An author and entrepreneur discusses the benefits of age diversity in the workplace, the importance of purpose later in life, and why older workers might consider a ‘gap year.’
Our guest on the podcast today is Marc Freedman. He is the co-CEO and founder of Encore.org, which is now known as CoGenerate and is geared toward helping people pursue meaningful work later in life. Freedman is also the author of How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations. He co-founded Experience Corps to mobilize people over 50 to improve the school performance and prospects of low-income elementary school students in 22 U.S. cities. Freedman also spearheaded the creation of the Encore Fellowships program, a one-year fellowship helping individuals translate their midlife skills into second acts focused on social impact, and the Purpose Prize, an annual $100,000 prize for social entrepreneurs in the second half of life. Freedman received his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and his Master of Business Administration from the Yale School of Management.
Background
How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations, by Marc Freedman
Age Diversity
“Overcoming Age Segregation,” by Marc Freedman and Trent Stamp, Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 15, 2021.
“Will 2023 Be the Year That We Begin to Make the Most of Age Diversity in the Workplace?” by Ramona Schindelheim, WorkingNation, Dec. 27, 2022.
“Harnessing the Power of Age Diversity,” by Alene Dawson, John Templeton Foundation, Oct. 31, 2023.
“America Is Arguably the Most Age-Diverse Society in Human History—It’s High Time to Prepare for Our Increasingly Multigenerational Workforce,” by Ramona Shindelheim, WorkingNation, Dec. 10, 2023.
Encore Careers
“Encore Career: What It Is, How It Works, Prevalence,” by Julia Kagan, Investopedia, Jan. 16, 2022.
Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life, by Marc Freedman
“The Case for Putting Seniors in Charge of Universal Pre-K | Opinion,” by Marc Freedman and Carol Larson, Newsweek, Nov. 29, 2021.
Work/Life Across Generations
“Kerry Hannon: Remote Work Trend Benefits Older Workers,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar, Oct. 20, 2020.
“Is America Ready to Unleash a Multigenerational Force for Good?” A National Opinion Survey From Encore.org With NORC at the University of Chicago.
Other
“The Globe: How BMW Is Diffusing the Demographic Time Bomb,” by Christoph Loch, Fabian J. Sting, Nikolaus Bauer, and Helmut Mauermann, Harvard Business Review, March 2010.
From Strength to Strength, by Arthur Brooks
Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative
Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones
“Dr. Anita Mukherjee: Exploring the Link Between Wealth, Longevity, and Quality of Life,” The Long View podcast, Morningstar, Oct. 10, 2023.
The Encore Career Handbook, by Marci Alboher
Christine Benz: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Amy Arnott: And I’m Amy Arnott, portfolio strategist with Morningstar Research Services.
Benz: Our guest on the podcast today is Marc Freedman. Marc is the president, CEO, and founder of Encore.org, which is geared toward helping people pursue meaningful work later in life. Marc is also the author of the book How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations. He co-founded Experience Corps to mobilize people over 50 to improve the school performance and prospects of low-income elementary school students in 22 U.S. cities. Marc also spearheaded the creation of the Encore Fellowships program, a one-year fellowship helping individuals translate their midlife skills into second acts focused on social impact, and the Purpose Prize, an annual $100,000 prize for social entrepreneurs in the second half of life. Marc received his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and his MBA from the Yale School of Management.
Marc, welcome to The Long View.
Marc Freedman: Thanks, Christine. I appreciate you having me on.
Benz: Well, we appreciate you being here. We’ve been looking forward to this. So, we want to start with a little stage-setting. In one of your presentations, you discussed the evolution of retirement in the U.S. and the pivotal role that Social Security played in giving the senior years a makeover. Maybe you can talk about that because I thought that was such an illuminating history lesson of how aging has changed and our thoughts about aging have changed over the years.
