I'm an attorney, and I have a few older partners who are nearing your grandfather's age. I've gotten close to a few of them and enjoy their insights, but I've also taken their lives as a cautionary tale. Invariably, they had put their careers before everything else, and fell for the siren-call of ego-validation that you get from being affirmed and praised for your efforts at work. They didn't bond closely with their wives or children, had affairs, and generally acted in an amoral (rather than immoral) way. How could their families compete with the lauding of prestige, money, and ass kissing you get at work? Now that they're older, they keep working because they've invested in no other aspect of life--they have no meaningful relationships outside of work and couldn't talk about something other than a judge they clerked for in the 1970s if you put a gun to their head. If they retired, 95 percent of all of their daily social contact would evaporate, and they know it. The cruel irony is that they're not even good lawyers at this point (they don't try to be) and have been phoning it in for the last twenty years. They pad their hours heavily, and slap together half-assed filings. Clients usually can't identify shoddy legal work because they're not lawyers themselves, and think they're being counseled by a master of their field who has survived in a cutthroat industry to old age. In a sense, they are, but it doesn't make for the sort of person they assume. It's ironic in many ways.