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Where
is Retirement Headed? The Story Differs with Each Retiree
By John Yemma, Christian Science Monitor
January
18, 2011
Once upon a time,
people worked all their lives. Then retirement was invented.
The idea of
retiring had always been around. The rich would doff their periwigs at the
end of an illustrious career and be chauffeured to their country estates
to enjoy their sunset years. But most people kept plugging away.
Retirement was a
dream that, if it came true at all, did so only for a few years for a few
people. No one could have imagined the huge industry it has become,
complete with age-appropriate communities, yoga groups, early-bird
specials, and more than $2 trillion in 401(k)s.
Modern
middle-class retirement owes its origin to the German Emperor William I, a
forward-thinking royal who saw how grim life was for older workers in his
realm. In the mid-1880s, William told the German parliament that “those
who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded
claim to care from the state.” A few years later, Chancellor Otto von
Bismarck signed into law the world’s first social security act – a
move of both compassion and politics since it also tamped down rising
socialist sentiments in
Germany
.
It took another
half a century for Americans to get Social Security. The World War II
generation was the first real retirement generation. But get ready. Baby
boomers are moving into their retirement years. As with everything boomers
do, this will be a big, self-involved journey of discovery –
Woodstock
with comfortable shoes and early bedtime.
Try this if you
have a minute: Go to Google’s Ngram viewer, which is an amazing new tool
if you love words. Plug in the word “retiree.” A chart of how often it
appears in the English language indicates only sporadic usage before 1945
– mostly describing soldiers who have withdrawn from the field of
battle. After ’45, the word retiree skyrockets. (“Retirement
planning” comes along in the 1950s. “Early bird specials” blast off
after 1980. But “shuffleboard” peaked in the 1950s. There’s a tale
behind each of those trends.)
The modern idea
of retirement is a little more than half a century old. And retirement
itself is changing. It’s not just naps in the hammock and puttering in
the garden any longer. It includes late-in-life education, volunteering,
and working because you want to, not because you have to. Or sometimes
working because you still have to, but doing so part time.
Regardless of the
individual retiree’s circumstances, most people who cut the cord with
the workweek describe the experience as a mixture of elation and terror. I
recently phoned Susan Trausch, a former co-worker who retired in 2005.
There are thousands of people like her. What makes her different is that,
as a journalist, she decided to take notes on what happened when she
retired. In a funny and touching little book (“Groping Toward Whatever,
or How I Learned to Retire, (Sort of)”), she describes how dealing with
identity can be the biggest challenge. Like many people who no longer
carry business cards, she struggled with the “so what do you do?”
question at dinner parties. She found herself starting projects and
dropping them.
Her relationship
with time has been particularly interesting. Time, she writes,
“evaporates into the ether, weasels out through a crack in the universe,
and plops into a black hole while you’re messing with string in the
kitchen drawer and not writing a novel or joining the Peace Corps or
planning a trip to the Orient or doing much of anything worth talking
about.” On the other hand, she sometimes finds herself in long and
meaningful conversations. And at the gas station or at red lights, she
says, “the wait no longer feels like an insult but a nice little
pause.”
She is a retiree.
She does some teaching, some writing, some meditating. It isn’t an end
state, she says. It is a journey. “Where am I going?” she asks.
“Somewhere. Somewhere interesting. We’ll see.”
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