Freedman: Well, Social Security was enacted in 1935 largely to shore up the economic security of older people and to my mind, one of the great policy triumphs in all of American history. But it did have as a goal providing incentives for older people to leave the workforce at a time when youth unemployment was extraordinarily high. There was real concern about social unrest. And the idea at that point was that people would probably not spend that much time receiving Social Security checks. In fact, the young new dealers who passed the act had based the age 65 on the Prussian military pension from the latter part of the 19th century, which Otto von Bismarck had enacted, convinced that they would never pay out a single pension. But lo and behold, Social Security gets passed in 1935. And in 1941, a woman named Ida May Fuller, a retired bookkeeper in Ludlow, Vermont, becomes the first Social Security recipient and she proceeds to live to 100. She saw The Beatles come to America, she saw the moon landing, and she probably was one of the great lottery winners in American history as well, because she paid a very modest amount in and, I think received tens of thousands in return. But in some ways, the longevity revolution handwriting was already on the wall, even at that point, before people started living so much longer, the idea that this period beyond 65 could be more than a few years of much-deserved R&R and could actually be a whole chapter in life.
Arnott: So, I think that’s a good segue into our next question. We’ve all heard that rich industrialized countries like the U.S. are heading toward this demographic tsunami where we have way fewer younger workers than we need and they’re supporting a lot of older workers. And by the 2030s, for example, people over age 65 in the U.S. are expected to outnumber people under the age of 18. So, can you talk about those trends and then also what you see as the key repercussions?
Freedman: It does go back to the conversation we were just having about Social Security. I think for too long we’ve been locked into a conception of life that was roughly three score and 10 and wasn’t really designed for the much longer lives that we’re living now. Half the children born in the developed world since 2000 are expected to see their 100th birthday. And so, the idea that we load all the education up in the first 20 or so years of life, all the work up in the next 20 to 30 years of life, and then just have this balloon payment of leisure extending out for half a century is just not going to work for most individuals who can work for 25 or 30 years and then support such a long period of nonworking later. But it also, as you say, makes it clear that we can’t have societies where a small group of younger people are trying to support everybody else.
But I do want to mention something, which is for me has been a surprise and some learning that has happened over the last few years. I think it’s natural for us to focus on the longevity revolution, those 100-year lives. It’s also important to understand the growth in the number of older people. But what I don’t think I fully appreciated is that the big thing happening is actually age diversity. One hundred years ago, when you looked at the chart of the number of people from birth to 74, it was just a ski slope heading straight downhill. If you look at that same chart today, it’s a flat line—we have the same number of 12-year-olds, and 61-year-olds, and 37-year-olds. We basically have the same number of people alive at every age from zero to 74. And that’s just extending out further. What’s more, a quarter of the population is under 20 and a quarter of the population is over 60. If you move into 25 and 55, you start seeing that the two big groups in society are older and younger people and there are pretty much the same number of them. So, I think one of the challenges in our multigenerational moment, our multigenerational future is going to be learning how to work together with people at other stages of life at other ages.
Benz: Let’s talk about that, Marc, because I know you are a huge proponent of age diversity in the workplace—that younger folks can learn from older ones and vice versa. So maybe you can just talk about your general thesis on that, why you think that’s actually such a healthy thing, and maybe also share some ideas for how we can do more to advance age diversity in the workplace.
Freedman: I think that the skills, the needs, the assets of older and younger people really fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And we need all of those skills to be as productive as possible to face the challenges that we’re facing in the 21st century. My favorite illustration of that complementarity is a study that BMW did a number of years ago where they had three assembly lines: one of older workers, one of younger workers, and a mixed, age-diverse line. The one of older workers—maybe this is an ageist stereotype—but it was a mistake-free but slow; and the line of younger workers was quite fast but error-prone; the mixed line was the ticket—fast and relatively error-free. And I think of that as a metaphor for what’s possible.
Arthur Brooks wrote a book, Strength to Strength. He’s a former head of the American Enterprise Institute who teaches at the Kennedy School in Harvard now. And in it—this book came out two years ago—he argues that younger workers are particularly strong at fluid intelligence and older workers at crystallized intelligence, which is very jargon-ish. But I think that that crystallized intelligence that older workers bring—the ability to see patterns, to have perspective—really complements the speediness and maybe some of the assets that younger workers have. And Brooks, and I agree with him, contends that there should be no workplace without both of those groups.
Arnott: So, you’ve also written about something called age apartheid. Can you talk more about what that means and why is it so entrenched and so damaging?
