Midlife

Some Thoughts about Retirement in the New World of Work

At age 46, with my own mortality no longer a mere philosophic abstraction, one of my hobbies is collecting biographical data about individuals who were still making substantive contributions to their chosen field of expertise into their 80's and 90's. Here are a few of my favorites; you could no doubt easily add to the list:

Viktor Frankl - world-renowned psychiatrist, author, and concentration camp survivor - was still actively engaged in leading the school of therapy he founded at the time of his recent death at age 92.

Peter Drucker is still actively working as perhaps the world's most influential management consultant and theorist at age 93.

Mortimer Adler, of Great Books of the Western World fame, hosted an exhaustive Web site and "virtual academy" until his recent death at age 98. His 60th book was recently published.

Avis Carlson, journalist and social critic, was actively reviewing and commenting on America's handling of aging when in her 80's.

Barry Fleming, novelist, finally succeeded in seeing his first novel in print when he turned 90.

What makes the difference between these individuals and most of the rest of us, who spend a shocking amount of our discretionary time doing nothing more useful than mindlessly watching reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard? And what can we learn from them about the relationships among work, play, and retirement?

Retirement is a recent phenomenon

It surprises many people to learn that the notion of retirement is an entirely recent one. It has not existed since time immemorial but was, in fact, the brainchild of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While there are some historical precursors (the basic idea of an age-related alteration in work duties is found in the book of Numbers, chapter 8), for most of human history people kept working, in one form or another, until death proved an irrevocable impediment.

Let's take a trip back in time to consider, not only how things used to be, but how things were during most of human history.

Set your time machine for March 20, 1901. America was still a young nation and, overwhelmingly, still a rural one. Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, and of course Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states. There were only 76 million Americans, or about one-fourth the current population. Over 60% of Americans lived in rural areas, compared to the current figure of approximately 20%. By a wide margin, the numerically most prevalent occupation was that of self-employed small farmer.

Most importantly, the Industrial Revolution had not yet widely impacted the economic landscape. The typical American worked, of course, and worked very hard. But he did not "have a job" in the sense we take for granted today. When there was a task to be accomplished, intensive effort was put into the completion of that task, but that effort was project-driven, not clock-driven. The idea of 9-to-5 work in which one showed up at the same place every day, week in and week out, year in and year out, whether or not there was any particular task to be done, would have been laughable. In fact, the notion, as William Bridges puts it, "of working constantly for wages... and [then] continuing to work, even after essentials were provided for, to accumulate savings... to provide for one's old age" was a radically new one even as late as the dawn of the 20th century. Don't forget that the notion of money as the primary medium of exchange was by no means firmly established a century ago; while we speak of "death and taxes" as equally inevitable, a mere 100 years ago the federal income tax was still unconstitutional, and only a few visionaries thought the alternative worth considering.

Many social analysts today believe that the brave new world of the 21st century actually has much more in common with the world of 1901 than with the world of 1951, which is seen by many as a brief historical aberration. Once again, work is being "dejobbed," the notion of job security (once enshrined as a virtual right or entitlement) is in the intensive care unit if not the morgue, project-driven work and the universality of entrepreneurship are the new norms, and "cottage industries" are again sprouting like mushrooms, helped along by a fellow named Bill Gates.

What this means for the notion of retirement is that it may rapidly turning into an outmoded idea. Let's see why.

The two purposes of work

In our culture and time, if not in all cultures and times, work serves two distinct purposes, which are sometimes difficult to integrate. Call them "making a living" and "making a life". Work allows us to meet our financial obligations, remain solvent, and keep the wolf or other assorted carnivores from the door. It also provides a source of meaning, mission, and purpose, and allows us to structure our days. As Stephen Covey reminds us, we all have two bank accounts - a financial one and a psychological one - and frequent deposits need to be made into each. Work provides a convenient means of accomplishing both objectives.

When contemporary analysts say that retirement may be headed for the scrap heap, they actually have both of these purposes in mind. On the financial side, those who are professional pessimists (a growth industry) suggest that the Social Security trust fund is almost certain to go bankrupt somewhere around the year 2020, just in time, I note, for me to face when I turn 65. While this seems less likely than it once was, thanks in part to Alan Greenspan and to the longest sustained period of economic growth in American history (which may, of course, soon be coming to an end), medical advances have vastly increased adult life expectancy, and, of course, it's much tougher to fund a 30-year-long retirement than a 10-year-long one.

Whether or not it will continue to be possible to fund the opportunity to exit the rat race at a point prior to the issuance of a death certificate, it's abundantly clear that the human need for meaning and purpose does not end with your last paycheck.

