection, continued learning, a sense of purpose, and the management of stress all contribute measurably to maintaining and even strengthening mental acuity into later life.

    Interestingly, these are the very things that good retirement planning attends to — which means that if you have been paying attention across these Topics, you have already been building your cognitive defences without necessarily naming them as such.

     It is also worth distinguishing between what is normal and what is not. Some slowing of processing speed is a natural feature of an ageing brain. Forgetting where you put the keys is not the same as forgetting what keys are for. Understanding the distinction matters — both to avoid unnecessary alarm and to recognise signs that do warrant attention. 

    There is a third conversation, harder still: what to do when you, or someone close to you, notices something that goes beyond the ordinary. Whether to speak up, who to speak to, and how to hold that concern without either dismissing it or being consumed by it — these are questions many people in their sixties, seventies, and beyond are navigating in private, but should not be. 

    They deserve a frank and compassionate hearing. The mind and body that brought you this far are worth looking after. There is evidence that genuine gratitude — toward others, toward life’s circumstances, and toward the remarkable system that is your own body and mind — contributes meaningfully to wellbeing as we age. It is no small thing to care for yourself with appreciation rather than criticism, particularly in later life. 

    It is better to focus on what you can achieve rather than on what might be diminishing. 

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

  • Mindset

    Take a seat.

    One version of retirement is defined by what has been lost.  Strength that has diminished. Speed that has slowed. Roles that have ended, the colleagues who have scattered, the options that have quietly closed. If that is the frame through which you view retirement, it will feel like a long diminishment — because measured against what was, most things will eventually fall short.

    Another version begins not with what can no longer be done, but with what remains possible. In most cases, what remains  is considerably more than the common  narrative of ageing might suggest.

    In practice, this shift in orientation is  exactly what mindset means. No relentless cheerfulness to  paper over real difficulty, and no denial of the real losses that too often come with ageing. Deliberate exercise of a consistent  choice to face forward — to ask what this next stage of life makes available rather than consider only what has been taken away.

    People to whom orientation comes naturally have always looked forward, adapted readily, and found adjustment to retirement relatively straightforward. If that describes you, the task is maintenance — holding your orientation steady when new circumstances test it, as they will.

    For many, reframing means real work. Habits of thought that took decades to form do not shift easily, and a mindset that served well in one context may need deliberate adjustment in another. This is not a character flaw. It is simply a recognition that retirement is life of a different kind and meeting it may well require thinking about it differently.

    The practical consequences of mindset are major. How you think about your own capabilities affects what you attempt. What you attempt affects what you achieve. What you achieve affects how you feel about yourself and your life. 

    The loop runs in both directions — which means that caring for mindset is not a soft pursuit. It is as functional as diet, sleep, or exercise, and  deserves just as much consistent attention.

    We will look at this in the Commentaries ahead. Mindset underpins all of them — including the one that follows, on mental acuity. How you think about your own mind turns out to matter almost as much as what you do to look after it.

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

  • Purpose and Meaning

    Take a seat.

    Purpose and meaning are often spoken of as though they are the same thing. They are not, and the distinction matters — particularly in retirement, when both require fresh attention.

    Meaning is the deeper question. It is the “why” that most people carry quietly through their lives — why am I here, what has my life amounted to, what is it still for? These questions do not arrive only in retirement. They surface at significant moments throughout a life, and retirement is certainly one of them.

    Most people have a relationship with these questions already, even if they have never put it into words. The questions sit beneath the surface of many conversations, and have a way of becoming louder when the busyness of working life no longer drowns them out.

    Purpose is different. Purpose is the “what.” It is the thing you are for, the activity or commitment that gives your days direction and your efforts a point.

    During your working years, purpose was largely provided for you. The job supplied it — sometimes richly, sometimes inadequately, but it was there. Retirement removes that provision and hands the choice back to you. That is both a freedom and a responsibility, and it catches many people unprepared.

    Selecting a purpose in retirement requires more care than is generally appreciated. Not every activity that fills the time constitutes a genuine purpose. Genuine purpose tends to make use of who you are — your experience, your values, your standards, your particular capacities — and connects to something beyond your own comfort and convenience. It is also, ideally, something that can grow into a passion. A purpose that engages you deeply enough will do that over time.

    There is also a relationship between the two that is worth noting. The question of meaning — the “why” — is significantly shaped by your answer to the prior question of identity: who am I now, and what do I actually stand for?

    Until that question has been honestly engaged with, the search for purpose can feel directionless. This is why identity, purpose, and meaning are best thought of, not as separate items on a checklist, but as a conversation that unfolds over time — each one informing and deepening the others.

    That conversation is worth beginning before retirement arrives, not after.

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

  • Identity

    Take a seat.

    In the last commentary, I suggested that the money question — for all its real importance — had crowded out almost every other question worth asking about retirement. Today I want to begin the work of asking those other questions. And the one that sits beneath all the rest, the one that makes the others harder to answer than they might otherwise be, is this: Who are you?

    Not what did you do. Who are you.

    For most of us, that distinction barely existed during our working lives. The question Who are you was answered, quickly and without much thought, by the question What do you do. We handed over our occupation like a passport at a border crossing, and it got us through. Lawyer. Nurse. Engineer. Teacher. Manager. Tradesperson. The word did the work. It told people where to place us, and it told us where to place ourselves.

    Retirement cancels the passport.

    This happens overnight in the administrative sense. One day the title is attached to your name. The next day it isn’t. But the psychological adjustment takes considerably longer — and for many people it never fully resolves, because nobody warned them it was coming and nobody gave them anything to replace it with.

    I have met people, years into retirement, who still reach for the old title in conversation. Not out of vanity, or not only out of vanity, but because it remains the most efficient answer to a question that retirement has made really difficult. Without it, the honest answer is: I’m still working that out.

    Which is, of course, a perfectly good answer. The difficulty is that our culture doesn’t treat it as one.

    There is also a more uncomfortable dimension to this. For some people — and I suspect more than would readily admit it — the occupation was not merely a convenient shorthand. It was load-bearing. It carried self-worth, structure, social standing, and daily purpose all at once. When it goes, what goes with it is not just a job title but a significant portion of the architecture of a self. That is a loss, even when the retirement is chosen and welcome, and it deserves to be named as such rather than glossed over with cheerful talk of freedom and leisure.

    The good news — and there is good news — is that identity is not fixed. It never was, even when it felt that way. The person you were at thirty was not the person you were at fifty, even if the job title stayed the same. Retirement is not the end of identity. It is an invitation — a rather abrupt and sometimes unwelcome invitation, but an invitation nonetheless — to construct an identity more consciously than most of us have ever had to.

    That construction is what the next several commentaries are quietly about. Before we can talk sensibly about purpose, or mindset, or how you spend your time, we need to have a moment with the prior question. The one the working world used to answer for us, without our having to ask.

    Who are you, now?

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