Freedman: Well, I’m really glad that you brought that up because I’m obsessed with this idea. In fact, I’m sketching out a new book now, which is going to have a title like End Age Apartheid. And to give you some context on that, the United States began the 20th century as one of the most age-integrated societies in the world and ended it as one of the most age-segregated. In the 19th century, people were not conscious of age at all. People didn’t even know how old they were. Birthdays weren’t celebrated and every institution, every aspect of daily life was integrated by age. We were an agrarian economy. Older and younger people worked side by side on the farm. Every household pretty much in America was multigenerational. Even the one-room schoolhouse of yore had four-year-olds and 40-year-olds learning the alphabet side by side.
And then in the first few decades of the 20th century, we decided to change all that. We thought we could be more efficient if we reorganized society by age. And oftentimes, it was the result of real breakthroughs in policy. So, the child labor laws, and universal schooling led young people to be congregated with other young people in school. Social Security, like we talked about earlier, had the intended effect of getting older people out of the workforce during periods of high-use unemployment. And then one after another with spectacular creativity we invented senior centers, nursing homes, retirement communities, and lifelong learning programs where older people were congregated with their agemates. And the end result is that the generational twains ceased to meet. And there were certainly efficiencies to that. But I think in the end, we’re seeing a grievous wound. Is it any surprise that in a society that’s in a state of age apartheid that people are talking about, “OK, boomer, OK, millennial,” the generational conflict, or that we have an epidemic of isolation and loneliness? Ageism is rampant. So, I think this way of organizing society, this state of age apartheid, it didn’t work in the last century, and it certainly is a poor match for the most age-diverse society in human history, which is what the United States is today.
Benz: You have written about some earlier efforts to integrate older Americans, such as the Gray Panthers in the 1970s, and JFK’s call to action in 1956 about the untapped potential of older people. So why do you think those kinds of efforts fizzled out?
Freedman: I think they were ahead of their time. But I do find it comforting that this idea of engaging older people in every aspect of American life for all that they can contribute isn’t just a novel idea. People have been saying it for a long time. You invoke JFK, and he said we’d added years to life, all this longevity, now it was time to add life to those years. And the Gray Panthers, Maggie Kuhn, who’s a personal hero of mine, said that—in reference to the older population—that we didn’t have a single person to waste. We couldn’t afford to write off not only this vast and growing population, but a group that arguably is America’s only increasing natural resource, certainly the most experienced segment of the population. And so, I think there is a long history of these ideas. But I think the new demographics, and the increase of life spans and health spans really brought those ideas to the forefront and made them impossible to ignore.
Arnott: We’ve talked about the overall demographic trends and the societywide need to have more crossover and interaction working together between different generations. But maybe you could talk a little bit about how working longer can help people individually too, both from a financial and quality of life standpoint.
Freedman: I think, as you point out, the financial aspect is critical. I feel that personally—I turned 65 last year and I have eighth, 10th, and 12th graders still in my household. So, retirement is not in my near-term future for sure. But I think there’s some other reasons that are equally important to the essential economic security of working longer. And a lot of it has to do with a sense of purpose in life, a reason to get up in the morning, and the kind of social connection and ties that work provides. Freud said that the keys to life were love and work, that reason to get up in the morning and those ties. And we did research a decade ago in which we asked retirees what they missed most about work. And they said they certainly didn’t miss the alarm clock going off in the morning, but they missed productive relationships, the idea of working together with other people to do important things. And so, I think along with the financial imperatives are these social imperatives and really in some ways psychic imperatives as well that work helps to address.
Benz: There seems to be a disconnect though in terms of people’s desire to work longer and their ability to do so. When you look at the data a lot of people say, well I want to work past 65, maybe until after I’m 70, whatever. But people in general do tend to retire earlier than they expected. Can you talk about some of those headwinds, how this is unfortunately not entirely within our control when we actually do retire?
Freedman: Yes, and I think it brings up the importance of helping people who are in some ways —they’re approximating retirement and they’re stopping doing the work that they’ve been doing for a while. But in many cases, there are people who will and in many cases plan to unretire. But the problem is it’s so hard to do that. It’s a do-it-yourself process. So, in a lot of ways, you can see people stopping working to address a need—caregiving, for example—or really to get a much-needed break. But that doesn’t mean that they’re retired permanently. They, in many cases, will need to, will want to return to the workplace. But the problem is that we’ve made that difficult. It’s so much dependent on the individual and their own heroic efforts to do that. And so, I do think we need more infrastructure, for lack of a better word, to help people step in and out of the workplace in the second half of life.
