Most discussions of retirement focus on the financial aspects of leaving the workforce: “How to save enough for retirement” or “How do you know if you have enough money for retirement?”
But this might not be the biggest problem that potential retirees face. The deeper issues of meaning, relevance and identity that retirement can bring to the fore are more significant to some workers.
Work has become central to the modern American identity, as journalist Derek Thompson bemoans in The Atlantic. And some theorists have argued that work shapes what we are. For most people, as business ethicist Al Gini argues, one’s work – which is usually also one’s job – means more than a paycheck. Work can structure our friendships, our understandings of ourselves and others, our ideas about free time, our forms of entertainment – indeed our lives.
I teach a philosophy course about the self, and I find that most of my students think of the problems of identity without thinking about how a job will make them into a particular kind of person. They think mostly about the prestige and pay that come with certain jobs, or about where jobs are located. But when we get to existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I often urge them to think about what it means to say, as the existentialists do, that “you are what you do.”
How you spend 40 years of your life, I tell them, for at least 40 hours each week – the time many people spend at their jobs – is not just a financial decision. And I have come to see that retirement isn’t just a financial decision, either, as I consider that next phase of my life.
Usefulness, tools and freedom
For Greek and Roman philosophers, leisure was more noble than work. The life of the craftsperson, artisan – or even that of the university professor or the lawyer – was to be avoided if wealth made that possible.
The good life was a life not driven by the necessity of producing goods or making money. Work, Aristotle thought, was an obstacle to the achievement of the particular forms of excellence characteristic of human life, like thought, contemplation and study – activities that express the particular character of human beings and are done for their own sake.
And so, one might surmise, retirement would be something that would allow people the kind of leisure that is essential to human excellence. But contemporary retirement does not seem to encourage leisure devoted to developing human excellence, partly because it follows a long period of making oneself into an object – something that is not free.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between the value of objects and of subjects by the idea of “use.” Objects are not free: They are meant to be used, like tools – their value is tied to their usefulness. But rational beings like humans, who are subjects, are more than their use value – they are valuable in their own right, unlike tools.
And yet, much of contemporary work culture encourages workers to think of themselves and their value in terms of their use value, a change that would have made both Kant and the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers wonder why people didn’t retire as soon as they could.
‘What we do is what we are’
But as one of my colleagues said when I asked him about retirement: “If I’m not a college professor, then what am I?” Another friend, who retired at 59, told me that she does not like to describe herself as retired, even though she is. “Retired implies useless,” she said.
So retiring is not just giving up a way of making money; it is a deeply existential issue, one that challenges one’s idea of oneself, one’s place in the world, and one’s usefulness.
One might want to say, with Kant and the ancients, that those of us who have tangled up our identities with our jobs have made ourselves into tools, and we should throw off our shackles by retiring as soon as possible. And perhaps from the outside perspective, that’s true.
But from the participant perspective, it’s harder to resist the ways in which what we have done has made us what we are. Rather than worry about our finances, we should worry, as we think about retirement, more about what the good life for creatures like us – those who are now free from our jobs – should be.
Marianne Janack is a John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy, Hamilton College.
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JeffLee
My dad retired before he was 60 and spent the next 30 years playing tennis, restoring vintage Jaguars, and traveling around Europe with my mom, and they spent much of the rest of their time socializing in their comfortable home.
For the vast majority of people, it's a myth that they feel "valuable" by being locked inside an office for 40 plus years, sitting behind a service counter or standing on a factory line, just so a billionaire can buy their latest mega yacht. If they do feel that way, they're delusional.
1glenn
JeffLee, right on.
We have been retired for awhile, and traveled a LOT. Getting a bit old now for traveling, but not ready to give it up completely.
Funny thing about our kids......they can go traveling and be out of touch for weeks at a time, and think nothing of it, but if we go out of town for a month, they start panicking. "Don't do that again! We don't like you being out of touch for so long!"
We definitely do not feel irrelevant. If the grandkids or great grandkids need watching, or a ride, we are still the preferred choice to contact. We try to get together with the kids for dinner a few times a month, but we don't cook anymore. It is too much work. When I was younger, I did most of the cooking. The kids loved it, and I enjoyed it.
I know this ride can't last forever, but we don't feel irrelevant. Just old.
1glenn
BTW, I too retired in my 50s. The wife kept working longer than that, but it was her choice. I loved my job, and wanted to work a few more years, but not sorry to retire. (Got injured, and couldn't do the job anymore, at least according to the doctors. IMO, I could still work circles around anyone else at work, even with only one good arm.)
englisc aspyrgend
Having never defined myself by what I did to pay the mortgage, I can neither agree or relate to this. This I would suggest is a particularly US problem, Europe and the UK have a much healthier approach to work life balance. On the whole we work to live rather than live to work.
Either a failed human being or a well programmed drone. If that is all you are then you are a hollow simulation of a human.
While the ancients took it too far as a product of their society, they didn’t get it entirely wrong, a balance of the less immediate merely utilitarian aspects of what a human is capable of helps to create a more rounded comprehending individual, which is what democracy needs to function properly and what corporate machines of any kind do not want.
englisc aspyrgend
Forgot to add, I semi retired at 55 and retired at 60 and never regretted it for a second. Money is very far from everything and buying “things” in no way compensates. Time is more important to enjoy being you and enable you to be the human being you should be.
wallace
Time is one of the most precious we can hold and not waste it on what we don't need. I have been free-lance for 50 years and will do it until I drop because that what's most artists do. My time is my own.
Gene Hennigh
My dream job was teaching. I taught about 8 different topics and loved it. (I won some teaching awards, too, because it never seemed like work to me.) Now, I still miss it. Oh, I often help former colleagues with research and I have a good social life, but every autumn as some of my younger friends prepare for their classes I often feel alternately jealous and sad. Oh, retirement is okay, but I'd rather work.
GBR48
I'm self employed and have no need or desire to retire at any specific age. My business doesn't define me. I don't consider that I have a need to be 'defined' by myself or anyone else. I have several hobbies which I will also continue with, as long as my health allows. As my 'identity' - I'm just me. I don't worry about it, and I'm not sure why young people fuss over it so much. Life is too short for such navel-gazing.
We aren't around for very long, so don't divide your life between working and retired. At an official retirement age, you may have too many health issues and too little energy to enjoy yourself much anyway.
If you are an employee who will be released into the wild at retirement age, there is nothing to stop you starting a side hustle now and concentrating on it more when you retire, to keep yourself active and some cash coming in. And you will really benefit from having at least one hobby. I can't imagine what life is like for people who have no hobbies at all. Doesn't everyone have at least one?
@Gene. It's not illegal to teach people when you are past the retirement age. I'm sure there are plenty of night schools around who would be only too pleased to have you teaching their students.
Dr.Cajetan Coelho
Out here retired people feel they have no time to waste. As Wisdom Banks they and their presence is needed by younger generations wanting to benefit from their experience and wisdom. 'Dust we are and unto Dust we return' is an age-old reminder that makes them realize the brevity of existence and the impending flight.