What We Get Wrong About Retirement

There’s been a lot of media talk lately about age, but this isn’t a political commentary. That’s a personal position wisely debated and shared among friends. However, it’s hard to not cringe when a 48-year-old news commentator states, “He’s old”. There’s something about the bluntness of those two words that sounds both insensitive and dismissive.

When we were teenagers, we wanted to be old enough to drive. Then we wanted to be old enough to leave home and start our parental control-free life. For much of our early years, there was always the next old enough benchmark that we looked forward to. At some point though, old enough became too old.

It’s all too common for a close friend, family member or casual business acquaintance to ask me when I’m going to retire. For those who fall into the casual business bucket, I suppose they’ve done some mental math and arrived at a number that puts me in their old enough age bracket.?

How do I answer the when-are-you-going-to-retire question?

With one word. Why?

Not why do you ask -- although I do wonder why they think it’s okay to ask -- but why would I retire??

Depending on where you are in your life, retirement is viewed through a finely focused, narrow lens. The farther we are away from the end of the traditional workday, the more enticing a life of unstructured leisure sounds.

We imagine what it will feel like to be free of the never-ending, day-to-day obligations of career, children, spouse, partner, pet care, and extended family. We see the shedding of these responsibilities as the ultimate reward for our years of diligent work.

What we can’t foresee yet is the loss of purpose and contribution. Each of those tedious, daily obligations means we have people in our life who look to us for support and encouragement. We identify with our professional position in the world. We belong.

As we get closer to some arbitrary age where we’re supposed to close the book on a lifetime of work, our imagined days begin to look very different.

Assuming we’ve been fortunate to have a professional life that was fulfilling, the fear that this sense of personal value will disappear is very real. Unless we have carefully scripted what comes next, retirement sounds more like our last page than our new chapter.

How did we arrive at this notion of a retirement age??

According to an archived Social Security Administration article, age 65 first became the cutoff for productive work based on a mathematical computation. 65 was the breakeven number where social security could be funded into the future without increasing the employee or employer regular payroll contribution.

This age has gradually been pushed farther out into the future as the social security reserves shrink.?

The important point to consider is that retirement age – whether 65, 72, or whatever comes next – is a mathematical number used to ensure ongoing social security funding. Life expectancy factors into this calculation, but retirement age is not based on a person’s physical and mental capabilities to stay relevant.

We have allowed these retirement ages – 65, 72 -- to serve as an unconscious anchor for our attitudes, discussions, and biases about the accepted retirement age.?

The word retire is derived from the French for retirer which means withdraw. That hardly inspires an enthusiastic outlook for what comes after a lifetime of personal contribution, achievement, and meaning

Instead of asking “When are you (I) going to retire”, the better question is “What are you (I) looking forward to achieving next?”.?

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Saying It in One Sentence

It might take a few seconds longer for the elder's words to come together, but their wisdom is worth waiting for.

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