And I’m starting to see some really encouraging developments on that front. There has been a proliferation of higher-education programs that started with Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative and spread to Notre Dame and Stanford and the University of Chicago and the University of Texas. I’ve been involved in the creation of one of these programs at Yale. And they’re essentially schools for the second half of life where people go back and can spend a year rediscovering their purpose and getting a breather in the process.
At our organization, we created 15 years ago a fellowship program, a one-year internship for people who were experienced in the workplace but wanted to move in a different direction. The Encore Fellowship program enables them to try on a new role. So, in many ways, these education programs, these internships like the Encore Fellowship program, they approximate what we routinely do for young people who are trying to go from being adolescents to adults. They do it through school and through internships. And I think we can learn a lot from that experience and adapt it to the second half of life.
Arnott: So, it sounds like there are more resources and programs available for people who do want to take a gap year sometime in midlife, take some time off to reflect, or maybe try different things. But that’s still probably less common than people taking a gap year before they go into college or before they go into the workforce. What do you think are some of the barriers to taking time off during the midlife phase?
Freedman: Well, I think some of it is cultural. It’s almost like you’re faced with the choice: You’re either working or you’re retired. But in the context of these longer lives, the idea of taking a break, I think is very appealing to people. But I think many people don’t feel like it’s legitimate to do that. And again, I think we can learn from the experience of young people because to step back and address what I think is the big development that’s happening is that what we’re witnessing now between the end of midlife and anything approximating real retirement or even old age is the invention of a new stage of life that doesn’t have a name but is very similar to the invention of adolescence 100 years ago. We had this proliferation of young people. They weren’t children and they weren’t adults. We didn’t know what to do with them. We decided they were teenagers and we invented schools for them and youth organizations and so forth. And I think as we’ve lengthened lives that the length of life is being accompanied by a new map of life. And there’s some uncharted territory between midlife and later life. Some people call it middlescence. Others—I asked my estimable mother-in-law and she said that she thinks that she’s on her next to last dog. That’s the way she thinks about this period of life.
But there is a period that’s taking shape. And it’s interesting, the person who invented adolescence in America, the founder of the American Psychological Association, the first Ph.D. in psychology, G. Stanley Hall, he invented adolescence with a book in 1906 of that name. Twenty years later, he said, I made a big mistake. I should have invented a new stage of life between midlife and old age. And to go to your question about what the unique advantages of later life, he said human beings didn’t reach the height of their capacity until the shadows started slanting eastward. And by that, he meant that there’s this moment that we have in the post-midlife period where you have a different perspective. You know that life doesn’t go on forever. That concentrates the mind, provides a sense of purpose. And yet at the same time, there’s enough time to do something with that insight. And it’s a unique period in life. It doesn’t have a name, but we have tens of millions of people who are flooding into that period with this unique perspective, tremendous amounts of experience. And as a society, we have the opportunity to take advantage of that windfall.
Benz: We wanted to talk about something that you, I think, pioneered, invented, this idea of an encore career where someone reinvents themselves or builds on their career to transition into later in life doing meaningful work. Maybe you can talk about how you define an encore career and how, as people are approaching their later years, how they might think about what their own encore career might be.
Freedman: We were inspired by a lot of famous people, Jimmy Carter being a powerful example, who’d had these second acts at the intersection of passion and purpose. Second acts that maybe didn’t last as long as their midlife career, but weighed as much, were as significant when they thought about what their contributions to life had been. So, we came up with the idea of an encore career to celebrate that. The tagline we used was “Second Acts for the Greater Good.” Because for so many people, like Jimmy Carter, these second acts were a way to take their accumulated experience and apply it to issues focused on improving the quality of lives for other people. And we wanted to show that these encore careers weren’t confined to ex-presidents or billionaires. And so, we launched a prize, the Purpose Prize, where we gave $500,000 awards each year to someone over the age of 60 who was doing their most important work. And I think we worried and wondered whether we would have enough people to—maybe it was just Jimmy Carter and a few other people, but very quickly we got heartening news. The first year we had 1,200 nominations for those five prizes. Over the course of 10 years, we had 10,000 nominations of older people who were doing their most significant work.
