TED Radio Hour - Late Bloomers

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Original broadcast date: November 11, 2022. Many of us feel pressure to hit big life milestones on a timeline. But what if age is an asset, not a liability? This hour, TED speakers examine the benefits and drawbacks of being a late bloomer. Guests include writer Doree Shafrir, network scientist Albert-László Barabási, anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite and retired educator Riley Moynes. Listeners also share stories. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

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From TED and NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti, and today on the show, Late Bloomers. For most of her life, writer Dory Schaffir, felt like she was always late. Oh, yes. This idea of having to keep up with my peers was something that I felt very deeply. Late to becoming a hip, teenage. age girl. It was like all the girls were shaving their legs. They were making out with boys. Like they were doing all these things that like weren't even on my radar. And late to hitting the

milestones of young adulthood. Yeah. So, you know, I graduated college, kind of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and moved to New York and thought, okay, I'm going to have this like great career in media. But I was kind of flying blind. Like I opened up the New York Times class. section and I was like, I guess this is how I find a job. Like, I just didn't know anything. But at the same time, I was like, well, I guess I have all these things I need to do before I turn 30. Like, write a book, maybe get married, like, buy an apartment. I mean, it was just like this list of things with no understanding of like what it actually took to get those things or why I even really wanted them. When I was in my late 20s, I went back to school. And as part of the part of that, I worked as an intern, and I was older than the assistants. I was older than a lot of the editors. And then I was like, oh, wait, what's happening here? So, Dory, your memoir is called, Thanks for Waiting, the joy and weirdness of being a late bloomer. Yes. Do you remember when it occurred to you to even refer to yourself as a late bloomer? Yeah, I mean, it was kind of late.

Appropriately. So, you know, I felt like I had a limited amount of time to kind of like make my mark professionally. But then I was simultaneously also in my head supposed to be finding a partner. But I had trouble kind of separating the idea of. wanting to be married and falling in love and finding someone that I was really excited about. Like, it was hard for me to separate the two. Like, did I just want to be married because that's what you do? That's what I thought should happen. Yeah. Why do you say that your book, your memoir is a gentle corrective to living a linear life. Why do you think people do put so much pressure on themselves? Well, I mean, I don't think we can discount the influence of the patriarchy.

I think that these ideas have been part of society for hundreds of years, and they're hard to overcome on our own, especially when it feels like the messaging all around us is do things in a certain way, in a certain order, and be on a certain path. I had no clue how much of that. I had just accepted as the norm, accepted as reality. For me, there was no role model of, like, the successful older single woman who had just said, you know what, I'm not interested in this. And I think that has changed also. Yeah. But in my early 20s, I had definitely internalized this idea of, like, the sad spinster, which I realize now I was just kind of buying into these, like, antiquities. patriarchal ideas. But as a 23-year-old, I was not aware of that. And, you know, as I got into

my mid-30s, I started feeling that even, even more. I mean, one of the things, of course, that happens in your mid-30s, and this is, you know, beyond our control is the biological clock starts, you're told basically, like, well, you are a late bloomer if you haven't gotten pregnant by 35. Yeah, I mean, you know, anything over 35 is a geriatric pregnancy in the medical community. So, you know, in my mid to late 30s, I started feeling, again, kind of like a late bloomer. Sort of like relationships wise, I had broken up with a long-term boyfriend when I was, I think I was about 33. And then didn't really date anyone seriously for a few years. But eventually met the man who is now my husband. And we got married when I was 38. and then started trying to have kids, and that was a whole long and arduous process that eventually resulted in my son, Henry, who I had when I was almost 42.

And, you know, in the fertility world, that is ancient. So I was definitely feeling that at the time. My husband and I have had sort of ongoing going conversations about having another kid. And then there's days where I'm also like, well, I'm 45. You know, by the time this theoretical baby graduates from high school, I'd be 64. And like that, that feels kind of old from here. I mean, that just feels so unfair because, like, we're saying, like, women, you don't have to live by this linear order.

Yes. But actually, biologically, maybe we kind of still do. Yeah, yeah, it's so frustrating and so unfair. Like, yes, these limitations do still exist. So despite all the struggles that you had, the title of your book does include the phrase, the joy of being a late bloomer. So spell it out for us. What is that joy? What is the benefit?

