(Note: In this article, I’m going to describe general health advice. I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist. Check with your doctor or nutritionist before beginning a new fitness program.)
The Well-Intended Advice That Did Harm
When I was a child, we thought of retirement as a time of rest and relaxation.
We’d tell our grandparents, “Just sit here and relax, Grandma, we’ll take care of everything.”
Little did we know we were actually shortening their lives by encouraging and facilitating their inactivity.
A 500-Year-Old Warning
We tend to think that modern advice for older people to stay active is new, but it’s actually at least as old as the 16th century. In her book, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life , Dr. Louise Aronson quotes a 16th-century French physician, André du Laurens, as saying,
“Nothing hastens old age more than idleness.”
People have known for a long, long time that we need to stay active as we get older.
Staying active isn’t just about movement—it’s mental, emotional, and physical.
In retirement, inactivity doesn’t show up all at once. It creeps in through lost purpose, shrinking social circles, and reduced movement.
Staying Alive Means Staying Mentally and Emotionally Engaged
1. When Work Disappears, Purpose Must Replace It
Work once supplied our identity and structure; retirement requires us to supply our own.
We need something to make us ready and anxious to get out of bed in the morning.
Here are some tips that might help you find a new purpose in life:
• Create a curiosity list. Write down anything you think you might be interested in exploring. This can include hobbies, volunteering, starting a business, taking on projects, and part-time work.
• Try some tiny experiments to see what fits and what doesn’t. The format for the pact that you make with yourself is, “I will X for Y days or weeks.” Don’t commit to new possibilities before experimenting with them.
• At the end of the period, evaluate the activity and decide to either keep it, drop it, or modify it.
Retirement isn’t a final exam—it’s a series of low-risk trials.
The nice thing about this approach is you really can’t fail.
If you try something and decide it doesn’t work for you, that’s a success because you’ve discovered that’s not a good option. On the other hand, if you try something and either keep it or modify it, that’s a success as well. You’ve discovered something that does work for you.
Friends Don’t Automatically Follow You into Retirement
Men tend to have all their friends at work. When they retire, those friendships rarely survive.
Maintaining social relationships in retirement is vital to staying active and healthy. As Dr. Louise Aronson wrote in Elderhood,
“The health impact of social isolation is equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. … All else being medically equal, loneliness increases mortality by 26 percent.”
Loneliness isn’t just unpleasant—it’s physiologically dangerous.
To have strong relationships in retirement, you can:
• Focus on making new relationships and renewing old friendships before you retire.
• Intentionally create new relationships after retirement. You can find potential friends by taking a course you’re interested in, joining an exercise class, volunteering for an organization you care about, working part-time, or attending a special interest group.
Why Healthspan Matters More Than Lifespan
While our lifespan has greatly increased, our healthspan has not kept up. Retirees today may spend a decade or more of their retirement years in poor health, unable to do what they’d like to be doing.
As popular retirement podcaster and writer Dan Haylett wrote in his newsletter The Retirement Fix on October 26th 2025,
“While life expectancy keeps rising, healthy life expectancy isn’t keeping up.”
We need to stay active to enjoy our retirement for longer.
The generally accepted advice about staying physically fit generally encompasses several areas.
1. Eat well. Eat lots of vegetables, beans, and whole grains. Stay away from highly processed foods. Reduce intake of sugar and salt.
2. Keep your weight and body fat percentage within healthy limits.
Obesity in older people results in losing mobility much earlier than they should, and initiates the onset of a number of serious diseases.
To lose unwanted weight and maintain a healthy weight, my wife and I follow the guidelines of Dr. Michael Greger in How Not to Diet: The Groundbreaking Science of Healthy, Permanent Weight Loss.
3. Exercise. This includes strength training, balance, and walking. This doesn’t necessarily mean you should do what you did when you were 30. You’re going to have to make accommodations and adjustments for an aging body.
I can’t backpack as far or with as heavy a pack as I used to when I was younger. So now I have to use lighter gear and plan shorter hikes.
Motion Is the Antidote to Decline
We’ve known for centuries that idleness hastens aging.
What changes with retirement is that no one schedules engagement for us anymore. If we want a full life, we have to design one.
That may mean walking instead of sitting, experimenting instead of retreating, and reaching out instead of withdrawing.
Don’t wait for motivation. Start with action.
Pick one thing that adds motion to your life today and let momentum do the rest.
AI Note: I wrote this blog post myself, using my own words and thoughts for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, images, and text improvements.
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