The speed of life

Our lives move so quickly that we sometimes forget what the real speed of life is.

Life moves deceptively quickly. Watch a sunrise. The sky gradually gets lighter and lighter, yet you wait and wait for the sun to peek above the horizon. Then you blink and it's already cleared the horizon and jumped up into the sky. It's easy to forget that the earth is spinning at around 1,600 km/hr (1,000 miles/hr).

Now I don't usually get up early enough to watch the sunrise, so I look for other things to remind me of the speed of life. 

If you sit and observe it, a garden seems to be completely static. But in reality, the growth is constant and deceptively quick.

It's the same with choosing the life you want. When you plant the seeds of conscious choice, it seems like nothing is happening. But their growth is constant and deceptively quick. And completely invisible if you just sit and wait.

So plant the garden of your life. Weed it and water it and let nature do its thing. You'll have a bountiful harvest before you know it.

Nature or Nurture, which determines how you save?

There is an interesting study by Henrik Cronqvist and Stephan Siegel that used data on identical and fraternal twins matched with data on their savings behaviour. The authors found that an individual's savings propensity is governed by both genetic predispositions, social transmission from parents to their children, and gene-environment interplay where certain environments moderate genetic influences.

Genetic variation explains about 35 percent of the variation in savings rates across individuals, and this genetic effect is stronger in less constraining, high socioeconomic status environments. Parent-child transmission influences savings for young individuals and those who grew up in a family environment with less competition for parental resources.

As an example, if you pulled two pairs of identical twins out of the population, you might find that Alice and Agnes saved 15% and 18% of their income, while Bob and Bubba saved 10% and 11%, respectively. About one-third of the difference in average savings (17.5% versus 10.5%) is due to genetic differences between the A girls and the B-boys. The A family presumably has alleles that code to more patience on the “savings gene”, while the B family has alleles that code to less patience.

Maybe as interesting as the 1/3 number is that the share attributed to common family experience is essentially zero. Their paper supports a “nature” over “nurture” view on savings behaviour.

 The authors argued in their article that people born impatient or lacking self-control might find that these traits have a consequence on their savings, and on some health issues. However, individual-specific life experiences is a very important explanation for behaviour in the savings domain, and strongest in urban communities. In a world progressing rapidly towards individual retirement savings autonomy, understanding the origins of individuals' savings behaviour are of key importance to economists as well as policy makers.

Regarding this article and some other research that indicates the influence of genes on savings behaviour, policy planners may have to reassess current public policies to see whether they are effective enough to encourage savings or to change savings behaviour.

Why is it important to prepare for retirement?

'Start early' is the main message from project partners at the close of BALL, a two-year project led by the Evris Foundation in Iceland, in which Reykjavik (Iceland) and Lublin (Poland) Universities of the Third Age and the Permanent University of the University of Alicante (UPUA) also participated. The project (pdf file) addressed the urgent need to establish directives and best practices for preparing individuals early for retirement, stressing the importance of on-going learning, environment and cultural factors, and knowledge sharing.

The figures indicate that in welfare societies a person aged 50-55 has between ten and fifteen years before retirement, and then twenty more years of a full and active life after that. It is essential, then, that we ask ourselves what we want to do with our time during this period of our lives; what might we need to train in beforehand, from financial and legal issues, to preventive health, social skills, leisure activities, dependence prevention.

One of the researcher  Concepción Bru stresses the importance of carrying out awareness-raising campaigns on the value of the third age in society, aimed both at the general public and those approaching retirement: "More and more people are living longer and in better health [and] the sudden stop in the activity you have spent your whole life engaged in" can lead to depression and related mental health issues.

Encouraging physical activity and inspiring a sense of inclusion and purpose is the overarching goal of the BALL project, but the key for Bru is that retirees, or those approaching retirement, are able to "reinvent themselves. Engage in something they've never done before, like volunteering. If you prepare yourself in good time and with good organisation and guidance, a better retirement is possible".

The idea, Bru tells us, is to continue work in the EU to put these recommendations into practice. Indeed, they are already being implemented by companies that took part in the project, as well as at an institutional level, via the regional ministry of education and the University of Alicante. Not to mention at the UPUA itself: "Much of the material we already teach is straight out of the project recommendations. This is why they asked us to participate, for our experience" (Bru).

A healthy life style is important as we age

Leading a healthy lifestyle not only extends one's lifespan, but it also shortens the time that is spent disabled - a finding that had previously eluded public health scientists and demonstrates the value of investing in healthy lifestyle promotion, even among the elderly.

In an earlier post, I referred to a study called Healthy Life Expectancy (pdf file) that shows that living longer does not guarantee people will be fit enough to work into old age.

I talked about the stats that show many of us, while living longer, spend many of those years in poor health. New research shows that we can change this pattern. An analysis of a quarter century of data by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and their colleagues nationwide revealed that older adults with the healthiest lifestyles could expect to spend about 1.7 fewer years disabled at the end of their lives, compared to their unhealthiest counterparts. The study results are online and scheduled for the October issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

If we spend less time in poor health, this will have enormous personal and societal implications, ranging from quality of life to health care costs. By staying healthy, by exercising and by eating properly so our overall heath improves thus improving our lifestyle we may postpone both our own death and disability, but it may mean less time in poor health at the end of our life.

The researchers examined data collected by the Cardiovascular Health Study, which followed 5,888 adults from Sacramento County, Calif.; Forsyth County, N.C.; Washington County, Md.; and Allegheny County, Pa., for 25 years. All of the participants were aged 65 or older and were not institutionalized or wheelchair-dependent when they enrolled.

The participants reported or were assessed for various lifestyle factors, including smoking habits, alcohol consumption, physical activity, diet, weight and their social support system. The researchers took into account and adjusted results for such factors as participants' age, sex, race, education, income, marital status and chronic health conditions.

Across all the participants, the average number of disabled years directly preceding death - years when the person had difficulty eating, bathing, toileting, dressing, getting out of bed or a chair, or walking around the home - averaged 4.5 years for women and 2.9 years for men, which is inline with the world wide data.

For each gender and race group, those with the healthiest lifestyle (those who were non-smokers of a healthy weight and diet and getting regular exercise) not only lived longer, but had fewer disabled years at the end of their lives. For example, a white man in the healthiest lifestyle group could expect to live 4.8 years longer than his counterpart in the unhealthiest group, and at the end of his life, he'd likely spend only two of those years disabled, compared to 3.7 years for his unhealthy counterpart.

Put another way, that man's healthy lifestyle has given him nearly three more years of active life free of disability than his unhealthy counterpart, who not only died earlier but spent the last three-and-a-half years of his life disabled - a larger percentage of those remaining years.

So the bottom line for me is to invest and take the time to maintain a healthy lifestyle and encourage my friends and other people to maintain healthy behaviors into old age. The results of this survey indicate that as seniors we need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Being healthy may allow to reduce risk of being disabled for a longer period when you are near the end of life.