It was very instructive for me to read this essay. I have several elderly people that I am close to who are coping with age and its attendant problems in very different ways.
Indeed, depression and suicide rates for men increase after age 75.
A few researchers have looked at this cohort to understand what drives their unhappiness. It is, in a word, irrelevance. In 2007, a team of academic researchers at UCLA and Princeton analyzed data on more than 1,000 older adults. Their findings, published in the Journal of Gerontology, showed that senior citizens who rarely or never “felt useful” were nearly three times as likely as those who frequently felt useful to develop a mild disability, and were more than three times as likely to have died during the course of the study.
This seems to coincide with what I've observed in my very small sample size. Men who are 75 and older that I know haven't felt useful in a long time and by this age it starts to show disproportionate mental decline while nothing is truly wrong with their physical health. Leaving the workforce leaves them without power, structure or community. Having over-invested in career they lack the social ties that can keep them afloat post-retirement. Many leave interactions with kids and grandkids up to the wife who is the social link between them and the world. Comes a time when they no longer have the means to feel useful.
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