So to me, that joy is learning who you are and being comfortable with who you are and being happy with who you are and contend with who you are and enjoying enjoying spending time with yourself is something that I like didn't really enjoy when I was you know 25 um so therefore having a kid in your 40s I think there are some aspects of like mom culture and having a kid that would have like stressed me out more certainly yeah when I was younger and that now I'm just like I'm just like I'm doing, I'm just going to do this my way. That's kind of great actually. Yeah, and that is the sort of freedom that I definitely would not have had even 10 years ago. I do wish I could like go back and give my younger self just a big hug and be like, hey, maybe be a little kinder to yourself.

Dory finally came around to accepting, even celebrating life as a late bloomer. But many of us still feel pressure to hit big life milestones on a particular timeline. Does it matter if we find success earlier or later in life? What's stopping us from thinking of aging as an opportunity rather than a liability? Today on the show, an examination of late bloomers. Ideas about rejecting societal expectations while also accepting some of life's realities as we strive to be happy. happy and healthy for as many years as possible. So a biological ticking clock is one kind of pressure. Another one? Professional success.

You don't have to search too much in Wikipedia to realize that I pass 55. This is Professor Albert Laslo Barabashi. He's worked in academia for 30 years as a physicist and network scientist. And about a decade ago, he started asking himself a very very, tough question. I was always wondering, how long can I keep up what I'm doing? That is, kind of running a research group, making discoveries, publishing papers, and having an impact. So he did a little digging around. And I was surprised to see that a fellow physicist, his name is Albert Einstein, has made a very interesting observation. He claimed that a person who has not made his great contribution to science before

the age of 30, we'll never do so. First, I was curious, why would he say that? Yeah, yeah. And when he looked around himself, the people he knew and he admired, he saw lots of young people, people who were kind of in the mid-20s to late 30s, maybe early 30s, at which point they made their big discoveries. And he just generalized from this relatively limited observation. I should say, it's not entirely clear if that quote does indeed come from Einstein. But the idea was compelling to Loslo because he had found a lot of early success himself. But he wondered, was this always the case?

What about other scientists and other professionals? So about 10 years ago, we started exploring when and how do scientists, succeed. We look at the career of many, many scientists asking many questions about how early we can say that the scientists will make a phenomenon of discovery. At what age do they make those discoveries? And in general, how do we spot a promising scientist? So you started with what you knew, the careers of scientists. But how did you go about trying to figure out whether Einstein's assumption that younger people achieve more was correct? Well, the first thing we wanted to ask is, is this true only for highly accomplished

individuals or is creativity really peaks for ordinary scientists as well? So the first thing we did is that we reconstructed the career of hundreds of thousands of scientists, starting with physicists, then biologists and so on. and ask when did people make their best discovery? We didn't care whether there was a Nobel Prize discovery or something that was forgotten immediately. We just wanted to know that within a person's career, what was their best?

And you're saying the best is equated with the most public accolades that they got or the most citations? The most citations, because that's kind of a very measurable quantity that we can assign to scientific impact. In fact, it's debatable whether that really captures impact, but it's a very good proxy of that. And when we analyze all these careers,

we were surprised that the vast majority of the scientists published their highest impact work within the 15, maybe 20 years of their career, the first 15 or 20 years. And then after 20 years, the likelihood of publishing something of high, impact falls dramatically. So, for example, I'm about 30 years into my career, and the chances of me publishing a paper

whose impact would overcome my earlier papers is less than 1%. That's depressing, huh? On the face value, it's very depressing, and so was for me. In a moment, how Albert Losslo Barabashi found a silver lining for scientists and some lessons for all late bloomer. I'm Manusse Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about our next bonus episode for TED Radio Hour Plus, it's coming out soon. It's a conversation with Yenisa, a face super recognizer, which basically means she remembers nearly every face she sees. We get into what it's like to live with this extraordinary

ability. That's coming Wednesday. If you're not a TED Radio Hour Plus supporter yet, join your fellow listeners to get all kinds of bonus content and to get all our episodes sponsor-free. Plus, you're just supporting the show. So go to plus.npr.npr.org or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. And thanks. It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Mnuch Zamoroti on the show today. Late bloomers. And before the break, we were talking to physicist and network scientists, Albert Laslo Barabashi, who left us with a pretty bleak statement.

I'm about 30 years into my career, and the chances of me publishing a paper whose impact would overcome my earlier papers is less than 1%. This sounds grim, but Laszlo looked at the data and realized, he was missing a control. Here he is on the TED stage. So the control would be, how would a scientist look like who makes random contribution to science?

