Paoli was born and raised in a large family (he has 7 siblings) in an Alpine village in northern Italy, Salorno. He turned 71 in July. As a boy he was a logger and farmer with his father, who had a mountain farm. But at age 16, after a car accident, he developed a mild form of epilepsy (which in the 1970s was not widely known, nor treated pharmacologically), and his right leg, after several surgeries on the femur, remained 2 inches shorter than the other.
From then on, his parents considered him the frailest in the family and years later gave the farm (which would have been his due), to his brother.
Paoli inherited the haberdashery under his house, where he worked as a draper and sold buttons and cloth until the store went out of business in the early 1990s. The women of the village had stopped donning socks and making clothes at home.
He ended up working in a bank until her retirement in 2014.
Over the years he cultivated his passions outside of work. The greatest of all was taking generations of village children to the mountains (from 1992 to the present) by organizing CAI (Italian Alpine Club) trips for nearly 40 years.
Now he continues to make curtains, helps elementary school children with their homework, and is a grandfather; his daughter Giulia had Matilde last year. All his life he has suffered from periods of depression, but when some friend calls him to prune trees or work with a chainsaw he is happy as a child.
Why did you retire or why are you still working?
Why did you retire?
Why are you still working?
If you do something you enjoy, even if it's tiring, you feel less of the years, the backache and the sense of emptiness that I felt right after retirement.
I worked for 40 years, and here people who retire very often end up spending their days in bars. I never went into a bar. I worked all my life from the age of 14 on, and when I found myself with nothing to do, I had to reinvent myself to figure out how to fill my time and days.
The last few, especially, have been happy years. Because they have been full of good things. Happiness and freedom is not sitting on the couch doing nothing. Not for me. The woods, making wood, tents, children on field trips, working in the fields. These are all things that fill my life and make me feel alive again.
If you do something you enjoy, even if it's tiring, you feel less of the years, the backache and the sense of emptiness that I felt right after retirement.
I worked for 40 years, and here people who retire very often end up spending their days in bars. I never went into a bar. I worked all my life from the age of 14 on, and when I found myself with nothing to do, I had to reinvent myself to figure out how to fill my time and days.
The last few, especially, have been happy years. Because they have been full of good things. Happiness and freedom is not sitting on the couch doing nothing. Not for me. The woods, making wood, tents, children on field trips, working in the fields. These are all things that fill my life and make me feel alive again.
Life expectancy 2023
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