Retirement and Its Discontents

Why We Won't Stop Working, Even if We Can

Michelle Pannor Silver

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231547925
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In the popular imagination, retirement promises a well-deserved rest—idle days spent traveling, volunteering, pursuing hobbies, or just puttering around the house. But as the nature of work has changed, becoming not just a means of income but a major source of personal identity, many accomplished professionals struggle with discontentment in their retirement. What are we to do—individually and as a culture—when work and life experience make conventional retirement a burden rather than a reprieve?

In Retirement and Its Discontents, Michelle Pannor Silver considers how we confront the mismatch between idealized and actual retirement. She follows doctors, CEOs, elite athletes, professors, and homemakers during their transition to retirement as they struggle to recalibrate their sense of purpose and self-worth. The work ethic and passion that helped these retirees succeed can make giving in to retirement more difficult, as they confront newfound leisure time with uncertainty and guilt. Drawing on in-depth interviews that capture a range of perceptions and common concerns about what it means to be retired, Silver emphasizes the significance of creating new retirement strategies that support social connectedness and personal fulfillment while countering ageist stereotypes about productivity and employment. A richly detailed and deeply personal exploration of the challenges faced by accomplished retirees, Retirement and Its Discontents demonstrates the importance of personal identity in forging sustainable social norms around retirement and helps us to rethink some of the new challenges for aging societies.

1

Introduction

Work can be more than a way to earn a living. It can be an intellectual pursuit, a creative outlet, a connection to society, and a central component of who we are. For some people, work is deeply intertwined with personal identity; for others, work is simply a means to an end. Different people have different orientations to work and, similarly, people have different orientations to retirement.

Retirement is both a deeply personal decision and an important social phenomenon. Frequently, retirement indicates that a person has stopped working because he or she has reached a specific age. It is often associated with freedom and leisure. Although retirement is primarily thought of as a time to enjoy life without the burdens of work, some people can feel burdened by a life without work. For these people, retirement can feel deeply constraining and limiting. Retirement’s freedom can create challenges for people whose life’s work was closely associated with their sense of self-worth.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud articulated the contrast between an individual’s quest for freedom and societal norms that restrict these primitive instincts.¹ He argued that social norms, rules, or laws that state, for instance, that we should not commit adultery or inflict physical harm on others, limit our possibilities for satisfaction and contentment. Yet, as a society, we agree to live within specific boundaries and to follow certain norms to help maintain order.

According to Robert Atchley, retirement is “an event, a process, a role or status, or a phase of life.”² It is a socially expected phase of life and also is known as an autonomous phase, a time to enjoy the fruits of our labor, with few rules to follow. Thus, retirement is a social construct created through social institutions and social exchanges. It is not an innate or natural occurrence, and in many ways, it is an ambiguous concept. But a fundamental tension exists between the autonomy, flexibility, and lack of boundaries associated with retirement and our instincts to maintain structure, a sense of social connectedness, and personal fulfillment. Retirement has been socially constructed in a way that can give rise to feelings of great discontentment as it stymies some possible paths in favor of others.

In 1966, baby boomers were named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” They have redefined social norms at each stage of their lives and, as they approach traditional retirement age, it is no wonder that the meaning, timing, and purpose of retirement also are undergoing significant shifts. Since the oldest baby boomers turned 65 in 2011, around 10,000 people in the United States alone cross over the threshold of traditional retirement age each day.³ Today, nearly 15 percent of the population in North America and 20 percent of the population in countries such as Japan, Germany, and Italy are over the age of 65.⁴ Consider that two centuries ago, less than 2 percent of the population was over 65 years old. The National Institute of Aging estimates that people living in economically developed countries have added approximately three months to their life span for each year that transpired during the past century!⁵

This shift necessitates a change not only in the way we think about pension systems but also in our assumptions about age, work, and retirement. For people who are lucky enough to be living in the time and place of the fortunate generation, retirement can be a lifestyle option.⁶ But retirement also can be a time of deep uncertainty and a source of discontentment.

This book questions the lure, appeal, and enticement of a generalized retirement that is defined as “no longer working” and asks: What becomes of those whose departure from their life’s work means losing a core and fundamental component of their personal identity? What are the repercussions of this burden?

The heart of this book is a series of chapters that feature stories of people who retired from five different types of work: doctors, chief executive officers (CEOs), elite athletes, professors, and homemakers. These individuals shared a loyalty to and passion for their life’s work and experienced a sense of discontentment with the reality of retirement. They all faced a range of different life experiences, but each similarly struggled with managing their own expectations that retirement was tied to age and had to be carried out through full withdrawal from the labor force.

The discontentment associated with retirement is not a sentiment that can be generalized. The narratives shared in this book are not meant to explain broad population trends. Financial strain, health problems, and caregiving obligations cause significant hardship for many people in their retirement. This book does not focus on these important challenges, nor does it focus on the many people working in physically demanding jobs or those who are in poor health, for whom retirement cannot come soon enough. Instead, this book focuses on the retirement stories and perceptions about the retirement of people who always found work to be an important source of identity and fulfillment. Then they arrived at an arbitrary point in their lives where they felt obligated, or forced in some cases, to exit the labor force; in other words, they encountered and succumbed to a socially imposed expiration date.

