Don’t Retire - Social Security Benefits is Shrinking and Private Pensions Plan are Vanishing
It’s remarkable how pervasive the relatively recent notion of retirement has become. Retirement as we now know it didn’t exist prior to the 1930s. Social Security was developed and promoted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Dealers as a way to convince older workers to retire in order to open up jobs for young people during the Great Depression. Since then Social Security benefits have been expanded dramatically. From the 1930s to the 1980s private pension plans also boomed. The financial services industry saw money to be made and began relentlessly promoting retirement. In less than half a century it had evolved from a social experiment to a presumed entitlement.
Retirement made a lot of sense at a time when you weren’t going to live much longer than age of 65, when your job was backbreaking, when you got less productive as you got older, and when society had to make room in the job market for lots of young people. And an idyllic retirement was actually possible for your parents’ generation, who could take those expanding benefits and pensions and add to them a windfall profit from the sale of their real estate.
But in this new age, retirement is not only not worth striving for, it’s impossible for most—and something you should do your best to avoid. The notions it’s based on are simply no longer true. When age of 65 was chosen as the retirement age, most people died at sixty-three. Today, not only are you likely to live into your eighties or nineties, but your older years are going to be active and productive ones. After working and retiring at age of 65 would mean your spending two decades doing needlework and gardening.
When retirement was first developed, everyone thought leisure was automatically more fulfilling than work. You know better. You take pride in a job well done, enjoy being part of a team, and know that work—of one form or another—is as integral a part of your life as play.
When retirement took hold in the American mind, most work was physical in nature. It was obvious then that older workers are less productive than younger workers—they simply couldn’t lift as many bales of cotton or carry as many bricks. Today the most physically demanding part of your job probably is pushing the buttons on your telephone or tapping on your keyboard. There’s absolutely nothing that indicates older workers are less productive. In fact, most evidence indicates they’re more productive.
When retirement was first being promoted, America had a large generation of young people that it had to absorb into the workforce. It made some sense, therefore, to open up spots. Today, however, the twenty-somethings waiting in the wings are a small generation. They don’t need to have lots of spots opened for them. In fact, there aren’t enough of them to fill all the jobs your generation is doing.
Finally, the financial trends that made it possible for your folks to retire have been reversed: Social Security is shrinking, private pensions plan are vanishing, and real estate values are barely keeping pace with inflation.
Forget about retirement. Believe me, giving up this living death is actually an empowering act that opens up undreamed-of opportunities for your personal, professional, and financial growth. Emulate the ancient Greek hero Ulysses rather than model yourself after a lemming. Look at your working life as a lifelong journey up and down hills rather than as a single climb up a steep cliff that ends with a fatal step off the edge (and into the abyss) at the arbitrary age of 65.