And one of the lessons that emerged is that very rarely were these encore careers entirely new kinds of work. We have the image of the person who’s a banker and then they open the vineyard, or the B&B, and it all happens magically and the sun shines and nobody ever breaks a sweat. But in fact, the people who won the Purpose Prize, and thousands of nominees, were people who were frequently building on what they had done in their middle years. One example was a guy named Gary Maxworthy who had wanted to go into the Peace Corps when he was younger but had a family, couldn’t afford to do it. His wife died of cancer when he was in his 60s. He decided he was going to launch a new chapter in his life. In midlife, he had worked in the food distribution business, and he discovered that food banks were only giving out processed and canned foods, but he knew from his food distribution work over decades that farms and growers were throwing out a lot of fresh food because they were aesthetically blemished. So, he created the Farm to Family program where he created a distribution network of farmers and growers to food banks that I believe last year distributed something like 120 million pounds of fresh produce to food banks. It’s an example of how experience and innovation can go hand in hand.
To your first question about the encore career, what we discovered is that five million Americans were already in encore careers at that point but 21 million more gave, following in that path, a top priority. And they all said that they saw their encore career as being about a decade in duration. So that’s 25 million people, 10 years—that’s 250 million years of potential human and social capital that society could benefit from if it made it easier for people to go from what’s last to what’s next.
Arnott: Do you think an encore career is inherently one that is focused on a broader purpose, building on your strengths to help other people? Or have you seen examples where maybe people just want to do something totally different from what they have focused on during their working lives up to that point?
Freedman: Absolutely. I do think that it’s a broader phenomenon. We’re a nonprofit organization that’s focused on tapping the unused human capital and society to improve things like education and communities and the environment. So, we moved the encore career definition in that Second Act for the Greater Good direction, but I think you’re absolutely right. There are so many things that people can do beyond the way we defined it and can have chapters that are as fulfilling or more so than earlier in life. So, this whole idea that by the time you hit your 50s or 60s, you’re over the hill, your best work is behind you, I think is really a misconception that came from a time when people were much less healthy in this period in life.
Just to give you an example, there’s an economist at the University of Chicago, David Galenson, who studies creativity and genius, and he studied the value of paintings that were done by artists of all different ages. And basically, what he discovered is that there were two big bursts of creativity and genius. One was young, imagine Mozart with the symphonies, concertos pouring out of his head, and he labeled the kind of genius that blossoms later in life as experimental genius. And it turns out that some artists grow through trying on different approaches, and that takes a long period of time to be fully manifest. And Galenson’s argument is that we oftentimes don’t appreciate this second kind of genius, and he’s shown that it’s actually as big a pool of talent as the earlier type of creativity. So, I think we have a skewed conception of people’s abilities and contributions and creativity. And we certainly saw this extraordinary creativity through the Purpose Prize in stunning ways that show that many of us get a second bite at the apple and the opportunity to do things that we never dreamed possible.
Arnott: But at the same time, I think, you mentioned Arthur Brooks earlier, and I think he has written about this phenomenon that a lot of people experience in midlife of just this feeling of being stuck, or maybe you feel like your career is stalling out, or if you’re in a creative field, you’re not making as much progress, having as many breakthroughs as you did before. Do you have any advice for people going through that so that they can create a bridge for themselves to that second burst of creativity and productivity?
Freedman: I think you said something key, which is around creating the bridge, but all too often also as you point out, people are forced to do that by themselves. And that’s not an easy task. Imagine young people who’ve finished their main tests of adolescence, and we say to them, “We want you to become an adult, we’ll see in five years.” But we didn’t have a higher education system, for example, or apprenticeships or any of those things. And I think that’s what we ask a lot of older people who I think correctly have come to an impasse that they’ve reached a point where that last chapter has run its course, but that doesn’t mean that their contributions, creativity, ideas have come to an end. But we do need to provide more opportunities for people to have education, to do internships, to explore, and rest up and ready themselves for a new chapter. And that’s too hard at this point. And I think it’s ultimately going to require imagination. I think we need role models and examples of people who have gone through that transition. It’s going to require innovation. We need better pathways to purpose for people in this stage of life, and it’s going to require investment. We need to put the resources in so that this can happen at a scale commensurate with the size of the population and the opportunity.
