Having Purpose & Longevity

[Amethyst]

Must be something FAA-specific. The most we could leave to one another would be 55% of our pension, and that in itself costs 10% of the pension per year (so the living person only gets 90% while they're alive).

It worked for my younger sister. She got divorced 20+ years ago, her ex later retired as a GS 15 from the FAA. He was obese and the stereotypical hard-charging "type A" personality. Healthwise, the only thing he had going for him was that he didn't smoke. She told me that her "retirement plan" was to outlive him, when she would get his full pension and not just part of it.

He passed away two years ago, she's doing just fine, so it worked for her.

 

[ls99]

A fellow I know just started training as an Air Traffic Controller. I tried to explain before he started, you don't know stress until you become a full fledged controller. Big $, big stress. But he has a purpose in life.

 

[street]

When I first found this site I was really having a hard time with the purpose my job gave me and now I had none.
I asked the question about purpose after retirement and some said, a hammer has a purpose you don't need a purpose, just live life and make your purpose retirement. Lol I will never forget that answer.

 

[joeea]

Which of these two women has a purpose in life?

That depends.

If by "purpose" you mean "which one jogs best", then the answer is clear.

What if the first was a Nobel Prize winning physicist who is working on a breakthrough method for producing cheap energy, while the second is a cashier at Piggly-Wiggly? Would that change the answer?

 

[BigNick]

As I often do in my awkward way, I actually read this research paper. I don't think the authors did enough to convince me that there is any direct causal effect of meaning in life on longevity, independent of all the other things that cause both. Meaning in life is a difficult thing to measure scientifically (I have co-authored a modest commentary on it in the psychological literature, including a sneaky Spinal Tap reference ) and even if we had a perfect measure (which the one that was used here is not; the people who designed the survey were not looking to measure meaning in life), it would be horribly confounded with almost every other aspect of our lives.

Amusingly, the authors cite (uncritically) an absolutely terrible study on the effects of meaning in life on gene expression, which my colleagues as I debunked; it was, as someone once said, "not even wrong". (The authors of that article later changed their published dataset without telling anyone, so that some of the mistakes we pointed out would no longer be reproducible. Science can be so corrupt sometimes.)