Dolly Parton has no intentions of slowing down—ever.
Really, the 77-year-old country star would rather die on stage than wind down her career, as she’s “not one to sit around and do nothing.”
“I would never retire,” the ‘9 to 5’ singer said in an interview with Greatest Hits Radio. “I’ll just hopefully drop dead in the middle of a song on stage someday, hopefully, one I’ve written.”
Although Parton quit touring after performing in more than 60 cities in the U.S. and Canada back in 2016, she has still been creating music—with her 49th studio album Rockstar set to release in November—and performing on a smaller scale.
Plus, provided she and her husband of over 50 years, Carl Thomas Dean, are healthy, the music icon says, she’ll continue performing.
“As long as I’m able to work, as long as my health is good, and my husband is good,” she said. “I mean, the only way that I would ever slow down or stop would be for that reason… But in the meantime, I’m going to make hay while the sun shines.”
Despite selling 100 million albums, racking up 53 Grammy Award nominations, and opening a Dollywood theme park, Parton still has career aspirations to look forward to, including launching her own network television show, as well as her own makeup and wig lines.
“I have new dreams every day…I’ve got lots of dreams,” Parton said, adding that it’s partly what keeps her from retiring. “I always believed that if you’ve wanted your dreams to come true and you are lucky enough to have that happen, then you’ve got to be responsible because you gotta keep the dream alive,” she said. “And every dream kind of spawns another dream.”
If you don’t use it, you lose it
Like Parton, many workers today are opting to stay in the workforce for longer than previous generations.
In the U.S., 32% of people aged 65 to 69 were in work in 2017, far more than the 22% who were working in 1994. Meanwhile in the U.K., the number of workers over 65 tripled between 1993 and 2018.
Although money is a motivator for some, research suggests that working for longer is more about improved life expectancy and health than collecting a salary. The thought of retiring and watching the days go by for some 30 years simply isn’t appealing to most people.
Plus, in turn, by working longer, would-be pensioners could be extending their vitality.
Experts told Fortune that keeping your brain active is one of the best ways to keep it healthy and delay age-related cognitive decline, as well as to avoid the social isolation that is common among older people.
“If your work does not involve heavy physical labor and satisfies your basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, then we can indeed expect that working longer can contribute to your physical and psychological health,” says Wladislaw Rivkin, associate professor in organizational behavior at Trinity Business School.
This is particularly the case, he adds, “when you have the autonomy to decide how much or little you work as you are not dependent on the income from your work but rather work for fun.”
With a net worth of around $440 million, it’s clear that Parton isn’t holding off retirement because she can’t afford to quit. However, for those working intensely to keep food on their plate later in life, the benefits vary depending on the type of work done and the level of day-to-day stress experienced.
“If your work is physically taxing and you have little psychological needs satisfaction and potentially work in a very constrained environment, like, shift work and work to make ends meet, as is the case for many blue-collar workers, then research shows that such work contributes to ill health and even premature death,” Rivkin warns.
