Should we Retire the Idea of Retirement?
6 minute read
My Dad retired at the age of 58. He’d worked from the age of 14, and by his late 50s, after a 40-year career in RTÉ, he was tired and more than happy to step away from the daily grind. He was fortunate to have the holy grail of pensions – defined benefit – so he enjoyed a long and financially stable retirement until he passed away at 80. My sister, on the other hand, has no interest in retiring. She’s an architect in her early 50s, running her own practice, and she says she can’t imagine stepping away from her profession. She loves what she does in a way that, I think, everyone would like to, and certainly in a way that my Dad never did. Of course, as a small business owner, her pension doesn’t promise the security that our fathers did, so she may need to work to supplement her retirement income anyway, but either way, she doesn’t view 65 (or is it now 66?) as the end of anything.
My own attitude towards retirement sits somewhere between the two. Despite being closer to 50 than 40 (48 in September), my career feels very much as if it’s still unfolding. It doesn’t feel ‘defined’ yet, so how can I know whether or not I’ll want to end it at retirement age? The past decade has been a rollercoaster of reinvention due to redundancies, recession and an ever-evolving media industry. This month three years ago, I was in a job I thought would last for several more years. In fact, it only lasted for several more months. In three more years, where will I be and what will I be doing? I can’t say for sure, which unnerves me more than it excites me, I’ll be honest. Not being on a linear career path and having to ride the ups and downs of a seesawing industry and economy makes me wonder if retirement will even be an option for me. But then it also promotes the interesting idea of a ‘third act’ because for me, unlike my Dad, nothing has ever been set in stone. I’ve been presented with more professional opportunities in my 40s than I was in my 20s, so if this trend continues, the last thing I’ll be looking to do in my 60s is rest and retreat.
Maybe retirement is simply an outdated notion now? Will it – should it – die out with our parents’ generation? Devised at a time when a lot of work was physical rather than knowledge-based, it was a release from back-breaking manual labour and the tyranny of time cards and punch clocks.
With the gradual acceptance of hybrid work models and a move away from the unwieldy parameters of a strict 9-5, work looks a lot less like servitude, post-pandemic, than it did beforehand. I think what a lot of people want to ‘retire’ from is not so much the work they do as the office politics, unsympathetic managers and punishing commutes they have to put up with. Certainly, since I’ve been freelance, work has felt much less mentally and emotionally draining, as I don’t have to worry about any of the above. For many individuals, retiring is, and was, a way of regaining control of their lives – from how they spent their time and organised their schedules to how they nurtured their hobbies, relationships and overall wellbeing. But the loosening up of traditional workplace structures opens up the possibility of a more in-control existence within our working lives.
At the same time, society is finally beginning to embrace all that an older generation has to offer in terms of skill sets, experience, mentorship, work ethic and ideas. Within our knowledge-based economy, individuals over 60 have as much value (if not more) than those in their 20s. Whether they want to continue to work or not, the prevailing narrative should be one of encouragement and support, because even for those individuals who can’t wait to walk out the door of their organisations for the final time, they can still enjoy a third act.
Maybe pivoting rather than retiring is how we should look at life in our mid-60s? There’s a great quote from Mad Men, which says: “This is America: Pick a job and then become the person that does it.” Similarly, this is 2022: Teenagers are Tik-Tok stars, centenarians are style icons. Pick a job and be the person who does it. The traditional career-ladder model has been completely dismantled. Age is no barrier, and this applies to both ends of the generation gap.
I read an article in The Guardian during the week in which the 6o-odd-year-old, 2019 winner of the TV competition Masterchef explained how after 30 years in banking, she was now working in the food industry and loving every minute of it. “Seeing how alive I feel and how much energy I have, the alternative is unthinkable – to think that, at 60, you go ‘Oh, now I sit in a corner and read books, and one day I die.’” For my Dad, sitting in a corner reading books was the most sublime of retirements. He loved nothing more. As with everything, different strokes for different folks.
Whichever way you look at it, with many pension schemes no longer considered fit for purpose, there is an important conversation to be had around the notion of retirement, but it’s not anchored in government raising the retirement age and making people feel that whether they enjoy what they do or not, they’ll be made to work until they drop. It’s about a shift in perspective. A re-evaluation of how our work lives intersect with our personal lives. A fresh understanding of what the over-65s can, and do, bring to the economy.
We need a strategic framework which makes it straightforward for individuals at this stage in their lives to pivot, and a consensus about the value that they have within the economy, within industry, within society and within communities.
Maybe my perspective is coloured by the fact that I’m a creative. Anecdotally, a lot of people in the arts view their jobs as much as a passion as a source of income. I have a friend, on the other hand, who is an accountant. She works for an American company with global interests, so she’s navigating time zones and tax regions as well as a plethora of personalities every day. She loves her job but she says she’ll be happy to retire from it when the time comes, or perhaps early as she’s lucky enough to be financially secure. I often think, though, about the enormous skill set she has, and what a shame it would be if those skills were completely withdrawn from the workforce. If the language around retirement changed, though, and the dialogue focused less on retreating when we’re older and more on repositioning, it could serve us all better.
In fact, a 2018 article in Harvard Health cites a study which showed that people who worked past the age of 65 were three times more likely to report being in good health and about half as likely to have serious health problems, such as cancer or heart disease. Really, any conversation about retirement comes down to the issue of choice. Having choices, whatever our age, makes us feel empowered, in control and of value. Retirement should be positioned as a choice, but not necessarily the most appealing one.
Marie Kelly, April 2022
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