In other words, we all have a vocation whether or not it's a paid one. The Latin word from which the term "vocation" is derived, vocare, literally means "to call", that is, to be called (by God) for a specific purpose or mission. Sad things happen when people lose sight of this second meaning of work and think of it only as a means to the end of a weekly paycheck. Work becomes nothing but a burden to be endured. Yet, a person who has not learned in his or her middle years how to find meaning in what he or she does with time may find that it's very difficult to acquire this skill as a sixtysomething or seventysomething.

Flow and autotelia

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has devoted a lifetime to the study of happiness. He concludes that happy people are those, by and large, who have become "autotelic" and who, as a result, spend a high percentage of their time in a state he calls "flow". Let's define these terms.

An autotelic person (literally, "one who chooses his or her own goals" rather than letting circumstances dictate them) is one for whom work and play have become largely synonymous: to work is to play, to play is to work. These two states are no longer opposites, but are flip sides of the same coin. We've all experienced at least a little of this: when we are so absorbed in something that we immerse ourselves in it, lose track of time, and find our attention focusing on the immediacy of what we're doing. This ability to focus attention in a structured way, says Csikszentmihalyi, is what happiness is: it's not something that depends on outward circumstances, like being rich, thin, or famous.

When this is happening to you, you're in the state of "flow": what athletes call being "in the zone". In flow, you're actively engaged with meeting a challenge; flow can't occur when you're being merely passive, such as when you're watching a rerun of Mannix. In fact, the main precondition for flow is one of pitting your skills against a challenge, and finding that your skills are adequate (but only by a narrow margin) to meet the test. If the challenge vastly outstrips your skills, you are overwhelmed and frustrated; if the reverse, you're, in a word, bored. (One college student to another: "Hey, dude, what does 'apathy' mean?" Second student, yawning: "Man, who cares?")

While this isn't necessarily the highest definition of happiness (as Frankl noted, an even better one is ego transcendence, or "losing your life to find it" through commitment to something higher than yourself), it is a good one. In fact, the two are linked; as Frederick Buetner puts it, meaning is most often found when "your deep desires and the world's deep needs intersect." And, of course, when you have a mission like this, you'll engage in it whether you're paid for it or not. You'll be devoted to it whether anyone else (humanly speaking) notices and cares or not.

If you think this is a luxury, consider the fact that the only people who survived the Nazi concentration camps psychologically intact, according to Frankl, were those with a rock-solid commitment to something higher than themselves and their own ephemeral comfort and security.

The third age

Someone famous - I think it was Simone de Beauvior, and if not, it should have been - coined the term "the third age" to represent the phase of life that follows youth and the middle years. Certainly, what psychologists call "the developmental tasks" of life last as long as life itself. Unfortunately, our culture doesn't help much in this regard.

Contemporary American culture is perhaps the only culture in all of human history to be obsessively youth-oriented. My favorite example of this trend is the tag line used until recently in commercials for a well known skin care product: "To make skin over 25 look young"! Since you're nobody until you're 18, that means we all have seven good years - and that's it!

In contrast, most cultures associate age with wisdom. Psychologists have long known that there are two kinds of intelligence, one which decreases with age beginning as early as age 25 or 30, and one which under normal circumstances increases without limit throughout the lifespan. The first is "fluid intelligence" or mental quickness and flexibility - the kind of skill that helps you to play video games or learn how to program your VCR. (Modern VCR's come with about 65 totally useless functions, when all most of us want to know is how to turn it on, turn it off, play, record, and rewind.) The second is "crystallized intelligence" or mental sophistication - the depth, richness, and interconnectedness of your cognitive map of reality, or to put it more simply, years' worth of experiencing and thinking about life. A culture that ignores the value of crystallized intelligence becomes habitually short-sighted. Any resemblance to the culture of the United States of America in the year 2001 is purely intentional.

Retiring this page

To sum up, let me share the Rev. Richard N. Bolles' (What Color is Your Parachute?) image of the ideal life. It's one in which Learning, Working, and Playing take up about equal proportions of every day, every week, every month, every year. How closely does your life resemble that ideal? It can be helpful to ask yourself, which of these do you engage in too little for your own good? As our culture becomes more "workaholic" (when companies reduce their workforce by 25%, they often seem to forget to reduce the amount of work that needs doing by that same amount, preferring instead to do more with less until they finally commit to doing everything with nothing), most people in the middle years have no choice - Working becomes the whole life, with brief snatches of Learning and Playing sprinkled in on a catch-as-catch-can basis. If you're in your third age, you have the luxury of implementing a life that's more balanced than that. How are you investing your time in each area right now?

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