Growing Old in a Young Person's Profession

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In Part I, I wrote about the stages of a police career from applicant to retiree. I asserted the unpleasant truth that studies of various jobs, including police work, show an earlier-than-expected decline in mental abilities.

In this, Part 2, I suggest ways you and your family could begin to think about the psychological and emotional transitions that come with growing old on the job.

Decline affects everyone. As I near the end of my fourth decade as a police psychologist and writer, I feel myself slowing down. I can’t work as long or as hard as I used to. Multi-tasking is a thing of the past. I have less tolerance for discomfort. People around me, especially those my age, are failing at an alarming rate.

Being a police officer makes you part of an elite group. Most people could not qualify for the job or do what you do day in and day out. There is a lot of evidence that the decline of ability in people of high accomplishment is brutal psychologically in much the same way as the loss of physicality is brutal for professional athletes.

Being a cop requires intellectual and emotional competence. It can be harsh physically as well as psychologically for both officers and their families, making early decline inevitable. It is a job few people can sustain for thirty years, at least not with the same level of energy and enthusiasm they had when they were younger. It is why most cops retire in their 50s.

Many, if not most of us, harbor a secret belief that decline and ultimately death are true for others, not us. Bear in mind that while the decline is inevitable, some suffering is not.

I offer the following in the service of adding ease to growing old on the job and after. These are neither recipes nor formulas but rather intentions and ways of thinking about the trajectory of your life.

• Don’t put all your eggs in the police basket. Being a cop is a job, not an identity. Here I paraphrase two colleagues. In his book, Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement, Kevin Gilmartin questions the wisdom of why cops invest so much of their self-worth into the one thing they cannot control, their jobs. He points to the precarious nature of placing the entirety of one’s self-worth into a single identity—being a cop.

There's safety in numbers. Joel Fay has several sources of self-worth and several identities in addition to being a cop for 30-plus years. While working as a cop, he was also a husband, a father, a psychology student, a long-distance bicyclist, and one of the founders and volunteer clinicians of the First Responder Support Network. When he retired, losing one identity was not disruptive to his life or self-esteem.

• Older officers must reinvent themselves. Rather than relying on your youthful mental and physical agility, use the accumulated wisdom of your years on the job to teach and inspire others.

Arthur C. Brooks, in his essay on decline, talks about two kinds of intelligence. A fast-moving type that connects disparate ideas and is required for innovation. The second he called crystallized intelligence—the ability to use the knowledge gained in the past. He credits crystallized intelligence as “The essence of wisdom.” Built on accumulated experience, crystallized intelligence increases with the passing years and appears not to diminish until late in life.

• Keep your ego in check: One of the occupational hazards of police work is self-inflation, believing you know more and can do more than others. It’s one of those unrealistic beliefs common to cops. On the plus side, it allows you to do your job. On the negative side, it can backfire by causing you to hold yourself to unattainable standards of perfection. People who are deeply invested in being perfect or better than others can suffer when they inevitably lose status and ability.
• Think deeply about how you measure your worth as a person. Decide what it means to you to have a life well lived. Define what it means to have enough, do enough, be enough. Figure out how you will know this for yourself.
• Focus less on professional ambition and accomplishment and adjust your life goals in the direction of spirituality, service, wisdom, and connection to others, particularly family.
• Take your foot off the gas. Life is not a Code 3 call. Scale back your ambitions. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the difference between resumé virtues and eulogy virtues. Eulogy virtues are what you want people to say about you at your funeral.

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Do you want people to remember you as a decent, kind person who helped others? Or would you prefer them to remember you were the youngest ever Lieutenant with the best arrest stats on your squad three years running? If you dare, pretend you are dying tomorrow. What would be said at your eulogy? What would you change?

• As you continue your career, detach progressively from the commonly acceptable rewards—power, fame, status, and money. Move from focusing on yourself to others, friends, family, co-workers, and the community. Build a spiritual life bigger than your own life's soap opera. Connect with others. Make developing deep relationships more important than work.

No one can predict the future. As is said, the best-laid plans of mice and men can go awry. I wish you (and me) the best as we wisely approach the inevitable with our eyes open, a firm grasp on reality, and a reasonable, manageable, and hopeful ops plan for the future, whatever it holds.