At 65, you may pause in your striving for social importance and prestige and ask yourself what really matters in your life. Or not. I did.

Arthur C. Brooks has recently written a book, “From Strength to Strength,” which examines our relentless drive to climb to the top of our individual career ladder and hold on, while holding off those whippersnappers below attempting to climb up behind us.

Early on, Brooks shows a bell curve graph based on “gigabytes of data.” Twenty years from our career inception is the peak average work productivity for most creative careers. After that halfway mark, productivity steadily declines. I graduated from law school at age 27. My peak would have been at age 47. I will be 67 next year. My career arc is complete, but I’m not done with the gifts that I have to offer.

At 47, I was trying court cases as a civil litigator and enjoying the strategy and competition of the game. At 65, I was deciding contested cases on the bench and enjoying the gamesmanship less. Although I believed that I still possessed the intellectual rigor for the challenge, with some effort, I often encountered a nagging internal question: “is this all there is?”

The problem, as I told one of the lawyers applying for my position after I announced my retirement, is that once you climb to the top of the career ladder, when you finally “make it” and look around you find yourself on the bottom rung of another ladder.

Success, and the drive for success, are like the rats in Bruce Alexander’s “rat park” experiment. The isolated rats in the experiment continuously drank water mixed with morphine instead of plain water even though there were resulting detrimental health effects leading to addiction.

The brain’s limbic reward system binds us to seek continuous experiences of power, control, mastery, prestige and “success,” even if the pleasurable dopamine hit from each successive experience progressively diminishes. I had often experienced mild bouts of depression for days following a successful trial outcome.

I have long self-medicated with caffeine, lots of it, to increase my work productivity for most of my adult life. Coffee energizes my worker bee persona, “Mr. Focus.” Mr. Focus is great at slicing through the mundane tasks of work life and getting things done.

However, Mr. Focus is less successful at looking up from work and connecting to human beings. Mr. Focus rarely cares about emotional presence or notices the “we space” needed to maintain close personal relationships.

It’s easy to avoid the hard work of interpersonal relationships when you’re doing what society regards as “important” work. Important work is what you ruminate about over the weekend, what requires you to take alone time in the evenings to decompress after a long and stressful day.

There’s no argument that the work of the courts is important. But I have seen some of my colleagues put the work ahead of their physical and emotional health, as I did. Work often gives us worth. It is natural to fear that nothing important will occupy our time once the purpose and satisfaction of doing socially important work is gone.

Helping-professionals in particular may powerfully experience the secondary or vicarious trauma that comes with heath care, emergency response or social work. If the problems at work are vast and intractable, it’s natural to feel that “only I can solve this” or “if I only work harder” there will be progress. There lies the road to burnout, if not madness.

The happy news is that Brooks says we can train ourselves to jump from the fluid intelligence curve of our productive youth and onto the crystalized intelligence of wise elders. The analogy of crystalized intelligence is that I have a vast library of knowledge and experience to draw from. However, the librarian is old and cranky. He takes a long time to stand up and stretch before going off to search for a book. He might stop for coffee, or get distracted and chat with a friend along the way. It takes a long time to retrieve the book.

Those successfully jumping from the productive to the second curve of intelligence often end up teaching or mentoring others based on the library of knowledge built up in the first half of life. Similarly, in the 12 steps of AA, the ultimate step is to recognize your successes and then be of service to others in their journey of recovery.

The happy rats in “rat park” experiment had plenty of food, toys for play and exercise, and lots of opportunities for sex. Unsurprisingly, they were uninterested in the addictive morphine water.

In our climb up the ladder of success, we may use people and love the things that success brings: status, material toys and societal respect. When we put away the striving, we may finally learn to use things and love people.

Joe Charter is a retired Circuit Court judge. His current project is working on becoming a “FIP” — a “Formerly Important Person.”