They are part of a new way of looking at retirement
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At age 55, Steve Weiner began to think about retiring from a satisfying 30-year career in higher education. He had gotten his Ph.D. in management and education from Stanford, was a professor there and at Berkeley, provost at Mills College, and the top dog at the organization that accredits California’s colleges and universities. Perhaps, he thought, life in academe had run its course.
But instead of doing what most people do -- poring over financial statements -- Mr. Weiner sat down at his kitchen table with actuarial tables. Sure he was concerned about how much money he’d saved, but he was just as concerned with another commodity: time.
If the averages were right, Mr. Weiner discovered, he could expect to live another 25 or 30 years in relatively good health, a period as long as his academic career. The realization hit him hard. “I panicked. I had lived two-thirds of my life!” Mr. Weiner says. “Still, I had 30 years left.” When anxiety and euphoria passed, confusion hit. What, he asked himself, was he going to do with all that time?
Mr. Weiner’s quandary is hardly unique. The first of 77 million baby boomers turn 60 next January during a sea change in views about retirement.
The question of what’s next can be truly daunting. Most people do a much better job of planning financially than emotionally for this period. Some are able to identify the exact age they plan to retire, but with only the vaguest notion of what they will do over the ensuing 20, 25, 30, or more years. And policy makers tend to focus on the negative -- the financial and social burden of an aging America.
Yet for all the genuine challenges, tremendous opportunities lie ahead not only for retirees but for American society. And as one of the nation’s great repositories of human capital, pre-boomers and boomers working in higher education are in a unique position to lead the way, to realize a new dream for the “bonus decades,” seizing and creating opportunities to bring their education, experience, and time together for new, rewarding, and important work. Some already are.
As Steve Weiner discovered, health and longevity have been stretched, creating the possibility of a new decades-long stage of life between the career- and family-building phase and the onset of true old age. No generally accepted term describes this emerging phase, but an ever-growing array of labels conveys its excitement: “the third age,” “the second act,” “my time,” “the second adulthood,” and “prime time.” All of these are preferable to “retirement,” which comes from the Old French word, retyrer, meaning to go off into seclusion.
The array of nomenclature reflects confusion about the purpose of this phase of life, what one can rightly aspire to, and what constitutes success. Those leaving their earlier careers confront something of an identity crisis along with the responsibility for shaping this new chapter for themselves and future generations. They are pioneers.
Historically in America new life stages evolve only about once every hundred years. The last one came along at the beginning of the last century, when universal education and the proliferation of young people who were neither children nor adults prompted the invention of “adolescence.”
Creating this century’s new stage requires a rethinking of what we’ve come to accept as a predictable life course. In the past there was preparation in the classroom, the home, and the neighborhood for the roles of adulthood. Then came careers of full-time, continuous employment for most men and, for most women, continuous family care, increasingly combined with employment. Retirement was the closing curtain -- a well-deserved leisure and a passage to old age.
That vision no longer works. On one hand, most people leaving their primary careers are clear that they don’t want to keep on keeping on at the breakneck pace of the jobs they have now. On the other hand, many are equally uncomfortable with a life of full-time leisure, or with what Jane Eisner, a newspaper columnist and a senior fellow at the Fox Leadership Program of the University of Pennsylvania, refers to as “its poor cousin, irrelevance.” Instead, an increasing number of retirees are coming to regard the phase not as an ending but as a transition to some often only hazily imagined second act.
In truth, many of us actually want and need to retire -- temporarily. There are trips to take, books to read, and relationships to tend to. However, for many, perhaps most, retirees, after a while they are rested, restless, and ready to move to the next chapter of their lives.
While much about this second act remains up for grabs, a central, defining feature is emerging: work. Study after study confirms that the vast majority of boomers plan to continue working -- full time, part time, paid, unpaid -- in their so-called retirement years. According to a 2004 AARP study, nearly 80 percent of boomers are planning to continue in paid labor during the traditional retirement years. For some that will mean continuing to do what they are doing. But many more seem intent on renegotiating their relationship to work.
Work after retirement can seem oxymoronic, but for most people it makes good personal, financial, and societal sense. Many boom-ers will need to work for the money, the health insurance, or greater economic security. But many retirees, studies show, also want the structure in their lives, the social connections, and the sense of identity. Most of all, though, they want a sense of purpose -- a reason to get up in the morning.
In interviews and focus groups, recent retirees across the country and the socioeconomic spectrum express initial euphoria over their newfound freedom. They wax rhapsodic about the pleasure of no longer having to commute or punch the time clock. Yet, when pressed about their overall happiness, many begin to equivocate. While there are some co-workers they were happy to leave behind, many miss the social connections they experienced at work, the kind that come from cooperating to achieve a common goal. Studs Terkel observed in Working more than 30 years ago that Americans head off to their jobs each day “for daily meaning as well as daily bread.” Studies sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the National Institute on Aging found that working not just for income but for meaning and purpose is good for people. Seventy percent of sustained physical and mental health in later life can be attributed to lifestyle and environment, and only 30 percent to genes -- the inversion of what we long believed to be the case. And among the essential ingredients in the realm of lifestyle are those identified by Freud as the keys to life: “love and work” -- essentially, the strong social ties and opportunities to remain engaged and productive.
