On August 3, 1962, the cover story of Time magazine featured the rapid aging of Americans who had lots of time and money but no place in society . . . The article talked about how Del Webb’s Sun City and similar age-segregated housing developments that focused on leisure in Arizona and elsewhere were transforming America’s image of retirement into a time of self-absorption and fun . . . The results were stunning. In 1951, among men receiving Social Security benefits, 3 percent retired from work to pursue leisure; in 1963, 17 percent indicated that leisure was the primary reason for retiring from work; and by 1982, nearly 50 percent of men said they were retiring to pursue leisure.
While there were positive results for some older adults who took this path, it also led many into self-absorption and prejudice, tensions with younger people, boredom, and lack of a sense that they were contributing to society and to others’ lives.
Let’s remember three things:
Retirement is a new concept. It didn’t exist before the twentieth century anywhere in the world except Germany. It didn’t exist before the nineteenth century anywhere.
Retirement is a Western concept. It doesn’t exist in Okinawa or much of the developing world. Old people in those places don’t play golf every day. They contribute to their families and societies.
Retirement is a broken concept. It is based on three assumptions that aren’t true: that we enjoy doing nothing instead of being productive, that we can afford to live well while earning no money for decades, and that we can afford to pay others to earn no money for decades.
6
“When you’re through changing, you’re through.”
William Safire was a speechwriter for President Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for The New York Times who wrote for the newspaper for thirty-two years. After the first twenty-eight years writing an Op-Ed column twice a week plus a famous Sunday column on the English language, he decided to turn things down a notch in 2005 at the ripe age of seventy-five years old.
At ten years older than “retirement age,” Bill didn’t just retire, though. He kept writing the Sunday language column every week (just ditching the Op-Eds) and took on a new job as chairman of the Dana Foundation for four more years until his eventual death of pancreatic cancer in 2009.
Quite a run.
But what I want to tell you about is that famous day of January 24, 2005, when Bill Safire quit writing his famous twice-weekly Op-Eds. People were disappointed! It was the end of a voice. But how did he mark the finish of his famous column? He wrote an Op-Ed about it, of course. It was called “Never Retire.” Here are some excerpts:
The Nobel laureate James Watson, who started a revolution in science as co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, put it to me straight a couple of years ago: “Never retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy.”
Why, then, am I bidding Op-Ed readers farewell today after more than 3,000 columns? Nobody pushed me; at 75, I’m in good shape, not afflicted with political ennui; and my recent column about tsunami injustice and the Book of Job drew the biggest mail response in 32 years of pounding out punditry.
Here’s why I’m outta here: In an interview 50 years before, the aging adman Bruce Barton told me something like Watson’s advice about the need to keep trying something new, which I punched up into “When you’re through changing, you’re through.” He gladly adopted the aphorism, which I’ve been attributing to him ever since.
Combine those two bits of counsel—never retire, but plan to change your career to keep your synapses snapping—and you can see the path I’m now taking. Readers, too, may want to think about a longevity strategy.
We’re all living longer. In the past century, life expectancy for Americans has risen from 47 to 77. With cures for cancer, heart disease and stroke on the way, with genetic engineering, stem cell regeneration and organ transplants a certainty, the boomer generation will be averting illness, patching itself up and pushing well past the biblical limits of “threescore and ten.”
But to what purpose? If the body sticks around while the brain wanders off, a longer lifetime becomes a burden on self and society. Extending the life of the body gains most meaning when we preserve the life of the mind . . .
But retraining and fresh stimulation are what all of us should require in “the last of life, for which the first was made.” Athletes and dancers deal with the need to retrain in their 30’s, workers in their 40’s, managers in their 50’s, politicians in their 60’s, academics and media biggies in their 70’s. The trick is to start early in our careers the stress-relieving avocation that we will need later as a mind-exercising final vocation. We can quit a job, but we quit fresh involvement at our mental peril.
In this inaugural winter of 2005, the government in Washington is dividing with partisan zeal over the need or the way to protect today’s 20-somethings’ Social Security accounts in 2040. Sooner or later, we’ll bite that bullet; personal economic security is freedom from fear.
But how many of us are planning now for our social activity accounts? Intellectual renewal is not a vast new government program, and to secure continuing social interaction deepens no deficit. By laying the basis for future activities in the midst of current careers, we reject stultifying retirement and seize the opportunity for an exhilarating second wind.
Medical and genetic science will surely stretch our life spans. Neuroscience will just as certainly make possible the mental agility of the aging. Nobody should fail to capitalize on the physical and mental gifts to come.
When you’re through changing, learning, working to stay involved—only then are you through.
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Work gives us so much—free and simple gifts we are given every day. These gifts are worth much more than any numbers on a paycheck, because they help us live truly rich lives. The freedom you feel from a satisfying job beats the oppressing ache of emptiness any day.
7
The 4 S’s of work
Why work?
Let’s break it down.
Social
Let’s flash back 1.2 million years. Before the Internet, before computers, before TVs, before you, before newspapers, before your parents, before cars, before your grandparents, before buildings, before your great-grandparents, before cities, before bikes, before lights, before clothes, before jewelry, before music, before art, before talking, before marriage, before fire, before weapons, before everything we know.
The Earth was here and it was empty. Trees, water, and dirt.
And then suddenly we appeared on the African plains. But, to be honest, it didn’t look like we would last very long. After all, we couldn’t fly, we couldn’t swim, we didn’t have claws, we didn’t have big teeth, we couldn’t see in the dark, we couldn’t run faster than a rhino, we couldn’t beat up a chimpanzee. We didn’t seem to have much going for us. It looked like we would be lunch meat for giant leopards and saber-toothed tigers with dagger claws and twelve-inch-long curved teeth.
Yet flash-forward 1.2 million years and we’re the most dominant mammal on the planet and many of the other animals around back then are now extinct.
See, we had a secret. And it was hidden between our ears. The human brain is the most complicated object in the entire universe. And it helped us take over the planet.
Over the past 1.2 million years the size of our brains has doubled and we have grown our population to more than seven billion from only a few scattered hundreds.