It is time to retire how we think about retirement.

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of retirement? What do we see depicted in commercials, TV, movies? Old age? Cruise ship? Gardening? Day time TV watching? Cross-word puzzles? Feeding pigeons in the park?

Nothing really inspiring. If you were like me, the number one thing to look forward to about retirement is never having a boss again and/or to stop working a job you don’t love. However what happens once you actually retire is a bit murky. There isn’t much focus or modeling in society of retired life as it isn’t a sexy topic to depict and let’s face it there is a lot of uncertainty around it for many people who would rather not think about something that scares them. I would like to declare this old way of thinking about retirement as dead and needs to be buried to make way for a new approach to retirement.

First let’s start with a short history lesson about the current concept of retirement.

The idea of retirement is relatively recent in human history. There was dude named Otto Von Bismark who was the first chancellor of Germany. In 1889 he enacted a law that created the first social security system and provided provide a pension annuity for workers of all categories who reached the age of 70. Previously most people had to work until they died or were no longer physically capable. If they were no longer capable you became a burden to family members or were poor on the streets. Now before you have an opinion on Otto being a great humanitarian, an important thing to keep in mind is that life expectancy at the time was 72. So most people were not reaching the ripe old age of 70 and if they did social security was intended to make the LAST TWO YEARS of their life comfortable and neither a burden on family or society.

This is the root idea behind today’s concept of retirement trying. Anyone else find this old model of work/retirement downright depressing? How does this scenario make you feel? Go to college, get married, work a job to afford to buy a house, pay the bills, and provide for your family. Wake up, commute, work, back home, sleep and some variations of that for most weekdays for a good part of your life. Then once you are 65-67 years old, IF you were able to put enough money away, you quit working and possibly move to a senior community for 10 years and then an assisted living community before you die. Now that is if you had enough privilege to get a job that provided a 401K or someone to teach you about how to use an individual retirement account (IRA.) Which unfortunately is not most BIPOC, women or other minorities. This is what Baby Boomers were sold as a life path and maybe some people were content with that especially when they look at the generations before them. However for younger generations that life path is not one that aligns with our current reality and opportunities we have available to us.