Forget Retirement
By Dixie Darr
An old friend wrote last week that she is retiring in June at the age of 54. I’m having a hard time feeling happy for her. It isn’t, as you might expect, envy. I’m just not a fan of retirement. It was a concept invented at the end of the last millennium to fit twentieth century needs. American society and individual Americans have different needs in the twenty-first century and one of those needs is to redesign how we will spend the years after age 65.
Retirement is supposed to be the payoff for a life of hard work, the reward of leisure and the good life. Finally you will have the time and money to do what you've always wanted to do: travel, play golf, go fishing, read War and Peace, spend time with your children and grandchildren. The reality for many people is that a steady diet of leisure is BORING. You don't become a different person overnight when you turn 65, so if you don't spend your free time traveling, golfing, fishing, and reading now, you probably won't be happy doing it in retirement. And you have only to look back at your own life when your parents first retired to understand that when you turn 65, in ten or twenty years, your children and grandchildren will be far too busy with their own lives to have much time to spend with you.
When the social security act was passed in 1935, it was not because Congress compassionately believed that older people deserved some leisure in their declining years. Instead, they believed it was in the best interest of our culture to remove older people from the workforce to make room for younger workers with families to support. Then, in the spirit of American entrepreneurship, new businesses sold the myth of the Golden Years. Entire industries grew to keep the elderly busy and out of the way.
That we have bought the myth of the golden years is evident. When I ask my students, who are mostly in their thirties, to discuss their plans for the future, they talk about the jobs they want to have, their families' development, and further education they want to pursue. Then, they state the age when they want to retire. The End. Usually, the younger they are, the earlier they want to retire. They never indicate why they want to retire or what they want to do after retirement. It's just retirement, period. Since they clearly see retirement as the end, I wonder why they're so eager to get there.
What if you were told instead that, after raising your family and working hard at your job for thirty, forty or fifty years, you had to spend the last twenty or so years of your life bored, isolated and useless, in a desperate struggle to keep busy with meaningless activities? That, in fact, is how baby boomers seem to view retirement.
A 1998 poll by AARP confirmed that more than 80 percent of baby boomers planned to work at least part-time beyond the age of 65. Only 16% say they won't work at all. When it comes to retirement, baby boomers seem to be echoing one of our popular rallying cries of the 1960s: "Hell, no. We won't go!"
I’ve spent much of the last few years interviewing people who decided to reinvent their lives after 50. Instead of retiring, they went back to college, started businesses, and pursued more meaningful work. They believe that retirement is for people who think of work as a four-letter word and that human beings are not meant to do nothing. They are a constant source of inspiration to me. If you know people like them, please let me know (dixiedarr@excite.com). I’d love to tell their stories here so they can inspire you, too.
8:29:21 AM 
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