Generative Retirement? Yes, It's A Thing.
By Karen and Erica
Everyone is talking about generative AI. Everyone should be talking about generative retirement.
What on earth do we mean?
First, let’s look at the meaning of generative, in the context of artificial intelligence. Basically, it refers to machines using the masses of data available to them to reach comprehensive (well, almost) ideas answers to specific questions:
Generative AI refers to deep-learning models that can take raw data — say, all of Wikipedia or the collected works of Rembrandt—and “learn” to generate statistically probable outputs when prompted. At a high level, generative models encode a simplified representation of their training data and draw from it to create a new work that’s similar, but not identical, to the original data.
That’s exactly what we are doing, those of us who worked until retirement, and changed the working world. We are now channeling the data we accumulated over the years—including data about how other people approach post-career life—to generate a new vision of retirement, and we’re doing it while we try to live this different idea. We are taking what we learned over the decades to create a new picture of post-career life. A picture that takes into account new, or newly observed, facts that we know well, but others may not.
Some of the data we know:
Retired women retain their ability to walk and chew gum at the same time, and indeed are so good at both that we have a lot to teach others.
Retired women especially want lives of challenge and purpose–-not like their working lives, but a new model that takes advantage of the fact that, while the younger may run faster, we know the shortcuts.
Among the many resources of retired women is their financial wealth–-wealth they want to use while they are alive—for mission-driven and profit-driven investments that speak to them.
Retired women have a long runway. Often decades.
While they are proceeding apace on that runway, retired women will be healthy, fit and glam, and looking for amazing things to do.
Retired women are stylish. Connected. Cool.
These facts have little to do with the ideas of retirement that prevailed in the early and middle twentieth century, when most retirees were men who had worked in physical labor-centric jobs and survived two world wars and the depression. Those men were looking for a restful way to have fun in the sun, with their spouses, in the few remaining years left to them. Retirement then was not a generative process, unless one was referring the ability to better one’s golf or tennis game.
Because of policies that were very beneficial to our generation, we are different. We need a new kind of retirement. One that uses the vast trove of data derived from our collective life experience to reach different conclusions and to design purposeful and creative lifestyles for post-career and older women.
We have seen a line of thought that generative retirement means we are passing our wisdom to the next generation. Well, of course we are. That’s an important goal. But by itself it is too narrow a goal for people like us, who have decades to live. We will live our own futures first! And those futures will change as we all learn, and share, what we all want from our lives.
We are a new generation of post-career women, and we are engaged in generative retirement. Just like the machines. Except better looking.