Or what is the productivity of the scientists? When do they write papers? So we measure the productivity, and amazingly, the productivity, your likelihood of writing a paper in year 1, 10 or 20 in your career, is indistinguishable from the likelihood of having the impact in that part of your career.

And to make a long story short, after lots of statistical tests, there's only one explanation for that. That really the way we scientists work is that every single paper we write, every project we do has exactly the same chance of wearing our personal best. That is discovery is like a lottery, right? And like a lottery ticket. And then the more lottery tickets we buy, the higher is the chance. And it happens to be so that most scientists buy most of the lottery. their lottery tickets in the first 10, 15 years of their career. And after that, their productivity

decreases. They're not buying any more lottery tickets. So it looks like as if they would not be creative. In reality, they stopped trying. So when we actually put the data together, the conclusion is very simple. Success can come at any time. It could be your very first or very last paper of your career. It's totally random in the space of the projects. It is the productivity that changes. So basically, scientists tend to put out more papers early in their careers, and therefore their chances of having an impact are greater. But as they get older, you found they're less productive for all kinds of reasons,

and therefore their chances diminish. Right. The conclusion is that there is no connection between creativity and age. There's only a connection between productivity and age. And if you as a scientist or any creative person are willing to continue trying over and over, you have the same chance of making a discovery later in your life or early in your life. For example, John Fann was a chemist, and at 65, he was forcefully retired by Yale, but he was still full of ideas. So he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University, and it is there after retirement where he

published the paper for which 15 years later at age 85 got the Chemistry Nobel Prize. So you have expanded your research beyond science and academia. You've started to research how these ideas apply to other fields. For example, entrepreneurship. What does success look like for entrepreneurs? When does it happen? One of the areas where the equation youth echoes creative is very strong held is in the Silicon Valley, right? We can look at the funders of Google or Facebook and you name it, and you're seeing very, very young faces, at least the moment when they funded the company they were in the 20s. And the press and the media is full with the image that UTEC was kind of talent when it comes to starting a new company. Well, it becomes a legend, doesn't it? It does become a legend.

Right. But when some of my colleagues actually looked at the data, they asked the question, what's the difference between a company funded by a young person versus funded by more and their individuals? What's the likelihood of exit? That is that the company will either go on the stock market or be successfully sold. You're reminding me of this moment in your TED Talk where you lay it on people, on the audience, that the chances of having a successful exit for an investor are far greater if you were to invest in a sort of midlife career entrepreneur. Do you remember that? Oh, yes. And it turns out that, yes,

those in the 20s and 30s put out a huge number of companies, form lots of companies, but most of them go bust. And when you look at the successful exits, what you see in this particular plot, the older you are, the more likely that you will actually hit the stock market or sell the company successfully. This is so strong, actually, that if you are in the 50s, you are twice as likely to actually have a successful exit than if you are in your 30s. Surely, though, it's more complicated than that, right? We're talking about investing, let's say, in a 50-year-old founder who maybe has had smaller successes as well, right?

It's not just like pick a random 50-year-old founder of a company and invest in them. What are some of the quantifiable that there need to be for that, the variables? Of course, it's never random, right? You don't pick a person on the street based on the age profile and give them $200 million to start funding a company, right? And of course you should. If you have a talented young individual that you feel that he or she has what it takes to form a successful company by whom is bet on them. But at the same time, don't disregard the very practiced hand. Okay, so Lozlo, I need to ask the two fields we've talked about, science and technology,

those are dominated by white men, always have been, who could work in a far more linear fashion than, say, women who might have had their careers disrupted by pregnancies and child care, and black and brown people who may not have been given the same opportunities. So how do you factor in those two groups of people into your idea that success can come later in life? This is actually a very important topic of research in my lab. And we specifically asked the question, what really distinguishes women and men scientists? Ethnicity and race is much harder to quantify, but gender is something that we can easily distinguish. wish. And when we started this research, there were lots of previous results that were not

encouraging. It indicated that when you look at the career of a woman scientist versus a men's scientist, women have smaller career impact and smaller productivity. But when we looked much more carefully at the data, we realize that when we look at the yearly productivity of men and women, they are largely indistinguishable. Then why there is a career difference? Well, that's because at any year of their career, women have about 3% higher chance of leaving academia than men. You know, at every year people leave because they go to industry, because they have personal reasons, but that every year of their career, women are 3% more likely to leave the scientific career than men. As a result, women have shorter career as a group seem to have lower

productivity, and that explains the bulk of the difference in the impact as well. Okay, so let's talk about a field where, you know, to measure performance, it's not that easy. Things get a little squishy. Art, the art world. I am reminded of something that you said, which I believe to artists, you said, tell me the first five places where you ever showed your art, and I will tell you the trajectory of your career. Did I get that right?