At a time when society faces daunting personnel shortages in areas such as education and health care, it is particularly heartening that a significant percentage of older Americans are looking to put love and work together. They hope to find jobs they have a passion for, and that reach beyond the self to make a lasting difference for others. According to a 2003 AARP survey, more than half of those who intend to work after retirement say that work that “lets you help other people” is a “very important” characteristic of what they are looking for.
In fact, when pre-retirees were asked by AARP what specific occupations they were considering in their post-retirement work, jobs in the education and human-services sectors were common responses. The most popular single job choice was teachingtwice as many people were interested in that as in consulting, that stereotypical retiree job. Also ranking among the top 10 most popular post-retirement occupations were nursing, health-services work, and child care. According to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, five of the 10 jobs that constitute the best fits for aging Americans in the next decade are service related: nonprofit managers, clergymen or clergywomen, patient advocates, home health-care counselors, and teachers. Those combine the skills the retirees bring and an articulated desire to work in a particular field, and they satisfy pressing human-resource needs.
An example close to home is that of Dick Shore (spouse of co-author Moen), who retired from a career in the U.S. Department of Labor for a next chapter at Cornell University as an extension associate, then left that for a position in an elementary-school classroom. Deciding that he wanted to do his part to improve public education in America, Mr. Shore approached the local principal of an Ithaca school with an offer to work 20 hours a week, for no compensation, in return for meaningful opportunities to improve the reading and development of students in the fourth and fifth grades. After 10 years and a move to Minneapolis, Mr. Shore is still at his new career, changing lives and improving chances for a new generation.
Sounds great, right? But finding fulfillment in this emerging stage of life isn’t easy. For previous generations, retirement was a taken-for-granted, short-term transition, institutionalized with the passage of the Social Security Act, the development of private pensions, and organizations’ (once mandatory but now more informal) retirement policies. Today virtually every aspect of this period of life and work is being rewritten, and new retirees find themselves improvising.
Here are some of the reasons why:
Twenty-first-century retirements often come in pairs, as husbands and wives have to negotiate two retirements: “his” and “hers.” Research shows this can be stressful for marriages, especially when one spouse wants to retire, and the other doesn’t. Wives often feel they have to time their retirements to coordinate with their husbands’ wishes. One woman we interviewed complained that her career had “just gotten started” and she was reluctant to leave it.
Older workers tend not to talk about retirement. Particularly surprising is the finding that couples tend not to talk with each other about life in retirement much past thinking about ages and dates. That reminds us of people who plan their weddings down to the last detail, but not their lives as a married couple. The fact is, many people will live together retired longer than they lived together when both were in their career jobs. Whether single or married, people rarely talk to friends, and even more rarely to colleagues, about retirement, worrying it may signal an absence of commitment and a readiness to throw in the towel, when what they really want is a well-planned second act.
People typically retire earlier than they expected they would. That decision is often a result of early-retirement incentives, their own or another family member’s health problems, or simply feeling burned out. Not planning for life after retirement can be especially problematic when the shift comes on suddenly. Women tend to plan less for retirement, both financially and in terms of their future lives, than do men. And many women we interviewed feel frustrated that they have retired only to become their husbands’ full-time homemakers.
Retirement is now a “blurred” transition.Not only is mandatory retirement now illegal, people are retiring at all ages, then often “unretiring.” Of the 1.5 million new jobs created between August 2003 and July 2004, for example, a full third have been grabbed by people 60 and older -- and half of those went to workers over 65. Labor economists have described the emergence of “bridge jobs” spanning the end of midlife work and the beginning of full-fledged retirement.
Nothing about retirement can be taken for granted. Just consider the upheavals and debates about health insurance, pensions, Social Security, and Medicare; the uncertainties of a global economy; and the changing demographic landscape. Americans today are making decisions about a very hazy future.
Identity is a problem. One woman we interviewed, an emerita professor teaching two classes a year, didn’t know whether to call herself “retired” or “professor” when filling out forms. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has come to recognize that “not working” doesn’t necessarily mean “retired,” and that “working” doesn’t necessarily mean “not yet retired.”
There are few part-time options. Outmoded career and retirement mystiques, and the policies and regulations they have spawned, define full-time continuous work as leading to full-time continuous retirement, with few options in between. Universities and colleges have led in rethinking that model, offering faculty members, especially, the option to retire in phases, or to retire and be rehired part year or part time to teach, engage in research, or take on special administrative roles. Other organizations have been slow to follow.
Opportunities to do meaningful work can be difficult to find. The problem is that jobs come prepackaged as full time, full year, with little flexibility. Many pre-boomers and boomers seek what might be characterized as “good work” as their next act, only to find that the doors are not opening.
