Retire Retirement?
In the Wiktionary, retirement is defined as “to designate as no longer qualified for active service”. Really?
I think we need to find a new word for this stage of life, because the people I work with who are in it are certainly still qualified for active service. I don’t know about you, but when I even hear the word retirement I think of it in traditional terms: an individual reaches an age, usually about 65, whereby they leave their lifetime career, collect their hopefully decent pension, and find a hobby. They stop working and generating income and they join maybe the lawn bowling league (no offense to those who love it), or they buy an RV and travel, or they hang out at Tim Horton’s every morning with the other retirement folk — talking about the good ole days.
Honestly, these are not the retirees of today. At least not all of them. First of all, we are living WAY longer than we used to. It was only about 150 years ago that the average life span was 35–40. Now for men it is 87 and women 88 (men are catching up, by the way, there used to be a four year spread). It has more than doubled. I also recently read an estimate that the kids of today can expect old age to be between 100 and 120. This is not hard to believe. We are smarter, we take care of ourselves better, and modern medicine makes huge strides every day. When I was young, I didn’t know anyone who was 100. Now I have client who is 100! He drives his car to my office, he walks up the two flights of stairs, and he comes to see me for counselling. That is very cool.
What this also means is that the notion of retiring from earning money is not that likely, nor desirable even. Who wants to stop working and sit around for another 30 years?! Not this girl. And not many people I know either. Besides, I know at 50 I have much more to offer the world in terms of life experience and wisdom than I did even a decade ago, so I’m sure that will be even more true in my 60's.
I have clients who did retire at 65, or earlier, because they could or they thought it was what everyone was supposed to do. Now they regret it. A decade or so later, they wished they hadn’t. They can often connect some depression or some cognitive decline or some loss of that mojo they used to have to the fact that they “retired” too early in their life.
It seems to me that perhaps a better term for this later stage of life should be reinvention. Instead of retiring, we could say we are reinventing? Just a thought. Definitely seems more on the right track. Perhaps it is the beginning of a stage where we can take what we have earned, take what we have learned, and put it to good use. This in itself will be different for each one of us, of course: start that business you’ve always dreamed of; explore that foreign land and perhaps help out others; mentor; teach; write a book . . . however it is that you can take everything you have earned and learned up until this point in your life and do something with it. Now that sounds better than retirement.