Yes. Art is a particular interesting area, right? When it comes to art, it's all about networks. And what I mean by that is that if I look at this glass of water in front of me, is this an artwork or is this a glass of water? Well, it depends, right? If you see it in the MoMA under a glass box, it's a repurposed object that is acting as an artwork. And if you see it in my office, it's obviously a glass of water.

So value in art only emerges through networks, meaning that. Who was the artist who put that glass there? What did that artist do before? What other museums have works by him or her? These are all network effects. So I like to study art, and in my lab we study art because art is the perfect example where only networks generate value. Because the rest is so arbitrary. I wouldn't call it arbitrarily. It's community-based.

Community-based. At the end, who gets rewarded and how for a given performance, it's fundamentally a network effect. Your performance is about you, but you. Your success is about us as a community. I'm so curious what you think about some of the movements that there have been in the last couple years about younger people saying, you know what, we're not doing this anymore. There's the lie flat movement in China here in the U.S., quiet quitting, people saying, produce, produce, is draining us. As someone who studies success and how to get it, what do you think of all that? there is such a thing as internal success that is not quantifiable.

And that's really the most important thing. You know, I would consider internal success my children, right? I have three children that I'm very proud of. And even internal success is the fact when I climb a mountain, right? These are the little pleasures of life that are unmeasurable to us scientists. But if you do seek success in the way we, use the word success, then you better engage with it on its own terms and you better understand the patterns and the laws that govern it. Because not everybody needs to go to the moon. But if you

want to go to the moon, you better understand the loss of gravity. And I'm guessing the next thing that you would say is be persistent. That's the key to the story, right? Because don't believe that Creativity vanishes with age. Creativity doesn't. The willingness to try, that's what vanishes. And if you can overcome that, you have a chance for success, no matter your age. That's physicist and network scientist Albert Laslo Barabashi. His book is called The Formula, The Universal Laws of Success.

You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, late bloomers, ideas about thriving throughout our lives, including our later years. Ashton, yes. May I ask you how old you are? Of course. Some people get very offended by that question. Well, that's sort of the heart of the matter. Why should we be offended at saying how old we are?

I just turned 70. I don't know whether, like, so I'm of an age when I remember when it was impolite to ask a lady how old they were. Well, and there you have hit also on the aspect that aging. is gendered and that women are doubly penalized for not only being older, but being an older woman. I just had a comment on Facebook where a woman said she liked everything about the article except the fact that the 70-year-old man who was being interviewed was described as old. And I said, well, by what measure is 70 not old? It happens to be my age as well. And there is a lot more road behind us than ahead. And she said, by my measure, I don't like the word.

Oh. In an agist culture, age is derogatory. It should be neutral. This is Ashton Applewhite. I am an anti-ageism activist and the author of this chair rocks, a manifesto against ageism. But it took Ashton a long time to get to this point. These are new ideas to most of us. We live in a culture that barrages us with negative messages about how awful it's going to be to get old, and we all internalize those messages.

They become part of our identity unless we stop to challenge them. Okay, I want to start with how you got into thinking and writing about the way we treat people of a certain age. Was it— Old people. Go ahead. Say it. Old people, yes. How did it happen? There's not a meet-cute moment. I was in my mid-50s, and I realized that this getting old thing was happening to me, and I was really absolutely.

apprehensive about it. And being a bull by the horns kind of person, I started looking into longevity and talking to older people. It's not that our apprehensions about aging are without basis, but our fears are way out of proportion to reality. Ashton Applewhite continues from the TED stage. What's one thing that every person in this room is going to become older? And most of us are scared, stiff at the prospect. I, you're to feel the same way. What was I most worried about? Ending up drooling in some grim institutional hallway. And then I learned that only 4 percent of older Americans are living in nursing homes, and the percentage is dropping.

