The term retirement, despite its definition is apparently reserved for the aged not the young because the young are, expected to go on to another job. But then what is the definition of work or a job? Is tennis a job? Is writing a job? Is travel? Is writing a memoir for example, a job? Is reading all these books you bought but never had a chance to read a job? I think so.
I’m 70 now and I am thinking a lot about what it means to retire. In the old days — the 1960s when I first entered the workforce — retirement was a goal: get to 65 and stop working at whatever you had been doing for the past several decades. The idea then was to retire, sleep late, and sit on a porch somewhere watching sunrise and sunset, day after day after day. Wait a minute: Already, this is starting to sound boring.
Turning 65 meant that you had to close down your social network at the place of employment. Yet, to many, co-workers had become a surrogate family, and the workplace had become a place to go, to hang out, to share stories, to chat. Your workspace was much more than a few square yards of floor space, a desk, a phone, a fax, a bubbler; the workplace was a social happening, for good or bad. Most likely many workers are in the presence of co-workers over time spans longer than with their spouse and kids.
Societies and governments compartmentalize our lives. The education system is the best example: pre-school, kindergarten, elementary, middle, high school, college and then maybe graduate school and finally the workplace (it is age-based). Society, however, has a new concept that parallels, while at the same time challenges the traditional age-based, cohort-based, boxed-in educational framework: K to grey (Kindergarten to the elderly). Education is now recognized worldwide as a life long experience for those who wish to see it that way. However, society has not yet come up with an equivalent parallel, time-independent concept for one’s worklife.
Whatever their specific reason, people today continue to be active well after the previously established expected retirement age of 65. The word “retirement” has become at best a poor descriptor of what now happens.
First of all most people have more than one job in their lifetime and many have more than one job at the same time (not necessarily by choice!). But we don’t say s/he “retired” at 30 (to start another career). We say, instead, they took another job, quit, dropped out, moved on, etc. “Retirement”, the concept seems to be reserved for one’s post-worklife life. But in today’s financial or social environment the end of work life has become synonymous with the end of life.
Retirement as a concept has lost its original meaning. People are busy all their lives, working at something, even if that “work” is in the form of play.
It is quite clear to me that the concept of “retirement” needs to be retired, much as sports organizations retire the numbers that star players have worn on their shirts for baseball or football. We do not retire any more. We just change from one activity to another, just like the young people as they do when they go from one job to the next.
Like I said at the outset, I’m 70 now and just beginning.
