RETIREMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS Why We Won’t Stop Working, Even If We Can
Michelle Pannor Silver
Retirement re·tire·ment ri-ޖtī(ԥ)rmԥnt/ noun 1. the period of one’s life after leaving one’s job, profession, career, or life’s work permanently, usually because of age. 2. the action or fact of ceasing to play a sport competitively. 3. a pension or other income on which a retired person lives. 4. the act of withdrawal of something from service or use (such as removal of military force, according to plan). 5. seclusion.
Contents
Preface
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ix
Introduction 1
2
Renegade Retirement and the Greedy Institution: The Doctors 21
3
Refined Retirement and Fulfillment Employment: The CEOs 57 4 Early Retirement and Resilience: The Elite Athletes 91 5
Late Retirement and Working in Place: The Professors 127
6 Undefined Retirement and the Retirement Mystique: The Homemakers 163 7
Conclusion 195
Appendix A. Methodological Overview Appendix B. Interview Guide Acknowledgments
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F
or many people, retirement is a much-awaited and enjoyable time in life. This book is not about those people. Some people retire because of personal health issues or to attend to caregiving obligations, and some suffer serious health issues shortly after they retire. Other people struggle in retirement because of financial obligations or a lack of retirement savings. This book is also not about those people. This book is about retirees who struggle with feelings of discontentment in their retirement because their personal and work identities are intertwined. Every retiree I interviewed dealt with one of life’s biggest challenges in a different way, depending on many factors, including their expectations about retirement and aging, how they prioritized work throughout their adult lives, how they dealt with earlier transitions in life, and what their work had meant to them. In many cases, the qualities that made them successful in their preretirement work were closely linked to the ways they experienced retirement. This book is named for Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, which focuses on the contrast between an individual’s quest for freedom and societal norms that restrict primitive instincts. While Civilization and Its Discontents is about a
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generalizable discontentment that emerges from social norms that limit our possibilities for satisfaction, Retirement and Its Discontents is about the ways that the social construct of retirement can stymie potential workforce contributions. The discontentment associated with retirement presented in this book is not a sentiment that can be generalized. Yet we can ask: if even these highly privileged individuals suffered, how can others who also identify closely with their work identity, but who have fewer economic resources, less status, or potential support, be expected to make a seamless transition to retirement? The experiences shared through this book illustrate how retirement can lead to what Émile Durkheim termed “anomie”—a situation whereby relatively no moral guidance is provided. In retirement, some individuals lose their source and sense of identity. On a personal note, I am not and never have been retired. My journey into studying retirement began when I closed the doors to my father’s practice for the last time almost twenty years ago. After struggling with dementia in his late 70s, there came a point at which my father could no longer see patients. As I shredded decades of files, I lamented the loss of a career that had been meaningful to his patients and a core source of my father’s identity for more than half a century. He had no retirement party, and to this day, I’m not really sure if he ever completely realized what had transpired. Because of the dementia, my father was unable to fully comprehend his retirement. His emphasis on the importance of work and his retirement inspired my interest in the study of retirement. For some people, retirement is a boring or sad topic, associated with endings. For me, retirement is a concept that has been an endless source of interest. Retirement is an important transition that stirs up questions about how we set priorities, create structure, and find meaning in life. For many people, retirement is supposed to be the ultimate goal and reward after a lifetime of work. Yet for some, it
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can be incredibly disappointing, frustrating, intimidating, and even more overwhelming than starting a career. Shortly after my father’s practice closed, I started working on my doctoral dissertation. I developed econometric models of retirement transitions to examine the relationship between preretirement occupations and several measures of health outcomes. I became interested along the way in the variation among definitions of retirement found across different research studies. Some researchers define being retired as having no working hours after years of paid employment, whereas others allow for the possibility of a partial retirement and others rely on self-reported measures, which may or may not include people who continue to work in some capacity. This led me to ask many questions: How did respondents define retirement? Why did they consider themselves retired? What was being retired like? What were their perceptions of retirement? How did the type of work they did affect the way they experienced retirement? I secured my first opportunity to examine perceptions about retirement after receiving a grant to study a group of women who self-identified as being “retired.” Among this diverse group of women, there was a subset who self-identified as retired homemakers who would defy just about any economist’s definition of retirement because many had never worked for pay in their life. I began my journey into researching retirement perceptions with this group of retirees, but they are the last group I discuss in this book. I feature these retirees last because they are the biggest anomaly when compared with any of the other groups of people I interviewed. Unlike the others, these homemakers received no financial compensation and rarely received recognition for their work. Their experiences, however, make a valuable contribution to society and to our understanding of what it means to retire. They also enable us to examine how earlier life opportunities can
