Retirement & Death
Have you ever noticed that there seems to be an odd relationship between retirement and death? I don’t mean the obvious one that’s age related, but the one that seems to be related to the fact of retiring. As if taking your foot off the gas at work causes life to spin off into the ether. The internet has.
One might understand the desire to retire early and enjoy the golden years, but researchers have also observed that early retirement doesn’t necessarily lead to a longer retirement.
The common theory baked into this idea is that work provides us with purpose, and that purpose can act as a propulsive, life-giving force. In fact, even the words themselves suggest that idea. The etymology of the word retire describes a “falling back,” a “withdrawal into seclusion,” while the word purpose describes an “object to be kept in view,” or a “proper function for which something exists.” Life and death baked right into the words.
I suspect that there’s something going on here with identity as well. We spend so much time and energy attending to our work on a daily basis that eventually it’s hard (if not impossible) to see the daylight between who I am and what I do. Ask someone “what do you do?” and they will almost certainly respond by saying “I am a…”
We shape our careers, and thereafter our careers shape us.
I wonder if we intuit the interwoven nature of identity and work and can sense the danger of retirement. That’s why doing things like writing a will, thinking about retirement, and planning for succession can become such touchy subjects. We raise the issue and invite the specter of mortality into the room.
This doesn’t just create problems for individuals, but for our organizations as well (to say nothing of our politics). When individuals, especially those in leadership positions, don’t take time to process the when, how, and wherefore of their own retirement, they limit themselves and hinder the ongoing vitality of the organizations around them.
Recently, on a flight to Atlanta (apparently all my ideas arrive on planes now?) I was scrolling through movies, watching trailers, and unable to commit when I stumbled across John Cena’s latest film Freelance. Here’s the log line:
An ex-special forces operative takes a job to provide security for a journalist as she interviews a dictator, but when a military coup breaks out in the middle of the interview, they are forced to escape into the jungle.
I didn’t watch the movie (great trailer though). But the reason I’m still thinking about this is because there is a classic trope at play in the film that I’m interested in. It’s the “ex-special forces operative” idea, the “guy coming out of retirement.” It pops up in a lot of movies. See if you can spot a theme in this short list:
John Wick
Logan
Unforgiven
Taken
The Equalizer
The Dark Knight Rises
Gran Torino
Rambo 4
Coming out of retirement is an expression of vitality (even virility). It’s as if the trope says, he stopped, but not because he couldn’t keep doing it, he’s still got it, it was his choice to back off, and if he comes back, he’ll be better than ever, better than everyone else. There’s something about this theme and its prevalence that serves as an acknowledgement of how we really think about retirement.
My top two posts on this thing over the past year have been about how death shapes our thinking about work. Something I wrote about midlife crises feels relevant here I think:
What’s interesting about the research [on midlife crises] is that it suggests these crises may be less directly related to death and more related to life events - to change - which can be unsettling and confusing, and there happens to be a lot of change in midlife because there’s a lot of life in midlife.
There happens to be a lot of change in the retirement years too, different typically than in midlife, but change nonetheless. What do we do with that change?
I’m not exactly sure why, but whenever I think about all this, a T.S. Eliot line from Four Quartets comes to mind: Old men ought to be explorers.
He goes on:
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
I like this idea. It gives a sense of propulsion to the change that retirement can bring, that our endings are not final but are also beginnings.