It’s the End of Retirement as We Know It …

Our modern idea of retirement was created by marketers based on a temporary set of circumstances that hasn’t existed in over four decades.

Less than 100 years ago, hitting your 50s didn’t mean the beginning of your second half of life.

Instead, it meant, “You’re about to die.”

Put another way, at the beginning of the Social Security system almost 90 years ago, the U.S. government knew that most workers wouldn’t even make it to age 62 and, therefore, would never collect benefits at 65.

Plus, the actuarial tables at the time said that even if you did make it, you’d only collect for about 12 years, tops. This meant, for most people, your 50s were the beginning of the end. 

Nowadays, more people reach the age of 65 than ever before. And if you do make it that far, you will likely  keep going for another 20 years.

That effectively pushes the outer edge of what we’ve historically called “midlife” to around 75. And this is without any of the medical advances we’ll likely see in the next 10 to 20 years that will extend not only lifespan but healthspan.

According to Joseph Coughlin, Director of the MIT AgeLab, the general concept of retirement was largely new at the time Social Security was introduced in 1935. Before then, the idea that you would just stop working and chill for your final years was mostly unheard of.

Social Security was intended to provide assistance to older people, yes — but also to force them out of the labor market. The primary governmental motivation was to protect gainful employment for young people by limiting the career span of older adults.

This made more sense when most working people did manual labor, where the physical wear and tear made continuing into your 60s a brutal proposition. And even though most people didn’t make it to 65, caring for those who did was the right thing to do.

Things are incredibly different now. Not only did lifespan in the United States double in the last 100 years, the labor force is currently comprised of 100 million knowledge workers plus a huge service industry.

In short, the protective reasoning behind retirement at 65 doesn’t really hold for many people these days, especially since there’s nothing inherently “old” about that arbitrary milestone. Then add to that a huge decline in birth rates over the last four decades, and the rationale for pushing older people out in favor of the young also falls apart.

This tells us that our modern concept of retirement is a 20th-century construction that’s already unraveling. How will this play out?

… And We Feel Fine!

The current crop of Baby Boomers over age 65 is already turning retirement on its head. They’re mostly in great shape, still feel young, and many have no desire to stop working.

“We’re going to see something we’ve never seen before — people in their 60s, 70s and 80s functioning at an exceptionally high level who want to continue working and remain connected,” says S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health. “Before, that number was small, but now it’s going to be large.”

That’s because retirement isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. It can lead to depression, isolation, and even an earlier death. Losing your sense of meaning and purpose can lessen your will to keep going, so you simply don’t.

The unretirement trend kicked off because retired Baby Boomers decided not working wasn’t all that great. Now the trend is trickling down to Generation X, many of whom have no real plan to retire at all, given that the cohort has substantially less in retirement savings than the Boomers.

But it’s not just about money. The prospects for living even longer and more vital lives are bright for those in their 40s and 50s. So, it makes sense that many will see no reason to stop working at 65, 70, or higher — but odds are they won’t be doing the same thing they’re doing now, given the prevalence of ageist attitudes from employers.

So what are returning Baby Boomers and experienced Gen Xers doing instead? Going their own way. 

People over the age of 50 are starting businesses at an accelerated rate. And they’re more likely to succeed than younger people, with the average age of a successful startup founder being 45.

According to figures compiled by the Kauffman Foundation, about one-quarter of new entrepreneurs were ages 55 to 64, compared to nearly 15% in 1996.

Despite these optimistic indications that pushing retirement back is a positive thing, it’s hard to hear them over the alarm bells about the coming retirement crisis. The news media says people simply can’t afford the “retirement dream” given current longevity parameters and savings rates, much less with additional advances in healthspan from medical science.

The truth is, that “retirement dream” we’ve been sold on has been just that for decades – a largely unattainable dream. Interestingly, the idea of retirement as a unique stage of life was in itself a marketing creation that convinced older people that they wanted to be consumers who retired from economic life, as opposed to producers contributing to society.

It’s time to sell a new dream. And in this case, marketers and entrepreneurs really do feel fine.

Marketing Created the “Golden Years” Concept of Retirement

We’ve already seen that marketers, publishers, and other commercial interests created the youth market that empowered the young Baby Boomer generation, all thanks to a unique post-war environment. Likewise, our modern idea of retirement was created by marketers based on a temporary set of circumstances that hasn’t existed in over four decades – and yet the popular conception persists.

In addition to Social Security benefits that became available to more people, lucrative private pensions were the norm in the mid-century United States. After World War II, companies would compete based on the terms of their generous pension benefits.

Older people became flush with cash, but didn’t understand what to do with it. The ethos of the time was that people were defined by what they produced and contributed, a very different mindset from our hyper-consumer culture. In short, they had to be convinced that doing nothing was a reward for a long work life well done, not a penalty or form of abandonment.

