What will Katie Taylor do next? After her Croke Park farewell, she was asked by reporters, and the answer was a little vague: put the feet up, relax, stuff my face with chocolates. Okay, she didn’t mention chocolates. But it was implied.
She won’t have to worry about the financial aspects, but what she will face – once she’s finished the chocolates – is similar to what people 20 and 30 years older than her have to deal with: the realisation that while a career may have come to an end, life has not.
Intellectually, she already knows that. A lot of recently “retired” (ghastly word) people know that. Yet for those who haven’t planned for life after a job, there can be a sudden and overwhelming sense of dislocation: the story that they have told themselves about themselves is suddenly parched of meaning and purpose. There isn’t a narrative arc any more. If you think about your life as a Netflix series, a lot of the action, like it or not, will take place in the office.
Some people do plan. Some people are psychologically attuned to be content doing nothing, to treating the rest of their lives as an extended holiday. Yet most people, I suspect, need some sense of purpose, to be able to have an answer to the question: what am I for?
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Katie Taylor had an intensely goal-focused career, based on winning or losing fights. Whatever she does next probably won’t have those defining moments and almost certainly will have quite a different metric for defining success. The victories and defeats may be small and incremental. She may well stay in boxing, in training or management. But those jobs require different skill sets. She may find that she doesn’t like them. She may find that she’s not that good at them.
And that’s similar to the situation many “retired” people find themselves in. Having lived a life with an identifiable shape, largely filled with work and family, they now have to start all over again. Like a pre-Leaving Cert teenager, they have to discover what they might be interested in, or what previously unknown aptitudes they might have. Written down, that sounds intriguing, even exciting. But perhaps not so much if you’re 70 years of age. You’ve been working for decades. You’re knackered, and not so keen to start figuring yourself out again.
People will probably recognise Katie Taylor for the rest of her life. Yet even that will fade over time. No doubt she has many physical objects to testify to her achievements, but she’ll never again experience 83,000 people calling her name. That’s a lot of validation.
And again, this is analogous to what it’s like for the postcareer person. They move from a situation where they can experience a sense of achievement, where colleagues or their employer may occasionally praise them, to one where they receive no praise at all; their value evaporated.
As Ireland ages, increasing numbers of people will experience these feelings, and with it – you’d hope – a general realisation that each of our lives is worth a bit more than the number of our PRSI contributions.
[ Seán Moncrieff: The word ‘old’ has become an insult. If you’re old, it’s all overOpens in new window ]
In fact, we may need to rethink this for everyone. Young adults today will change their occupation several times during the course of their lifetimes. Young adults today are training for jobs that, in a decade, may have been replaced by AI.
Many occupations could be eradicated this way. We may well reach a point where there are not enough jobs to go around; where a proportion of the population will always be “unemployed” or “early retired” or whatever way we choose to describe it. What will they do? How will they feel about themselves?
Just like Katie Taylor, none of us know what the future will look like. Not even AI companies. Except, of course, that they are the ones likely to make even more money.
