Retirement. Let’s Make It Our Word.

By Karen and Erica

Do you like the words beginning with retire? We don’t. Even the American Association of Retired Persons changed its name to AARP.

Why this hostility? Because retire implies retreat. Retreat from everything. Leaving the world to everyone else. 

That’s not how we want retirement to go. And it’s not how we want ourselves, as retired women, to be seen.

In the U.S., retirement as currently conceived was invented in the 1950’s, as a reward to those who completed long, hard working lives, often involving physical labor, usually men. Retirement benefits also created an enticement to older workers to make room for younger ones. Medical advances meant that people who reached retirement age could expect to live into their 70s, for the first time exceeding the social security retirement age of 65. These retirees had weathered the Depression and a world war. They could stop working and still live comfortably, on pensions and social security for the five or maybe ten years ahead.  

Simultaneously, leisure time became a middle class commodity, no longer reserved for the wealthy. Movies and TV created new forms of entertainment. The nationwide highway system was being built, as were lots of new cars that could go the distance. Fuel costs were low. In sunny spots in Florida and Arizona, retirement communities were being invented, marketed as places to spend your newly named golden years. 

In the 50s, and for a long while thereafter, retirement was splendid. But then something happened. Imperceptibly at first, retirement lost its lustre. By the time we retired–the first large group of career women to stay in the work force until retirement–the 50s vision of retirement seems more like a death sentence than a golden goal. 

What happened?

What happened is that the working world, and the people who work in it, changed dramatically.

• Today’s retirees had different work lives than the retirees of the 1950s. The management-focused male atmosphere of the 50’s, and even that of the self-actualizing 60’s, had changed. 
• Technology became a driving force. Moving from telex and multigraph to computers to mobile phones to personal devices enhanced productivity and also our workspace. From local we went global. We worked in the knowledge economy any with colleagues all over the world. We saw issues through a much wider lens. It was exciting.
• At the same time, health advances of the 1950s resulted in our having a post-career runway of thirty years, not ten or less. A person who lives past her 50s is likely to live until her 80s or 90s. For at least twenty of those years, she will likely be mentally and physically fit.
• Technological advances–like self-driving cars–will further help overcome previously limiting conditions. 
• We are no longer talking about what we are going to do for a decade or less. We are talking about what we are going to do for the next 20 or 30 years. That is way too long to be in retreat. Or to do nothing but play. Or to be treated like a potted plant.
• Finally, many of us, for the first time, are women. Women who fought for their careers, women who reshaped the workforce, women who proudly worked until retirement. We are at the top of our form, and we want to spend the next few decades doing interesting and purposeful things in the wider world. Because of our careers, we also have the wherewithal–mental, physical and financial–to reshape retirement.  

But retirement did not catch up. Retiring was still regarded as a tactical retreat from a desk to a rocking chair.

For us, this 1950s approach to retirement is obsolete, as are the words beginning with retire. But, although we have given it much thought, we do not think we can escape the word. So we need to claim it. Update it. Make it modern. An achievement that is a gateway to many different things, a status marked by fluidity, energy, activity and engagement. Just as we tailored the working world to fit our talents and needs, so too will we refashion retirement to make it a brilliant next phase.

Let’s make the retire words a signal of who we are.