What else was I worried about? Dementia. Turns out that most of us can think just fine to the end. Dementia rates are dropping, too. The real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss. I also figured that old people were depressed, because they were old and they were going to die soon. It turns out that the longer people live, the less they fear dying,

and that people are happiest at the beginnings and the ends of their lives. It's called the U-Curb of Happiness, and it's been borne out by dozens of studies around the world. So you go on this mission to just learn more about aging, and you discover that there's actually a lot less to worry about than maybe many of us assume, Even though, you know, not to diminish it, yeah, getting older does have its challenges. Yeah. There are legitimate and real reasons to worry about getting older, getting sick, running out of money, ending up a loan.

But, you know, only two bad things about aging are inevitable. One is that people you've known all your life are going to die. And the other is that some part of your body is going to fall apart. Carl Pillar at Cornell interviewed, I think, over a thousand older people. what advice did they have for younger people? And they said, don't worry so much. And they said, especially, don't worry so much about getting older. People with more accurate attitudes towards aging live longer, an average of seven and a half years longer. We walk faster. And my favorite study shows that people who don't equate aging with disease and decline are less likely to

develop Alzheimer's, even if they have the gene that predisposes them to the disease. Wow. So I started feeling a lot better about getting older, and I started obsessing about why so few people know these things. The reason is ageism. We experience it anytime someone assumes we're too old for something, instead of finding out who we are and what we're capable of, or too young. Ageism cuts both ways. All prejudice, relationships, lies on othering, seeing a group of people as other than ourselves, other race, other religion, other nationality. The strange thing about ageism,

that other is us. Ageism feeds on denial. Our reluctance to acknowledge that we are going to become that older person. It's denial when we try to pass for younger, or when we believe in anti-aging products, or when we feel like our bodies are betraying us simply because they are changing. The sooner we get off this hamster wheel of age denial,

the better off we are. Older people can be the most ages of all, because we've had a lifetime to internalize these messages, and we've never thought to challenge them. I had to acknowledge it and stop colluding. Senior moment, quips, for example, I stopped making them when it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school,

I didn't call it a junior moment. Like I stopped blaming my sore knee on being 64, my other need doesn't hurt, and it's just as old. We are all worried about some aspect of getting older. But when labels are hard to read or there's no handrail or we can't open the damn jar, we blame ourselves. Instead of the ageism that makes those natural transitions shameful and the discrimination that makes those barriers acceptable.

In a minute, Ashton Applewhite on what being a late bloomer can look like for an older person. On the show today, late bloomer. I'm Anush Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zomeroidi. On the show today, late bloomers. And we were just hearing from Ashton Applewhite.

She is a writer and anti-ageism activist, who says that age isn't the barrier that we often think it is, which matters even more because on the whole, we are living longer. population aging is a permanent global demographic trend. In your and my lifetime, four and five living generations are becoming commonplace. We have longer to grow up. We have longer to learn what we learn. So the whole idea of being a late bloomer, we have to rethink what time frame we attach that to.

People are going to cycle in and out of careers and in and out of being trained to learn totally new things. the entire landscape of work is being transformed. I mean, even the word retire, I have to put in quotes. I started a website called Old School, the old school anti-ageism clearinghouse, and we host a weekly meetup. Anyone can show up, and one of our regulars has worked for 38 years at a Maine American corporation, and he's stepping down. But he's not, you know, he's retiring from employment at that company,

but he's not retiring from, work. Is he a late bloomer? He may go on to write symphonies. He may go on to write a novel. He may go on to sit in his deck chair. You know, it's so American to think you have to keep on producing this whole pretty toxic notion that you have to, you know, keeping busy. You know, it's okay to be idle also if you can afford it and if it is okay for you, you know, sooner or later, we got to slow down. I want to ask you what you, you know, this is what I hear a lot of worry from younger people right now, which is that this population that is older now probably is the last one that have had a pension that is able to draw social security at the same time that maybe owns homes as well as savings. No kidding. I mean, so what is maybe, you know, older people can thrive, but maybe this is just not going to be possible for. for future generations financially and they're going to be living longer? No question. I mean, I was born in 1952 into an unprecedented 60 years of economic prosperity and peace. I was incredibly lucky. And yes, my dad worked for the same company, his whole life and retired with a pension.

