Routine and Its Danger to Retirement

I have been reading Learn to Grow Old (1971) by Paul Tornier (1898 - 1986).  In this extract he is summarizing the statistical research on retirement and death by Professor Arthur Jores (1901-1982).


It is, then, the uniformity of office work and the spirit of routine that it creates which are most likely to turn retirement into a serious crisis.  Jores notes in this connection that an office career prevents the employee from maturing inwardly.  Retirement is a calamity for the civil servant who has wholly identified himself with his work, and who has not attained a certain personal maturity.  In that case the consequence can be death, and of this there are striking examples.

Routine!  There you have public enemy number one.  We had already suspected as much.  But now we have been provided with a scientific demonstration of the fact.  One ages prematurely in a routine existence.  There are people who are already little old men at thirty or forty, because their lives are restricted by routine.  What will become of them when retirement comes and deprives them of their sole motive force -- professional duty?  They will sink into boredom and passivity.  We can see a vicious circle here, as in all domains of life: routine causes ageing, and this premature ageing buries the individual all the deeper in routine.  On the other hand, to stay open throughout our lives to a multiplicity of interest is to prepare for ourselves a lasting youth and a retirement free from boredom.

...

Those who let themselves slide -- down to death -- are those who no longer have a task, a goal, a hope, more meaning in their lives.  There is no joy in an aimless life, no fulfillment when life seems meaningless.  Now this radical despair, the veritable breath of death, is only an exacerbation of an existential anxiety which I believe to be latent in every man, ready to rise to the surface as soon as he feels himself powerless to solve a personal problem.  That is when those diseases appear which are peculiar to man, and of which Jores speaks.  All those functional troubles which are called 'nervous' are signs of a dissatisfaction with life, an emptiness of meaning, a personal problem that is unsolved and is without hope of solution.