THE TIMES: Work harder, live longer — but don't expect to enjoy it: “Shell Oil has spent 26 years monitoring the longevity of 4,000 workers in Texas who retired at 55, 60 and 65 respectively.”: Monday 24 October 2005

Richard Morrison

Here’s some good news. The longer we work, the longer we live! So, on this joyous Monday morn, we can all trip to the office with a song in our hearts. Clearly, we got it wrong. Far from being worn to a frazzle by the stresses of our jobs, we seem positively to thrive on hard labour. Stop in our mid-fifties and we are virtually signing our death warrants. But toil on till 65 or more, and we will be doing cartwheels and Su Doku long into the 22nd century.

OK, I exaggerate a bit. But the gist is exactly as was reported last week in the British Medical Journal. Shell Oil has spent 26 years monitoring the longevity of 4,000 workers in Texas who retired at 55, 60 and 65 respectively. What the researchers found was that among those who opted out at 55, the death rate in the first ten years after retirement was almost twice as high as those who keep their noses to the Shell grindstone till 65.  

You have probably spotted the obvious flaw in that statistic. Quite a lot of those who retired at 55 would have done so because they were feeling the stress. In other words, their health may already have been damaged, and a significant number were heading for an early appointment with Mr G. Reaper, whether they continued working or not.

But Shell then compared the death rates of only those who had survived past 65. The results were broadly the same. Those who worked till 65 lived longer on average than those who retired at 60. And both groups survived longer than 55-year-old retirees.

Hmm. It’s possible that working conditions on Texan oil fields are so conducive to good health that Shell’s research is irrelevant to, say, the weary hack in Wapping or the embattled teacher in Leeds. But I doubt that. No, I sense that this research is universally valid. So how will it be explained?

Simple-minded dolt that I am, I divide humanity into two categories: those who work to live; and those who live to work. In this context the latter are no problem. Enthralled by what they are paid to do, quite often to the detriment of their family and social lives, they would happily clock up 60-hour weeks into their nonagenarian dotage if they could. Typically, they have creative and varied jobs — but not invariably. Years ago I knew a postman who had to be restrained from turning up for his 5am shift when he was 75. Such people have an abhorrence of retirement — a revulsion only intensified in recent years by the alarming prospect of the Magical Evaporating Pension.

I am one. I can’t imagine how I would occupy my waking hours if I weren’t scribbling stuff in newspapers. Perhaps this is merely evidence of a stunted imagination. But it’s also a satisfyingly uncomplicated way to get through life. I work therefore I am.

It’s the other (probably much larger) part of humanity, the work-to-live types, who fascinate me. They toil to survive, but their hearts lie elsewhere. If they could get by without work, they would. And back in the 20th century it was still possible for them to keep sane and sanguine by clinging to that dream. They fantasised that, with kids and mortgage seen off, and health, hair and teeth still more or less in place, they would opt out early, "downshift" to Devon, and devote themselves to messing about in boats. They imagined 30 or 40 years of gentle bliss: a lazy, hazy autumn to their lives, compensating for a bloody awful summer.

I know people who tried to live this whimsical dream. One or two did find that land of lost content. But the majority became terribly depressed. Some even sidled surreptitiously back into the rat race. They had underestimated how much the human psyche needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Or they had misjudged how much they would miss office banter. Most of all, however, they found that they couldn’t handle freedom. Unlimited leisure sounds wonderful when you have none. But when the days are suddenly emptied of everything — stretching into the far distance like the Sahara — it’s an invitation for the brain to atrophy and the body, psychosomatically, to follow.

So in a way the current pensions crisis has done work-to-live types a favour, albeit of the cruel-to-be-kind variety. It has snapped shut the exit door to early retirement for all but the truly resourceful and determined. What it can’t do, though, is turn them into live-to-workers. That would be like asking foxes to become hedgehogs. Like Philip Larkin, they will continue to see enforced labour as an ugly toad squatting on their lives:

Six days a week it soils

With its sickening poison —

Just for paying a few bills!

That’s out of proportion.

What I find sad and strange is that, in the 50 years since Larkin penned that bitter verse, mankind has invented countless “labour-saving” machines. With all that smart technology, we should be able to award ourselves three-day weekends, or four months’ annual holiday, or mid-career sabbaticals like my colleague Mary Ann Sieghart’s imaginative jaunt — and still surpass the productivity of our parents’ generation. That would make working to 65 or 70 much more palatable to everyone. Yet we force ourselves, and each other, to toil harder than ever. Why? Is Homo sapiens hard-wired that way for ever?

Alas, that is something which the Shell survey doesn’t tell us.

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