Those things are no longer available to younger people who have to change jobs and cannot expect to build a career in that same way. And youngers have every reason to resent my demographic good fortune, but it doesn't make me the enemy. And we need to work together, old and young, united, to try and reduce inequity and produce a fairer, more equitable landscape for people of all ages in the workplace and everywhere else. Do you have a role model right now for aging well? Is there someone who you think of who you think, you know what? That's who I want to be. I would say I learned different things from different people. I adopted a phrase that I heard from a geriatrician named Joanne Lynn who called herself an old person in training.

I really had no idea how important the phrase would become to me, but I was like, I think that's what I have become. And the idea there is simply to form an imaginative hypothetical connection to the future, older you. And she can be as far away, a distance back on the horizon, as far away. way as you need her to be. But if we realize, like, oh, with luck, I'm going to get old, it's easier not to get on that hamster wheel of age denial. I don't want to think about it. It's scary. And to look at the older people around you who, if you look around you, we're all over the place and most of us are enjoying our lives, you know, most of them, there's things about aging none of us like, but no one wants to die young, you know.

You're reminding me of like a song by Michelle shocked. Her saying that, I was like, yeah, when I grow up, I want to be an old woman too. There was no positive. There was no negative. It was just a fact that I would like to have a long life. And I think that's kind of what I hear you saying is like, can we stop having opinions about it? It's going to happen. So deal with it and make the most of it.

Yeah. You are entitled to your opinions. You are entitled to your fears. you're entitled to feel any way about it that suits you, and you're going to feel different about it on Tuesday than you do on Friday. Being young is hard. Being old is hard, too. Life is hard, especially, you know, in a heartless global economy

where we don't have enough social supports. The leaps we're able to make, the risks we're able to take, the compromises we have to make are unique for each of us. I would never say, here's how to do it. But the most important thing we can each do is to look at our own attitudes towards age and aging. Think about how you use the words old and young, how you feel when someone, you know, calls you young lady or fails to call you young lady or cards you or doesn't card you. The zillions of ways in which age crops up in daily life in the media, you name it, and think about your response. Think about where that message comes from and what purpose it serves.

That's Ashton Applewhite. She is the author of This Chair Rocks, a manifesto against ageism. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, late bloomers. So far, we have touched on the biological clock, professional success later in life, and the things that hold us back as we age. And now, the ultimate phase that we all hope to land on, retirement. To make sure we blossom during that period, we need to take some specific steps, according to author and retired educator Riley Moynes.

Here he is on the TED stage in May 2022. I belong to a walking group that meets early three mornings a week. As we walk, we've gotten the habit of choosing a talk. topic for discussion. And one day the topic was, how do you squeeze all the juice out of retirement? How's that for seven o'clock in the morning? So we walk and we talk and the next day we go on to the next topic, but the question stayed with me because I was really having some challenges with retirement. I was busy enough, but I really didn't feel that I was doing very much that was significant or important. So I decided to dig deeper. And what I discovered was that much of the

material on retirement focuses on the financial and or the estate side of things. And of course, they're both important, but just not what I was looking for. So I interviewed dozens and dozens of retirees, and I asked them the question, how do you squeeze all the juice out of retirement? What I discovered was that there are four distinct phases that most of us move through in retirement. And as you'll see, it's not always a smooth ride. Phase one is the vacation phase, and that's just what it's like. You wake up when you want, you do what you want all day, and the best part is that there is no set routine.

And for most folks, phase one lasts for about a year or so. And then strangely, it begins to lose its luster. We begin to feel a bit bored. And we ask ourselves, is that all there is to retirement? Now, when these thoughts and feelings start to bubble up, you have already moved into phase two. Phase two is when we feel loss and we feel lost. We lose a sense of identity. We lose many of the relationships that we

had established at work. We lose a sense of purpose and for some people there is depression and decline, both physical and mental. The result of all of this is that we can feel like we've been hit by a bus. Fortunately, at some point most of us say to ourselves, hey, I can't go on like this. And when we do, we've turned a corner to phase three. Phase three is a time of trial and error. In phase three, we ask ourselves, how can I make my life meaningful again? The answer often is to do things that you love to do and do really well. but phase three can also deliver some disappointment and failure. For example, I spent a couple of years serving on a condo board

until I finally got tired of being yelled at. I thought about law school, thinking perhaps of becoming a paralegal, and then I completed a program on dispute resolution. It all went nowhere. Now, I know all this can sound bad, but it's really important to keep trying and experimenting with different activities that'll make you want to get up in the morning again, because if you don't, there's a real good chance of slipping back into phase two, and that is not a happy prospect.

