TIME OUT:Leaving work should be seen as a new job – that job is life, writes MARIE MURRAY
RETIREMENT is not what it used to be. Nor is the retiree. The stereotype of the exhausted male, having survived 40 years’ service, exiting the workplace with carriage clock and farewell speeches is defunct. The stereotype is as outdated as the fob watch gift. It is as obsolete a typecast as that of his apron-clad housewife awaiting their Darby and Joan years together, years that often were few, given the medical and mental-health post-retirement adjustments for both of them and the poor life-expectancy projections of a former time.
The new retiree is of a different ilk and is much more complex than that. Like the new “older person”, the new retiree is active, vivacious, ambitious, focused and envisaging a future rather than accepting a past.
The new retiree rejects stereotypes, ageism and any suggestion that working life is over. It is not over, just changed, and with that change comes a thousand possibilities that were previously denied, chances to do and be and live and enjoy life to the full. The new retiree does not subscribe to the “sissification” of age, to misquote Bette Davis. The new retiree, like the new man or woman, seeks a new life and knows this is the time to acquire it.
The new retiree is part of the current mass exodus from the workplace by those of variable age and variable service heading for diverse futures and second or even third careers. These retirees are leaving for many reasons, with a combination of excitement and fear generated by early-retirement incentive schemes, threat of erosion of benefits, fear of more invasive austerity measures on their future, or fear of more pension disasters dissipating what they worked years to achieve. When the going is good, get out, they say, and get going into a good life while you can.
Some taking early retirement fear an extension of the mandatory retirement age and they have worked enough – long enough, hard enough, diligently enough – to deserve reward for their work and time to enjoy it. And because those retiring at age are a generation that took on independent adulthood early, and who worked diligently to raise their families and be dutiful to their parents, they know that unless they finally claim time for themselves, they may be out of time to claim.
As death begins its early selection of friends and colleagues, unfairly chosen and too young to die, questions about life’s purpose and meaning arise and must be answered. For many, the answer is, “Yes, I have the will, the courage and the good fortune to be able to retire now, and so farewell.”
Of course, many who choose retirement find the combination of greater workload, more work pressures and fewer resources an incentive to go before they are murdered by work. They watch the departure of colleagues who will not be replaced, they have experienced the additional workload on them and they are aware that they cannot do what cannot be done if the pattern of exodus without replacement continues. But they also realise that it may be time to leave the stage for a generation just behind them, to give those younger workers the opportunity to make their mark, achieve their ambitions and occupy their places.
The manner in which people retire, why they leave and what they do upon departure remains as psychologically significant as in any previous decade, and good mental health still depends upon good retirement planning and consciousness of the psychological adjustments such changes require.
The new retiree still encounters age stereotypes, age-transition issues, life review, identity crises and power shifts in marital dynamics, and loss of work/life structure. The questions – “Who am I now?” and “How am I perceived?” – still arise even if it is answered swiftly by a positive alter ego and a different “self”.
This is the crucial question. Whatever age people are when they retire, whether they do so angrily, joyously, reflectively, impulsively or because they have no choice, good retirement still depends on what you do with the possibilities retirement provides. For retirement is not withdrawal, retreat or defeat unless you think it is – it is to be savoured, celebrated and enjoyed, time to be serious, outrageous, wise, witty and direct and do what you always wanted to, whatever that was. Retirement is a new job – that job is life.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and author whose most recent book, When Times are Tough, is published by Veritas.
Series concluded