As Joseph Coughlin recounts in The Longevity Economy, during the middle of the 20th century, retired life seemed to have no natural purpose to it. So naturally, one would have to be invented by those with an economic interest in seeing it happen. 

“Perhaps,” said historian of technology Lynn White Jr., while serving as chair of a 1951 roundtable on retirement hosted by the Corning Corporation, “we have to glamorize leisure as we have not.”

In the late 1950s, marketers – including the founders of the fledgling American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) – started to rebrand “retirement” as the golden years. And one entrepreneur in the desert aimed to illuminate those years with the power of the sun itself.

In January 1960, real estate developer Delbert “Del” Webb opened Sun City in Arizona, the first-ever planned retirement community. Webb had hoped to move 1,700 residences in the first three years of Sun City but ended up selling 2,000 homes in the first year alone.

The idea of the planned retirement community spread from Sun City to include the Villages in Florida, that bastion of conservative politics and the liberal sharing of sexually transmitted diseases. Today, niche retirement communities designed to appeal to narrowly cast affinity groups abound, each seeking to secure Baby Boomer dollars for ideal environments that are segregated away from the rest of society.

So what’s the problem? Well, ever since the creation of the 401(k) in 1978, corporate pensions have largely disappeared. This shift from defined-benefit plans, in which employers saved on workers’ behalf, to defined-contribution plans, where employees can contribute a portion of their wages on a pretax basis, was monumental.

In two short decades, seniors with more retirement funding than they knew what to do with gave way to a perpetual savings struggle against periodic market crashes to earn the retirement dream that Americans now felt entitled to. Bradley Schurman, author of The Super Age, sums it up this way:

The problem with normalizing the idea of comfortable retirement and older age, a vision perpetrated mostly by large organizations that have profited from it, is that it is patently false. A comfortable retirement is reserved only for a shrinking proportion of the population, an issue due largely to vanishing corporate pensions, shrinking state pensions, and declining private savings.

In other words, the “R” in AARP might as well stand for rich instead of retired. Of course, not every older person thinks living in The Villages is an outcome worth pursuing. Most older people generally wish to “age in place” and stay integrated with the rest of society. There are plenty of emerging opportunities in this space that we’ll explore in the future.

But the larger point is that the dismantling of our modern conception of retirement is not the letdown for older people that you might think, given that it’s not what most people want or can afford without a substantial drop in their standard of living. If certain types of people want to segregate themselves from the rest of society as a retiree, there’s a market for that. But the broader market of those who think otherwise is much more lucrative and interesting.

When older people keep working, participating, and contributing, they keep spending. Entirely new categories of products and services will be in demand. Beyond that, older adults will continue spending on just about everything else rather than becoming fixed-income citizens who live in constant fear of the next stock market crash.

The End of Learn, Earn, Retire

The idea that the third phase of life is one of idle leisure was so unnatural that it took a concentrated effort of visionary marketing minds to sell it to older people. That the economic basis of the “golden years” marketing movement was built on quickly shifting sand doesn’t change the fact that the idea of an idyllic retirement has permeated our culture.

Just like it’s up to marketers to shift the cultural narrative about the superiority of youth to one that celebrates older adults, it’s also up to us to transmit the message that retirement should not be the ultimate goal of your working life. As Stanford professor Susan Wilner Golden puts it:

Sixty-five as an age marker that signifies the entry into old age no longer works. The classic view of modern life was one of three stages: learn, earn, retire. No more. It doesn’t make sense anymore. You don’t retire at sixty-five if you have 35 percent of your life left.

Economic reality in a rapidly changing world – one without pensions or true safety nets – has already shifted the age of retirement upward. With increases in lifespan and healthspan, those economic realities also mean that very few can afford the popular conception of retirement at 65 while living healthy lives into their late 80s, 90s, and beyond. And finally, more people than ever simply don’t want to stop working at some arbitrary cutoff point that no longer makes sense.

Professor Golden says the simplistic “third life stage” we call retirement is, in reality, multiple stages. She thinks in terms of repurposing, relaunching, and transitioning for people in their 50s and 60s, with each stage demanding both existing and brand new products and services.

Rather than one big bucket of economically undesirable people over the age of 50, Golden maintains these later life stages require marketers and entrepreneurs to adopt all new offers and messaging strategies:

It will be stage that defines what types of products and services a person will need; how they should be marketed to; who should be marketed to; and how education, work, and career will need to change.

A big part of what used to be retirement will now be learning. Not only what’s known as lifelong learning to develop new skills, but a process of unlearning how we’ve been taught to think about our so-called golden years in the first place and adapting to new, better ways of later life.

This is a big opportunity for content marketers in particular. People already realize they can’t afford to retire and live 30 years without working. Others know they'd rather not quit working at some arbitrary age regardless.

What they need to know is that it’s okay; no, that it’s better than okay. It’s awesome to be a badass older person. In other words, it’s time once again for marketing in the form of a movement that changes the world.