So, I’ll just give you one idea on the list because we started our conversation talking about Social Security. What about if we gave people in their 50s the opportunity to take an early year of Social Security, to go back to school in return for working in an actuarily adjusted period later before getting their full benefits? It would be almost like a G.I. Bill for people in the second half of life. Everybody would have a voucher, and I think it would change higher education. They would create a lot more programs addressing this population. So not to say that that’s the panacea, but we’re not even having the conversation about how we could do this at a scale that matters.
I’ll give you another example. One of my favorite programs is something called Troops to Teachers, which helps retiring military personnel move into public school teaching. And it has the fundamental insight that somebody who’s been in the middle of the desert with a bunch of unformed 18-year-olds might do fine in the middle of a classroom with some unformed 17-year-olds. And it also brings in the possibility of social mobility because so many people who do go into the military at 18 do that because they don’t have any opportunity to go to school. And programs like Troops to Teachers help people get the education they need to move up the ladder, but in ways that draw on their accumulated experience, but allow them to use it in new ways to new ends.
Benz: Marc, I wanted to ask about the role of income and education in all of this and wealth, because it does seem like as people have more income and education, they just have more flexibility. They can write their own tickets a little more readily. So maybe you can discuss the role of wealth in all of this. We had previous guest professor Anita Mukherjee, who’s a professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she talked about how really these life expectancy gains, these longevity gains are primarily accruing to wealthier people and they’re using those years to work longer and also be retired longer and they’re also healthier, so they’re having more better years later in life. So maybe you can discuss that dimension of this and whether encore careers are for everyone or at this point mainly wealthy folks.
Freedman: It’s a huge issue, and I think in the do-it-yourself universe that we’re in now, it disproportionately benefits wealthier folks. I talked about these higher education programs in places like Harvard and Stanford and Notre Dame. They’re wonderful programs, but the tuition can be $60,000, $70,000 a year and that doesn’t even count the cost of moving to South Bend for a year or to Palo Alto. So, I think we’re seeing some very creative efforts. One of my favorites is the Modern Elder Academy that Chip Conley created that’s in Baja and soon to open up in Santa Fe. But all these efforts are drawing people who are on the more advantaged end of the spectrum. So I think the challenge is how we can do things like the Troops to Teachers program I just described, which widen that opportunity and provide support for people who don’t have vast bank accounts to go back to school, to retrain, to retool, to try on new roles because those are groups of people who not only need to keep working most of all but also have vast assets again like those army sergeants I just talked about. So, we’re really missing out on a big talent pool in that area.
Arnott: So, if you’re a person in your 50s or 60s and you like the idea of an encore career, but you’re maybe a little fearful about giving up the security of a paycheck, what are some of the things that you think you would want to think about in making that decision? And what would you see as the main benefits of transitioning into an encore career versus slogging it out for a few more years at your current job?
Freedman: I think you really hit on—the slogging-it-out option is a short-term one. If you really want to have a whole new chapter that provides fulfillment, that reason to get up in the morning, strong social ties, income over an extended period of time, it takes a different perspective, a different time horizon. And I think time is really critical. If you’re thinking about what you’re going to be doing for the next 10 or 20 years, rather than slogging it out, I think it pays to take a step back to reinvest in your skills, to do something like an internship or a fellowship. It can even be through volunteer work, and to recognize that most likely you’re not going to make this transition successfully the first time or easily. There might be a time period of a few years.
So, I think, for me, I think getting that time horizon right. If you’re thinking out 10 to 20 years, and you’re also recognizing that the transition might take a year, two years, three years, then I think to plan accordingly—and I think one kind of trade-off that is worth considering is taking money from that long-term retirement period and using some of it for the transition. Investing in yourself, taking time to do an internship. And so, I think that reallocating resources in ways that help tee up this new chapter is one way for people to acknowledge that life is longer, our working lives are getting longer, and that means more chapters, not just hanging on and trying to fend off the abyss.
