In this episode, Marc interviews Chris Farrell, a senior economics contributor for Marketplace, American Public Media’s nationally syndicated public radio programs. Chris is economics commentator for Minnesota Public Radio and an award-winning journalist. Chris is a regular contributor to PBS’s Next Avenue, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times, Kiplinger’s, and other publications. Marc hopes you enjoy this episode.   Key Takeaways: [1:13] Marc welcomes you to Episode 117 of the Repurpose Your Career podcast. Career Pivot brings you this podcast. CareerPivot.com is one of the very few websites dedicated to those of us in the second half of life and our careers. Please take a moment to check out the blog and the other resources delivered to you, free of charge. [1:43] If you are enjoying this podcast, please share it with other like-minded souls. Subscribe on CareerPivot.com, iTunes, or any of the other apps that supply podcasts. Share it on social media or just tell your neighbors, and colleagues. The more people Marc can reach, the more he can help. [2:05] Next week, Marc will be interviewing Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism. [2:15] This week, Marc is interviewing Chris Farrell, author of Purpose and a Paycheck: Finding Meaning, Money, and Happiness in the Second Half of Life. [2:28] Marc introduces Chris and welcomes him to the Repurpose Your Career podcast. [3:10] Marc loves Chris’s previous book, Unretirement: How Baby Boomers are Changing the Way We Think About Work, Community, and the Good Life and is very much looking forward to the new book. Chris explains the motivation behind his new book. He wants to reshape society’s view of the aging population. [4:54] Marc agrees that we are aging very differently than our parents did. A lot of folks are now dealing with their parents and their kids. It’s a different world. [5:20] We have very powerful stereotypes about the stages of life. What strikes Chris is that people lose their jobs or quit their jobs all the time. You may have kids and parents in your care. Even if your kids are launched, you’re always a parent. [6:01] So we have this simple idea of how life evolves. Chris says, life is just a lot of ups, downs, twists, and turns and part of this rethinking of aging is just being much more realistic. If you are caregiving in your twenties for a baby, you’ll also be caregiving in your fifties for your aging parents. [6:29] In Marc’s online community, there are a bunch of people in their late 60s, primarily guys, who still have kids in college, mainly because the Vietnam War era draft made people delay getting married and having kids. This means they have obligations to worry about that younger Boomers don’t have. [7:18] Chris shares stories from the chapter, “The Myth of Creative Decline.” He had seen Matisse at MoMA. He says Matisse was at the height of his creativity between the ages of 74 and 84. Bruce Springsteen is still performing and writing new songs in his 60s. [8:35] We’re beginning to realize that aging artists and performers are not just reliving their glory days, but creating new works of merit. The closer you look into the artistic community, you see so many people building on their experience and connecting their dots. Research shows we retain creativity in our own fields through our senior years. [9:34] It’s fundamentally wrong to think creative abilities go away in the 60s and 70s. [9:59] Marc tells of a recent experience in Ajijic. They recently had an art walk with 90 artists. Three-quarters of them were expats from Canada and the U.S. Almost all of them took up art in their 60s. Marc was blown away. There were paintings and other media. Many of the artists had learned their art from YouTube videos. [10:48] Some took classes. Some went and studied with masters. They were able to do this in their 60s and 70s. [11:01] There is a stereotype that people, a