Still Waiting for the Golden Years: Serious Thoughts on Retirement

Some of the most persistent images of retirement are those used in "retirement community" ads. They uniformly show older couples sitting on the beach or walking along a path. I am not aware that my wife and I have ever sat on the beach or anywhere else and that opportunity never entered my mind. What are we supposed to look forward to in becoming a retired person? Why does our society and culture mandate that we must stop working at some point in our lives?

However, there are definite statistics that show that in the United States, male mortality has a discontinuous increase at age 62 when men begin to retire and claim Social Security. See "The mortality effects of retirement: Evidence from Social Security eligibility at age 62." In short, retirement can be lethal. Why is this the case?

Before getting too far into this topic, I need to define retirement and distinguish it from disability. Of course, you can be both retired and disabled, but the United States has increased the legal protection for the disabled but protection from age discrimination lags far beyond. Looking back in history, retirement as a concept did not exist until the life expectancy level raised because of the industrial and technological revolutions. People did not retire, they died. Those who lived to a "ripe old age" just kept working mostly out of necessity. Germany was the first country to recognize retirement and introduced retirement benefits in 1889. Presently, the concept of retirement has passed from being a novelty to become a fundamental right. National systems such as Social Security in the United States are mandatorily imposed on all workers and until very recently workers were penalized for working past the arbitrary "retirement age."

For the purpose of this post, I am using the term "retirement" to mean the "withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from one's active working life." See Wikipedia, Retirement. This definition of retirement includes both voluntary and involuntary retirement. By this definition, it would be impossible for me to retire, although I do qualify for Social Security benefits. If you think about this system for even a few minutes, you will likely realize that many of the people who pay into the system never live to receive the benefits. Hmm. This is actually part of the planning of the system and as the life expectancy age increases, the ratio of old people to young people changes and if you maintain an arbitrary "retirement age" then you start having more people drawing out of the system then you do paying into the system. This disparity is further ascerbated by a decrease in the maternal reproduction rate.

Granted, I am not making as much money as I did while I was working fulltime as a trial lawyer but I still make money and it then becomes due to the vagaries of the tax system that I do not continue to pay additional self-employment or social security related taxes. In some cases, however, you could pay income taxes on your Social Security benefits. OK, so the system seems arcane and arbitrary is there anything that can be done?

Well, here is what I think. The problem is the way we define work. If I am employed by a company and they set my hours and my pay level, I suppose you could call that work. But what if I set my own hours and my pay level is based on my productivity. Is that work? Let's suppose that I like to write. I would write all day almost every day even if no one paid me for doing so. What if through some stroke of luck or whatever, I actually get paid to write, i.e. I write a book and it sells. Is that work? Do I look forward to retiring from my writing all day? Actually, I use the time that I worked all day as an attorney to write. So is my writing work or not work? So what do I dream about doing when I retire? See, by definition, I can never retire. If I were one half of the couple sitting on the beach, I would have a laptop and be typing or a camera and be taking photographs of the beach and the sunset.

This is where the whole idea of retirement including retirement communities where the idea is to play golf and sit around a drink and play cards has created an artificial view of what life should or could be like. So, you say, but I don't like to write and I don't like to take photographs. Well, there is another issue here altogether. I just got through looking at a website called JustServe.org. That website is tailored to provide you with a long list of places where volunteers are needed to benefit the community and the nation.  I suggest that inactivity and lack of involvement lead to depression, illness, and ultimately death. I am not arguing against Social Security but I am arguing against age discrimination and a wasted, idle, old age. If you spent your life at a job you hated, take advantage of your age to do something meaningful.