Benz: Well, maybe to back up a little bit, Marc, can you talk about the benefits, the many benefits that you see coming from continuing to work? It seems like it ticks a lot of boxes in terms of physical activity, relationships, and so forth, but maybe you can walk us through what the data say about that.
Freedman: I think that the three main benefits are financial security, social connection, and this sense of purpose. And there’s so much research now on the link, including through the Blue Zones series that’s been airing over the past months, that purpose and health are inextricably intertwined. And then also on the social connection, we are in the middle, according to the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, of an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. And a lot of people get that kind of social connection from the workplace. And so, I think that’s the kind of holy trinity of benefits of longer working lives is income security, social connection, and ongoing sense of purpose.
One of my favorite quotes is from the poet, Marge Piercy, she has a poem called To Be of Use, and it closes with the line, “The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.” And that’s not something that has an expiration date, that’s not confined to midlife. It’s something that I think people feel deeply even as they move into their 60s, 70s, and beyond. So, purpose, connection, and security, I think all are inextricably intertwined in the benefits of longer working lives.
Arnott: I think that’s a great point, just this deep need to be useful and to have meaningful work. So, if you’re someone who wants to continue pursuing meaningful work but is worried about maybe confronting ageism either in the workplace or with going back to school, do you have any tips for dealing with that? Or are there things that we can do to make ourselves seem more relevant and less vulnerable to ageism as we get older?
Freedman: I think that one of the benefits of so many more people insisting on contributing in ways that defy outdated norms is that they are making it better for everybody. It reminds me of the movement of women in the 1970s who were moving into roles that had been off-limits to previous generations and refusing to be denied. So, I do think that there’s a way in which people who are forging ahead despite outdated attitudes and other barriers are really making it better for younger generations.
But that said, that’s cold comfort probably for a lot of us. I do think that focusing on continuous learning and growth, it’s not only good for our own health cognitively and otherwise, but it sends a powerful message about the kinds of people we are. And I think embracing relationships with younger colleagues, not just in the traditional mentoring way, but I think through co-mentoring where there are opportunities for people at both ends of the age spectrum to learn from each other are two ways that keep us relevant and learning, and I think contribute to changing the cultural norm about who are the contributors in society and providing a sense of the wholeness of life, which I think we’ve lost in many ways in the context of separating generations.
Benz: One of our previous guests, Kerry Hannon, who writes about work and money and life, she made the point that the pandemic has normalized remote working and that’s a really good thing for older adults and that they can maybe live where they want to live, don’t have to commute. And also, her point was that ageism may be less of an issue, like if people aren’t seeing you in person, but that seems kind of sad and also seems like it runs counter to your idea of age diversity, right? Can you have age diversity in a strictly virtual setting? Is being physically with other people important?
Freedman: I think it is. And I think that we need to embrace our age in part as a service to younger people so that they know what awaits them. But I take a lot of succor and I’m quite heartened by what we’re starting to see in the cultural sphere. For a long time, we thought of pop culture as a source of ageism and undeniably, there’s a lot of ageism in that realm. But I just watched the Grammys on Sunday night, and the 80-year-old Joni Mitchell was there along with Brandi Carlile, half her age, who’s been her great champion. There’s Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs. Tracy Chapman is about to turn 60. Luke Combs just turned 30. Even Billy Joel’s appearance was the result of a young person who is deeply influenced by his work and got him to start writing again. Or even in films like The Intern or shows like Only Murders in the Building and Hacks. I think we’re seeing a picture in front of us not only of older people who continue to contribute but younger and older people coming together to do things that no one generation could do on their own.
And we did a study last year with the University of Chicago that showed in fact that older and younger people are quite interested in working together with each other, particularly on issues like climate and mental health. And the most striking finding is that the group that was most interested in collaborating across generational lines were young people and young people of color. So, I find in the context of the long-standing battle against ageism that there’s a new generation that’s coming up, whether we’re seeing it in the air, on the air, or on the ground, who actually are embracing older people and wanting to collaborate and work together. So, I don’t want to be a Pollyanna and say that ageism doesn’t exist still, but I do think we’re in the midst of a change and it’s a heartening one.
Arnott: I think you’ve made some changes in your own work life over the past few years. Can you talk about some of the changes you made and why?
