‘So um, no one is expecting to retire anymore, right?’

After all you’ll probably enjoy Coachella more in your 20s than your 80s…

Just enjoying my pre-retirement life.

I was watching something recently where a woman in her 70s was bemoaning the fact that her similarly aged husband was now retired. Correction: She wasn’t complaining that he was retired per se, but she was frustrated with how down he seemed, with a keen sense of a lack of purpose. In her frustration she said something like: ‘I wish there was no such thing as retirement!’.

Retirement, according to the trustworthy Wiki, is explained as below:

Retirement is the withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from one's active working life. A person may also semi-retire by reducing work hours or workload.

Many people choose to retire when they are elderly or incapable of doing their job for health reasons. People may also retire when they are eligible for private or public pension benefits, although some are forced to retire when bodily conditions no longer allow the person to work any longer (by illness or accident) or as a result of legislation concerning their positions. In most countries, the idea of retirement is of recent origin, being introduced during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Previously, low life expectancy, lack of social security and the absence of pension arrangements meant that most workers continued to work until their death. Germany was the first country to introduce retirement benefits in 1889.

Nowadays, most developed countries have systems to provide pensions on retirement in old age, funded by employers or the state. In many poorer countries, there is no support for the elderly beyond that provided through the family. Today, retirement with a pension is considered a right of the worker in many societies; hard ideological, social, cultural and political battles have been fought over whether this is a right. In many Western countries, this is a right embodied in national constitutions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement]

Is this what retirement is supposed to look like?

As I’ve grown older and engaged in full-time employment, I’ve noticed the age of retirement steadily increasing along with the cost of living. For Brits of my grandparents’ and to some extent my parents’ generation, the norm was to stop working around 65, collect whatever random engraved gift their office was handing out, and move to the Costa del Sol or the Cotswolds, largely depending on what social class they fit into. (I’ve noticed a decided difference between classes in this when it comes to holidays and can say undoubtedly that for some reason, upper classes prefer France and while the middle is split, working class retirees seem to prefer Spain. I would love an anthropologist to talk me through this, but I digress…)

So, I was thinking about this concept of retirement and I realised a few things:

1)      Many happy retirees seem focused on holidays and hobbies

2)      Most of the Millennials I know are already focused on holidays and hobbies and spend a large amount of their time engaging in both – while still working. In many cases, holidays get tagged onto work trips and hobbies get added to team building activities by scrupulous HR (or “people”) departments.

3)      Many unhappy retirees get tired of having nothing to do and end up going back into some sort of work environment whether that’s part-time or voluntary. There is even a name for this, and it is, according to Wiki, pre-tirement:

The word is a portmanteau word, coming from the prefix "pre" and the word "retirement." [citation needed] The state is being found primarily in first world economies, with aging populations. A "pre-tiree" will continue to create economic wealth and/or contribute to the generation of knowledge, likely on a part-time or reduced hours basis. Some "pre-tirees" use the period to give back by providing unpaid social support. This form of unpaid work creates economic benefit, by allowing taxes to be focused on other wealth creating or protecting activities but relies on the existence of sufficient financial resource.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-tirement]

Not me doing a sky dive before retirement.

Unless you are working slave hours and being paid pittance (admittedly, like most of us working in media… 😉) working is actually healthy. Part of what I believe as a Christian is that we were created to look after the world we live in and that involves work. And where generations before us may have foregone holidays and hobbies in order to put it off for the later time of retirement, I can tell you that no one is doing that anymore! People don’t want to wait until a later time to enjoy themselves, they/we want to enjoy our lives now.

For the most part, work gives us a sense of purpose and I know many elderly people who make more of an effort to get dressed up every day than most of my colleagues, and “all” they are doing is going to the local shop to get a newspaper or to visit a friend or weed an allotment. If they have grandchildren then their lives may revolve around taking care of them and at least for the ones who do that by choice, that gives them their sense of purpose.

What doesn’t seem to work too well – and this is only from an onlooker’s perspective – is when otherwise healthy older people move into a care home. The sense of identity, independence and purpose can sometimes be lost. Not always, but sometimes. Is that a healthy life trajectory for anyone?

I asked a very wise woman in her 70s about retirement and she told me:

The Old Age Pension was introduced in January 1909 by Herbert Asquith — it was means-tested, starting at 70 — and greatly revised by William Beveridge in 1948; but there were alms-houses and mainly church-based poor relief before that, going back many centuries. You could argue that Mephibosheth got a disability pension from King David!

 Before 1909, I guess there was a form of retirement as people could not go on working for ever, but there was no financial provision for it, and people would be dependent on their families or savings (or indeed investments if you were in the upper classes). The Bruderhof/Christian Communities International have an interesting model, in that they have a virtually money-free environment where food and clothing are supplied from central stores for free, and they try to keep their older people involved in the work of the community as long as possible, for instance in sewing. No one, unless too ill, is regarded as ‘retired’.

I wonder now, what is the point of retirement? Do I need to put aside money now for the future where I will have nothing to do? Please hear me out because I’m not saying don’t save; far from it. I think saving is important, investments if you can afford them and trying to generate passive income – yes, yes, yes to all those things. But this idea that you’ll just stop contributing to society so that you can stop working completely? Stop doing? Stop engaging? Stop trying? Is that healthy at all? No idea.

Suggestions in the comments please!

Tola x

PS It’s my birthday this week and I’m happy to say that even though I’ll be away on a pre-retirement holiday, I have “arranged” for the weather to be suitably summery for UK residents.

You’re welcome. Bisous!

Happiest of birthdays too, to my twin Carla who I met during a clearly dicey fashion period of my life (see left pic). I love you Carla!

I’m  the editor and creative director at Premier Woman Alive and co-host of the YouTube show Sisterhood. In 2019, I delivered a TEDx Talk on Debunking the Myth of Success and my first book, 'Still Standing:100 Lessons From An 'Unsuccessful' Life' (SPCK) is out now.