No more than an hour after I sent last Friday's edition of the Never Retire newsletter, another research paper on the effects of retirement on health came across my email.
While still inconclusive, it sheds a slightly more precise light on the matter.
From Netherlands-based Netspar—Network For Studies on Pensions, Aging, and Retirement—let’s look at The causal effect of retirement on health: A meta-analysis.
Here’s the bottom line first from the abstract—
Using 576 results from 61 causal studies, we find that 15% of the results indicate that retirement deteriorates health, while 36% of the results indicate that retirement improves health.
And a few key points from the body of the paper—
Why can’t we reach any sort of consensus on how retirement directly affects health? From the paper:
A likely explanation for the different findings is the variety of different countries, causal methods, and health indicators used in the different papers.
Exactly. I see pretty much every academic article published on the subject. Based on this sample and the sub-samples of articles I summarize in the newsletter, it’s clear.
You can’t do one study in China, another in Germany, and another in the United States and expect consistent results. Different cultures. Different labor situations. Different pension and safety net programs.
In summarizing the studies that attempt to measure the direct relationship between retirement and health, the paper broke things down like this:
So, you see the previously mentioned overall numbers.
Then you see that, for example, 50% of the results show that retirement has a positive effect on self-reported health with similar results on mental health.
Also interesting—the country breakdown:
You can see the complete list and a deeper analysis and discussion of the results in the paper itself.
With inconclusive—and even confusing—results, I still enjoy reviewing these studies. I hope you get something out of them as well.
They help us piece the puzzle together. For our purposes, the more information, the better.
Maybe more importantly, this area of research brings something else into focus. Which doubles as yet another limitation to studies that seek to establish a relationship between retirement and health.
These studies position retirement as the goal and tend to follow/survey people who have traditionally retired.
They don’t look directly at the scenario we focus on here. The increasing numbers of people—particularly in the United States—who have acknowledged, accepted, and embraced the reality that they’ll Never Retire.
How does this realization and the lifestyle changes and money strategies that go along with it impact overall well-being, from measures of happiness to physical and mental health to time spent working versus doing other stuff, particularly leisure activities?
For large swaths of the population, traditional retirement is no longer the goal. And it’s not just a financial decision. Sometimes the lifestyle of working less now so you can work less longer draws people in by choice and opens the eyes of those of us who will Never Retire out of necessity to a surprisingly better life.