Who says retirement is required? According to an article in a September 2012 issue of The Christian Science Monitor, a worker in a needle factory, Rosa Finnegan, had recently turned 100 and still enjoyed her work. She’s one of a rising number of centenarians who have continued to live active lives (Mark Trumbull, “The silver-collar economy,” The Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 3, 2012).
Research affirms that Rosa’s desire to be productive is healthy. A Newsweek article about Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer’s book, Counterclockwise, explains Langer’s argument this way: “We mindlessly accept negative cultural cues about disease and old age, and these cues shape our self-concepts and our behavior. If we can shake loose from the negative clichés that dominate our thinking about health, we can ‘mindfully’ open ourselves to possibilities for more productive lives even into old age” (“Just Say No to Aging?” Newsweek, April 13, 2009).
Langer’s theory relates to an experiment she did a few years ago. She placed a group of men in their late 70s and early 80s in a New England hotel made to look like something out of the 1980s. They were asked “not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time.”
