As long as we’re questioning everything else about work - home or office? how many days a week to work, how many hours a day? - we might as well pose a related question: Has the time come to abolish retirement?

Despite the appearance of an age-old institution, the concept of retirement is a fairly new social construct. Well into the nineteenth century, most people worked until they dropped. In our largely agrarian societies, this was a viable model, particularly for those who owned a farm and had a large brood of children. As you aged, you could delegate the more physically demanding work to the kids while continuing to supervise the operation and doing less labor-intensive tasks until your last few years.

As economic life began to industrialize and the kids began leaving for the cities, this model began to crack. Fewer and fewer kids were interested in coming back to care for parents in exchange for a promise that they would inherit the farm. Urban life offered better wages and more exciting opportunities than milking the cows.

It was somewhat of a Faustian bargain for the kids, though. Like today’s technology firms, many businesses favored younger employees, believing that they were more capable of learning new skills and operating the increasingly complex machinery in new factories. Figuring out a way to move older people off the assembly line became a priority, one that even the new labor unions endorsed, since it created employment opportunities for their growing cohort of younger members.

Meanwhile, the concept of pensions was gaining popularity. In 1889, Germany created the first public pension system for workers. Most of Europe and Scandinavia established similar systems, and in 1935, during the Great Depression, the United States followed Germany’s model to create its Social Security system.

Today, during the initial financial-planning process, when we ask clients what their desired retirement age is, most people say 65. They offer different reasons for this, and we often have interesting discussions about the desirability and viability of different ages, but in the end, age 65 seems to be a centrifugal force that shapes all their thoughts and expectations about the appropriate time to stop working.

Age 65, it turns out, is the age of eligibility for Social Security retirement benefits, under the program’s initial terms. The U.S. selected age 65 based on Germany’s public pension system. Germany, in turn, had taken care to set the eligibility age higher than most people lived at the time, offering, in effect, an illusory promise of care for the old and infirm (born of political expediency at the time). In other words, a cynical approach to creating a social safety net in the 19th century became the foundation for the concept of modern retirement that took root during the following century.

During World War II, wage and price controls prevented companies from offering higher salaries to compete for scarce talent. However, they could still offer pension benefits to attract employees, and there were even generous tax benefits for doing so. In the post-war years of the 1950’s, both public and private pensions bloomed like algae on a hot summer day. These pensions, in turn, helped create a “retirement-industrial complex” along with Eisenhower’s national highway system, rock and roll, and the mass migration from northern states to sunnier southern and western climes.

The term “senior citizen” first appeared in 1955 as the title of a magazine aimed at the newly minted retirees. Glossy brochures for goods and services targeting these consumers promoted the idea of the “golden years,” with pictures of golf courses, beaches and sunsets. In 1960, real estate developer Del Webb opened the nation’s first large-scale retirement community that it called Sun City, Arizona. 

Flash forward to present time. We now have several decades of experience and data from the first waves of modern retirees to help assess how this grand social experiment is going. The Baby Boomers, in particular, have been leading the way, and so far, the reports from the front lines of retirement are mixed.

In financial planning, we divide the classic retirement period into three segments - the go-go, slow-go, and no-go years. The go-go years are the first few years of retirement, when long-deferred gratification gives way to travel, hobbies, and other interests. Afterwards, having “been there, done that,” most retirees tend to settle into routines and slower daily rhythms that continue for many years. The no-go years are typically the last few years of life.

In general, the reports during the go-go years from our clients are positive. Many of them are thrilled to have escaped jobs they were feeling lukewarm about, and there’s excitement as they plan new activities. For many of them, the slow-go years are also good, a time when they feel grateful for the financial resources that give them the freedom to do what they want, when they want.

However, this freedom from financial and time constraints comes with a cost, and, in our experience, this cost tends to be steeper than people expect. The phrase “wherever you go, there you are” comes to mind. Even if retirement is grand in many respects, you still have yourself to contend with, and what many people find is that life can feel a little empty without any reason to get out of bed in the morning. 

Not surprisingly, we’ve seen a number of clients who retired but then later decided to go back to work. Sometimes, it’s the same field where they previously worked; other times, it’s an “encore career” in a new, perhaps less remunerative field. Sometimes it’s for no compensation at all, but rather the satisfaction of contributing their time and skills to causes they care about. Work for them is about more than a paycheck, it’s about purpose and social engagement.

Stories about bored retirees going back to work, in fact, are so prevalent these days as to have become a trope. There are also numerous reports about the health challenges that many retirees experience soon after quitting their jobs, with suggestions that the two are linked. All this has led to a growing suspicion that retirement is not only failing to live up to the promises concerning it, but that, as currently construed, it’s constitutionally incapable of doing so.

Why don’t we do anything about this? The dominant 25-40-20 model of years spent pursuing education, work, and retirement is a lifecycle structure that we invented only recently. It’s a story we tell ourselves about how we should organize our lives, and we could, if we wanted, come up with a different story.

The problem, it seems, is that we’ve framed retirement as a reward, a badge of success that represents, for many people, one of life’s pinnacle achievements. In a world where billions of people still struggle at subsistence level, being able to walk away from your job, even if it’s your life’s work, is the ultimate social status symbol. The losers are the ones who must keep working. This is all incredibly ironic, even Orwellian, given how the concept of retirement derived from a desire to “move old people out of the way.” 

The pandemic’s gift of encouraging us to reconsider the terms of employment - the location of work, the commute, how many days and hours a week that we work - offers an opportunity to reconsider the concept of retirement as well. At a minimum, with people living far longer on average than ever before, it’s an opportune time to take a look at what constitutes “normal retirement age.” 

As it turns out, a lot of smart people have been writing about alternate lifecycle models for years, in much the same way that people were talking about the promise of remote work long before the recent pandemic. In “The Big Shift - Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife,” published in 2011, Marc Freedman explained why “the old model doesn’t make sense for a one hundred-year life span.” He offered a number of thought-provoking proposals for how we might reorganize the institutional structure that supports this model.

For example, what if formal education were a lifelong process, not front-loaded at the beginning of our lives? What if social institutions were created to support mid-life career transitions? What if you could access Social Security benefits, or something similar, not just for retirement, but for other important life events as well - the birth of a child; a period of caregiving for an older relative; heck, even a period of self-reflection after which you could return to the hustle and bustle of daily employment.

A lot of these notions strike many people as fanciful, impractical, and even morally repugnant - just like the concept of “retirement” a hundred years ago when idle hands were considered the devil’s workshop. As the rise of the retirement-industrial complex shows us, though, all we need is a new story to help us see beyond the current social waters in which we swim. And chances are, there’s something better that we can create for ourselves and future generations if we’re willing to look for it.