Not everyone breaks through to phase four, but those who do are some of the happiest people I have ever met. Phase four is a time to reinvent and rewire. But phase four involves answering some tough questions too. Like what's what's the purpose here? What's my mission? You see, it's important that we find activities that are meaningful to us and that give us a sense of accomplishment. And my experience is that it almost always involves service to others. Maybe it's helping a charity that you care about. Or maybe you'll be like my friend Bill. I met Bill a few years ago in a 55 plus activity group. In the summer, we golf together and walk together and bicycle together. And Bill had this idea that we should exercise our brains as well.

He believed that there was a tremendous pool of expertise and experience in our group. And so he approached a number of folks and asked if they would volunteer to teach some of the things that they love to do to others. Our members taught us to paint. They taught us to repair our bicycles. We tutored and mentored local school kids. We set up English as a second language programs for newcomers. We had book clubs, we had film clubs, we even had a few golf clubs. It's exhausting but exhilarating.

That's what's possible in phase four. It is magic to see. Magic. So, I urge you to enjoy your vacation in phase one. Be prepared for the losses in phase two. experiment and try as many different things as you can in phase three and squeeze all the juice out of retirement in phase four. That's Riley Moynes. He's the author of The Four Phases of Retirement, What to Expect When You're Retiring. You can see his full talk at ted.com.

Now I know it's late in the episode, but we want to share something very special from you, dear. listeners, we put out the call asking if the late bloomer label applies to your life, and so many of you responded. Hello, my name is Ruben Erazzo. Susan McGregor. Thomas Darcy. Linda Robinson. Cecilia Zoltanski.

I am old. I am a late bloomer. I was a late bloomer from the beginning in the incubator for a month, late to teathe, late to walk. I always consider myself to be kind of needing to catch up. Some other opera singers, they have everything, and they studied for a few years. They're good. For me, I had to struggle a lot. About a month after my 50th birthday, I went to culinary school.

I enrolled in a sailing school. I was a novice. I knew nothing, but I wanted to sail big sailboats, offshore, blue, I can remember one of my coworkers expressing astonishment saying, do you realize that in four years when you graduate, you'll be 45 years old? To which I replied, and in four years, if I don't graduate, how old will I be? Earning that Ph.D. in bio-inorganic chemistry has provided opportunities I never could have dreamed of. At the age of 54, I deployed to Antarctica as a senior

analytical chemist with the U.S. Polar program. In 2011, the year I turned 62, I spent a nine-month winter at South Pole. I hold the record for the oldest female to ever overwinter at pole. It took me a long time to make the leap of faith to chase my dream. 20 years to finally say, I'm getting that job, which is ironic since I've known what I wanted to do with my life since I was 10 years old. So I got a seasonal six-month temporary job across the country as an educator at a zoo. First day of training, I'm 10 to 15 years older than every one of my peers. And now at the age of 54, when I finally got where I always wanted to get, it's already late to have an opera career because at this age, most of the singers are at the top of their craft or finishing their careers.

But for me, it's just the beginning. When I go back to school to secure a degree, In counseling, in my early 50s, it brought me to some healing that I needed to do from a childhood trauma that was unrealized at the time. And from that time, I have been able to find some growth and strengthening both mentally and emotionally and spiritually. and am currently at the age of 61, a social emotional educator at a K-3-2 school in Mississippi. I am now 71 years old. I had a lunch for my first novel. I finished a short screenplay after teaching myself

how to use the software. I entered a film festival, and I got a third place Laurel. It isn't about the laurels. It's about enjoying the journey, and I'm blooming doing that. It's crazy to know that I'm over 65, living in my wildly wonderful life, places I could only dream about. And a fresh love that I met during the pandemic and with a shared interest in voting, a partner my age.

And so I am calling you from the Capricord Coast of Queensland, Australia, where I failed. Over 65, it's probably late, or it might be too late. Too old for you guys, but I've got nothing to lose. Thank you very much. Bye, bye. Thank you very much, listeners, for sharing your stories. And as always, thank you all for listening to our show this week on Lake Blooms. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier, Katie Montalione, Andrea Gutierrez, and Fiona Guren.

It was edited by Sana's Mesquenpour, Rachel Faulkner White, Andrea Gutierrez, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahousie and Catherine Seifer. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablewe. Our audio engineer was Co. Takasugi Chernivan. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelin, Michelle Quint, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.