Freedman: Well, this past year I turned 65, which was a shock. I started our organization with John Gardner, who was Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Health Education and Welfare, and he was the person who implemented Medicare in 1965. And suddenly, I’m getting my Medicare card, and it was our 25th anniversary as an organization as well. And I started thinking about, well, maybe it is time to move to my encore career. And I talked to a colleague who’s a quarter century younger than me, Eunice Lin Nichols, to see if she would be interested in succession. And she said no, but she came back with a counteroffer, which is, why don’t we do this job together? And I have to say I was really moved by that. I have so much respect for her. And I thought, wow, we can even model the ethos of the organization around the power of age diversity through this collaborative co-generational leadership model. And I’m happy to say a year in that I’ve never enjoyed my work more. And it’s a reminder that I think these abject choices we often have—work or retire, be the director, or step aside—aren’t the only options. And there are tremendous opportunities around collaboration, co-creation, sharing of power. And so, I’m hoping that we can be a model for other leaders too who can craft these kinds of collaborative arrangements.
Benz: You’ve written that the nonprofit sector, the not-for-profit sector, is particularly ripe for encore careers. Can you talk about that thesis?
Freedman: I do think that that’s the case. And I’ve seen it in my own quarter century in that sector where there’s so much more appreciation, respect, hunger for strong management in that sector. And so, people who’ve come from other sectors and who have that kind of expertise, whether it’s in strategy or marketing or financial issues, are in a unique position to help strengthen this work. In fact, that was the reason we created our Encore Fellowship program where we’ve had 2,300 fellows who put in 1,000 hours in a nonprofit organization, but they don’t do work that’s foreign to what they’ve done before. If you were working in marketing at Intel, you take a role as a marketing person at the Boys and Girls Club in your community. So, it’s a blend between the accumulated experience that older workers have with new settings to use that experience.
And so again, instead of reinvention, it’s almost more of a reintegration. But I want to put in a plug, in particular for education. There’s a great program in the United Kingdom that was created by Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times columnist, whose daughter did the British equivalent of Teach for America, which is very popular in the U.K. like Teach for America is here. And Lucy decided at age 60 that she wanted to follow in her daughter’s footsteps. And so, she created an organization called Now Teach, which recruits older people into teaching roles in STEM areas— science, technology, and math in particular. And it’s become a national phenomenon in the U.K. I believe they had 40 applicants for every slot. And I just found out in talking with an anthropologist, Michael Gurven, at the University of California, that evolutionary thinkers now actually believe that teaching is the most natural role for older people. Gurven studied 20,000 people in hunter-gatherer tribes, and the elders in those tribes play this teaching role. There’s now a new study on killer whales, which had killer whale grandmothers play this teaching role with young whales. So, I think their argument is that we’re wringing our hands about what role older people should play when, in fact, evolution has already answered that question. Even the killer whales have figured it out and that there’s a huge opportunity around teaching, whether it’s formal teaching roles or less formal ones.
Arnott: So, teaching and education is a path that a lot of people might want to explore. But if someone is listening and they’re a little bit stumped about what their encore career might be, do you have any tips for how they might think about that or get inspiration from other people?
Freedman: I have a few ideas. One would be to read the absolutely wonderful book my colleague, Marci Alboher, wrote—she was The New York Times career columnist and blogger for many years—and she wrote a book called The Encore Career Handbook, which is just filled with stories of people who’ve moved into encore careers and how they did it. I’d also recommend looking at the winners of the Purpose Prize. AARP now runs the Purpose Prize. It’s the AARP Purpose Prize. And there are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people who’ve moved into these second acts where they’re really doing their most fulfilling work. And so, I think that’s another wonderful source of inspiration. And then I think also to look at this new crop of higher education programs and efforts like the Modern Elder Academy where people can go and explore future possibilities.
Benz: Well, Marc, this has been such an inspiring conversation. You’ve inspired Amy and me, I think, as we’ve talked to you today. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be with us today.
Freedman: Thank you, Christine. Thank you, Amy. It’s an honor.
Arnott: Thanks, Marc. This has been great.
Benz: Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Ptak: And @Syouth1, which is S-Y-O-U-T-H and the number 1.
Benz: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week.
Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at TheLongView@Morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.
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