When my husband and I turned 50 (yes, I finally dare to write the actual number down, after being in denial for quite some time), we got to talking about the years ahead. What do we want to do? How do we want to grow old? How do we lead a fulfilling life, right to the end? Those are the questions you start asking yourself when you realise that youth has quietly shifted into middle age (OMG). I guess what it came down to for us was this: how do you keep feeling useful? How do you still have a role that matters? Retirement is still a long way off for us, but a lot of people are there already, and more and more of them every year. So that led to an interesting design question:
How do you design a retirement where people still feel needed? And how might the same thinking matter for any of us who draw our sense of worth from being useful?
I found an interesting answer in Japan. The conventional approach to ageing is to provide for people: pensions, care, activities laid on to keep them occupied. All necessary, and yet it can quietly cast older people as recipients, people things are done for, which is its own kind of diminishment. Japan built something different alongside it. Its Silver Human Resource Centres, more than a thousand of them with hundreds of thousands of members, match retired people's skills to real needs in their community. A retired carpenter repairs the furniture at the local centre; a former teacher helps at the kindergarten. The work is real, the community needs it, and the member is the one providing it, not receiving it.The behavioural science here is about the role a context hands you, and how much of our wellbeing rides on having one.
A person with an active role, with expectations to meet, a status to hold and people who rely on them, tends to stay healthier and live longer than a person with no role to fill.
The centres do not tell retirees they still matter. They build a context in which retirees are visibly needed, and the feeling of mattering follows from the fact of it. This is Behavioural Design applied to something as deep as purpose.
You do not persuade someone that they are still valuable. You design a situation in which they are genuinely needed, and let the role do what no reassurance could.
So how do you put this to work, well beyond retirement? Here are three practical moves:
Give people a real role, not just inclusion. Being invited to attend is not the same as being needed. Whether it is a new joiner, a volunteer or a quieter colleague, assign a genuine responsibility that others depend on, and watch engagement follow.
Make the need visible and specific. "We'd love your help sometime" lands far weaker than "the team needs you to own this." People rise to a need they can see clearly and that is unmistakably theirs.
Design the role before you worry about the motivation. When someone seems disengaged or adrift, the instinct is to motivate them. Often the stronger move is to build a context in which they are actually required, because a real role generates its own motivation.
I guess my role, or the way I hope to stay purposeful, is to keep diving into behavioural science and translating the insights into practical applications for people, including you, my reader. I can do this when I am 90, or better still, up to 100. If you do what you love and keep your eyes and mind wide open to the world, I think you live longer (I am channelling my inner Sir David Attenborough, who turned 100 this year).
Behavioural Design Summer School
Two days in Amsterdam with Tom and Astrid, and a small group of people ready to be more influential by September.
Day one builds a working Behavioural Design × AI workflow you can use from the following week. Day two: two masterclasses based on the founders' books, one on designing for happiness and energy, one on finding the leverage points that unlock stuck change.
Dinner together on the first evening. A follow-up session three months later. Both books included.
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The mere presence of others: why we try harder when watched
I mentioned having a responsibility others depend on. As it turns out, simply being together does even more for us. You have probably noticed you work differently when someone else is in the room, even when they say nothing at all. Behavioural science has long observed this: the simple presence of other people changes our behaviour, often sharpening our effort on things we already do well. It is sometimes called social facilitation.
The effect is not about pressure or judgement so much as a kind of activation that other people produce in us simply by being there.
The practical use is to stop trying to do everything in isolation. If there is a task you keep avoiding alone, do it alongside someone, a shared work session, a colleague at the next desk, a standing call where you both simply get on with your own work. You are not asking them for help; their presence alone tends to lift your focus.
We are wired to show up a little more fully when we are not entirely on our own, so arrange to be in good company when the work matters.
See you next week!
Astrid Groenewegen
Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.
Source:
Japan Silver Human Resource Centres (Silver Jinzai), Japan Silver Human Resource Centers Association. Underlying science on role theory and purposeful ageing.
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