My recent post, Why Retirement Confuses Knowledge Workers, generated a lot of emails and texts to me, almost all of them giving me a high-five. One person said, “To me and my friends, you might as well replace the word retirement with irrelevance. No one would ask a friend, ‘When are you thinking of irrelevance?’” It’s understandable why an industrial worker, possibly doing back-breaking, mind-numbing work, would seek out Sun City in 1960, but does it make sense for a marketing strategist, management consultant, or professor to go out to pasture just when their crystallized intelligence is reaching its apex?
My friend Michael Clinton, former President of Hearst Magazine, and author of the book ROAR and the ROAR community, published a survey of his members in their newsletter that was very telling (see the graphic below). Only 3% of his members said they were going to spend 30 years in traditional retirement.
What about you? Is retirement something you look forward to or have you banished it from your language? I hope you’ll consider joining me and Michael when we teach together in Santa Fe in the most glorious time of the year, Oct 6-11: ROAR into Midlife: Build Your Bold Second Act. Here’s an Esquire article that Michael just published about why he loves Santa Fe so much.
-Chip