Dorothea Glass, a retired professor of medicine from Philadelphia, is one person who struggled to find what she was looking for. After a distinguished medical career spanning four decades, she retired to Palm Beach County, in Florida. After a few months of R&R, she was climbing the walls with boredom. In desperation Dr. Glass approached the local hospital with an offer seemingly too good to refuse: “Put me to work in a way that makes use of my experience and my passion for medicine, and you can have my services free of charge.”
After some consideration, the hospital informed Dr. Glass, who just a year earlier had been chairwoman of her department and president of the professional association of rehabilitation-medicine physicians, that they were pleased to offer her a new volunteer position -- refilling water pitchers.
Some scholars label the situation “structural lag,” arguing that the population of older people is changing dramatically in nature, in capacities, and in expectations, yet society’s outlook toward this group remains hopelessly behind the times. Fortune magazine took a more pointed approach in chronicling the frustration of other highly skilled “retirees” trying to find a way to apply their talents in the nonprofit world, in an article titled “Candy Striper, My Ass!”
Strikingly, this gap persists when we have the best-educated population of older Americans in our nation’s history, and when we are wringing our hands over where we will find sufficient manpower to keep the economy healthy as the population ages. Turning the situation around will require nothing less than a new generation of pathways, priorities, and policies. However, even as society considers how we might solve the problem, many restless retirees are coming up with their own solutions.
Dr. Glass was recruited by a newly formed free health clinic in Palm Beach County. Dozens of similar clinics are sprouting up around the country, started by retired health-care professionals looking for a new way to practice -- and unwilling to refill water pitchers or staff the hospital gift shop. In San Mateo, Calif., the Samaritan House Free Medical Clinic was created by retired members of the clinical faculty of the University of California at San Francisco. Along with seeing more than 8,000 patients a year in two locations free of charge, the Samaritan House Free Medical Clinic has become a favorite rotation for the university’s medical students and residents -- a place where they come to learn medicine under the guidance of experienced physicians.
As Samaritan House illustrates, retirees from academe are among those leading this social innovation. Despite the awkwardness and ambiguities, they consider this emerging stage of life and work as much an opportunity as it is a problem.
Steve Weiner shows how this impulse to post-midlife social entrepreneurship can redound to the benefit of the higher-education system itself. He was appalled by the erosion of California’s near half-century promise -- originally articulated by Clark Kerr in the early 1960s -- that any California high-school graduate who qualified for higher education would be guaranteed a slot in the state’s public system. In retirement Mr. Weiner teamed up with David Wolf, a former community-college president, to organize an advocacy group, the Campaign for College Opportunity, designed to promote greater investment in public and private education. After raising nearly $2-million, the two men began the group in 2003. Mr. Weiner says the effort “has been the single most satisfying experience of my professional life.”
The Yale history professor Jack Hexter, after reaching the then-mandatory retirement age of 65, continued at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching there for more than a decade. At age 80 he began to focus on a new challenge. After the first Gulf War, Mr. Hexter saw that the U.S. armed forces were being downsized, and that hundreds of thousands of active-duty soldiers would be retiring from the military. He believed that many of them, retiring in their 40s and early 50s -- could help fill the acute need for public-school teachers.
Mr. Hexter devoted the next six years of his life to promoting the concept of Troops to Teachers, eventually persuading then-Senator John C. Danforth, a Missouri Republican, to secure federal money for the program. In its first four years, Troops to Teachers helped channel more than 3,000 retired veterans into teaching, and they have far exceeded the retention rates of conventional education-school graduates.
In a recent book on the implications of the aging society, author Phillip Longman argues: “After the proportion of elders increases in a society beyond a certain point, the level of entrepreneurship and inventiveness decreases.” But maybe that assumption reflects the low expectations and narrow opportunities we’ve created for the traditional retirement years. Consider instead the words of the former Stanford University President and historian Richard W. Lyman, as he described the work of Mr. Hexter, who died in 1996: “I have never seen a more dramatic example of what a single individual can accomplish ... armed only with a good idea and boundless determination to see it put into effect.”
Pioneers like Steve Weiner and Jack Hexter are the antidote to structural lag. They are structural leaders, vivid reminders that the history of retirement in America is a history of invention. Fifty years ago we didn’t even have Medicare or retirement communities, much less IRA’s.
What will the new landscape of retirement -- and work -- look like 50 years from now? Is age, or demography, destiny?
Perhaps.
But there is probably greater truth in the words of the management guru and Claremont professor Peter F. Drucker, still productive in his mid-90s. “The best way to predict the future,” he tells us, “is to create it.”
Marc Freedman is the founder and president of Civic Ventures, co-founder of the Experience Corps, and author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America (PublicAffairs, 1999). Phyllis Moen is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and author, with Patricia Roehling, of The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
http://chronicle.com Section: Personal Finance & Retirement Volume 51, Issue 34, Page B1