Retirement and Its Discontents is about the larger structural problems that society must grapple with as individuals confront the mismatch between an idealized retirement and the reality of giving up identity, income, and status. The point of sharing these stories is not to say that their experiences are universal. Instead, I share them so that we can learn from their experiences to better understand how to avoid the traps they fall into. I hope that this book inspires readers to consider more deeply what is embedded in the social construct of retirement and to question our ageist assumptions about age, work, and retirement.

I begin this chapter with “A Brief History of Retirement,” drawing attention to the fact that widespread retirement at 65 was only tenable when a relatively small proportion of the population lived much beyond this age. Next, I turn to the growing tendency for people to “Work Anytime, Anywhere,” particularly those of us in professional roles who feel the omnipresence of our work. This concept highlights the point that for some people, separating work from other aspects of life can be difficult. As more of us approach the traditional retirement age, we experience “The Proliferation of Retirement,” bringing us to a point at which retirement is expected, and yet we have no idea what to expect. Then I suggest that retirement, when understood as “Having an Expiration Date,” runs counter to social interests while also creating great feelings of discontent for those individuals who succumb to out-of-date notions of retirement. At the end of this chapter, I introduce the key ideas shared in the chapters that follow, highlighting stories of people from each of the five different types of work backgrounds.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF RETIREMENT

Tracing its origins to the sixteenth century, retirement once described the retreat of armies.⁷ Retirement has since been associated with withdrawing, fleeing from engagement, and receding from companionship in a desire to detach. These conceptualizations of retirement were later reflected in disengagement theory, which suggested that with age came a mutual withdrawal between older people and society.⁸ Then the receipt of a pension signaled that a person was “retired.”

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, economically developed countries began instituting social pension systems to provide continuing income to workers at a certain age.⁹ Otto von Bismarck is often credited with introducing this iteration of retirement. In a speech delivered when he was 74 years old, von Bismarck proposed financial support for older Prussian workers when they became disabled or ill, and, in 1889, Germany became the first nation to institute a public pension system for workers when they turned 70 (well above the average length of time a worker was expected to live). In 1916, this age was lowered to 65 (still well above the life expectancy at the time). Most of Europe and Scandinavia developed similar public pension systems for older workers (also initiated at an age above life expectancy). In 1935, the United States followed suit and instituted Social Security for workers at age 65.¹⁰ Canada’s first universal pension, entitled Old Age Security, was instituted in 1952 for people 70 years old and over. Each public pension system provided financial compensation for eligible workers (by and large men who had accrued an amount of time working that was equivalent to most of their adult life), set to begin at an age that less than half of the population lived to enjoy.

These early public pension systems for older workers served two primary purposes. First, they addressed concerns about later-life poverty by providing financially for eligible workers who survived past the average life expectancy.¹¹ Second, early social insurance distribution systems essentially removed from desirable positions older workers who were deemed too old to be useful, to make room for younger workers who were assumed to be more capable, better able to handle physical labor, and in need of salaries to support growing families.¹²

If we look at workforce participation rates among men 65 years and older before the 1930s, rates exceeded 50 percent. Since the times when most economically developed countries instituted public pension systems, the workforce participation rate of men or women over the age of 65 has yet to exceed 50 percent.¹³

James Birren has described retirement as “an example of society’s use of age as an arbitrary index.”¹⁴ Over time and in periods of high unemployment, employers, unions, and governments have needed ways to reduce the size of the workforce. And, as Atchley has explained, one solution was to mandate or incentivize retirement at a specific age.¹⁵ For many decades, mandatory retirement was imposed at a specific chronological age. Mandatory retirement was lauded as helpful to older workers because for many it was linked with a degree of financial security. Additionally, it was helpful to younger workers, who were able to move more readily into the workforce or into higher positions. Although it reduced some of the uncertainties associated with old age, mandatory retirement essentially created a precedent for moving people out of paid employment automatically at a set age, with no consideration for their skills, ability, personal interests, workplace performance, experience, or institutional knowledge.

In thinking about the historical context of retirement, it’s worth considering how attitudes about aging itself have changed. Western culture has not always had the lack of reverence for elders that marks many modern workplaces. It was not unusual in the late 1700s for young adults to try to make themselves appear older, powdering their wigs and wearing clothes styled to imitate the sloping shoulders of older adults. But by the 1800s, aging came to be perceived as more like an incurable disease that must be avoided, ignored, and forestalled. After the Industrial Revolution, as many countries were establishing pension systems, the status of older people declined further. As countries modernized, older adults were often stereotyped as less productive workers and were assumed to have little to offer in terms of useful information to teach the younger generations.¹⁶

As Lynn McDonald and Peter Donahue have explained, just when we think we have “a sound grasp of retirement, the picture shifts: new economic conditions arise, followed by related policy debates and changing individual preferences that require new explanations.”¹⁷ Since the turn of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, mandatory retirement has been abolished in many types of work and regions of the world. And on the whole, its abolishment has been celebrated. Subsets of workers in fields such as aviation or the justice system, however, still face a mandatory retirement in North America. Throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, public servants as well as people employed across the private sector continue to face mandatory retirement. Even the Roman Catholic Church imposes a mandatory retirement age for priests, bishops, and archbishops (although cardinals and the pope are recused).

WORK ANYTIME, ANYWHERE

A true conflict exists between the history of retirement systems that issued a pension upon complete work stoppage (for the few who lived long en...