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influence a person’s reaction to the potential challenges retirement can pose. My next opportunity to examine perceptions of retirement came when I was fortuitously connected with the head of a faculty development committee from one of the largest departments of medicine in North America who had been tasked with figuring out how to negotiate the retirement transitions for an important group of doctors. Over the course of several years, I was invited to participate in committee meetings, new-faculty orientations, training sessions, and even retirement parties. Although my initial work was focused on working academic physicians’ perceptions about retirement, it fostered connections with the retired doctors who I then interviewed for this book. One day, while presenting my research on retirement from academic medicine, a gentleman from the audience approached me to ask why I hadn’t talked with chief executive officers (CEOs) about their retirement transitions. Admittedly, I first thought the question was odd. In my mind, wealthy senior executives exemplified media portrayals of the happy retiree and I was concerned that he had missed the point of my talk. I was also entirely unsure of how in the world I would locate and convince retired CEOs to agree to an interview. But once he identified himself as a retired CEO and explained how several of the concerns I articulated had resonated with him, I was on my way to developing the study that forms the basis for chapter 3. I also interviewed professors, a group close to my heart given my own professional interests. In many ways, the retirement experiences and perceptions shared by the professors I interviewed surprised me the most. I likely was so entrenched in trying to establish my career that I had failed to consider what things might be like on the other end of what sometimes feels like a long and dark academic tunnel. For the most part, their experiences contrasted with those
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of the busy CEOs who were constantly moving up and changing jobs, or the doctors who were dealing with life-and-death situations. Many of the professors, however, held a similar distaste for retirement, and these individuals shed new light on what it means to hold on tightly to our work identity. Then, the university campus where I work hosted the Pan American Games. These games attracted world-class athletes and coaches, leaving the campus with a vibrant athletic facility that remains among the best in the world. Through various encounters at this athletic facility, I observed some very young people refer to themselves as “retired.� I found the world of athletic retirement fascinating and tried to understand how their work as athletes influenced their perceptions of retirement. Learning about how they dealt with the transition dispelled some of my own assumptions about the relationship among the mind, body, and aging. As more of us spend longer in retirement, in part because of increases in life expectancy that have occurred over the past century, the implications of work and retirement take on greater significance. This book reveals a set of retirement experiences. It emphasizes a fundamental tension between the freedom and autonomy associated with retirement and the need to maintain structure, a sense of social connectedness, and personal fulfillment. These experiences encourage us to examine and question our assumptions about the relationships that exist among work identity, age, and retirement. I hope this book inspires readers to question the social construct of retirement and to create a retirement strategy that avoids some of the discontentment shared through this book.
Praise for RETIREMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS “A convincing analysis of the disquiet among a small group of elders who— despite having money—want to work. Warning! A furtive tear may betray empathy for their deep feelings of abandonment, depression, being a renegade. Michelle Pannor Silver digs deep for courageous insights into the transition from career to retirement.”
Teresa Ghilarducci, The New School, author of Rescuing Retirement: A Plan to Guarantee Retirement Security for All Americans
“This fascinating read holds insights not only for those on the verge of retirement, but for all of us—in how we think about structuring our work and living our lives.”
Michael Norton, Harvard Business School, coauthor of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending
“This extremely well-written, interesting, and informative book gives rich and vivid retrospective accounts by contemporary professional retirees of what was, for them, a jarring transition. The in-depth accounts of people with different occupations are deftly analyzed—revealing both commonalities and differences. Retirement and Its Discontents feels timely, as growing numbers of workers are reaching conventional retirement age. Silver’s writing style is appealing, and the stories capture and hold the reader’s attention.”
Phyllis Moen, University of Minnesota, author of Encore Adulthood: Boomers on the Edge of Risk, Renewal, and Purpose
ISBN: 978-0-231-18856-2
Columbia University Press/New York
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