Time to re-tread, rather than to retire

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/02/2022 (1698 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AS I scan the daily round of climate and other disasters, one thought has nagged at me enough to share:

Individually and collectively, we need to rethink the wheel metaphors in our lives. There is way too much interest expressed these days in “re-tiring.”

Many readers will remember the “Freedom 55” ads encouraging investment toward an early retirement. That campaign — usually featuring old white people golfing at resorts by the sea — was misguided, at best.

To start, such a retirement setting was an impossible dream for most people, because they never had enough extra money to invest. Worse, those who attempted “Freedom 55” not only had to work too hard beforehand, but by 65 (thanks to volatile markets), were worrying about rent, not revelling in the luxury of their seaside condos.

While the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was a huge improvement over other government plans begun in the 1950s, unfortunately (even with Old Age Security added) it has never provided seniors with much more than subsistence support since it launched in 1966.

The immediate post-war generation was thus the first to enjoy the social benefit of government-provided retirement income. Anyone born after 1948 would have been covered by CPP from their first day on the job, and the ideal of “retirement” has unfolded in Canadian culture ever since.

You all know people who have kept an obvious countdown calendar of how many months, weeks or days left until they retire. (You might be one of those people yourself!) It is a goal, a destination, perhaps even a dream, and investment planners naturally push that perspective, along with their various financial instruments.

If retirement is the dream, however, then work becomes the nightmare. “I can’t wait till I retire from here” isn’t an attitude that endears you to younger colleagues. And yet, if work is a prison sentence, if you are “doing time” awaiting release, who wouldn’t want to retire?

But that’s exactly the wheel metaphor we need to change. What we should be looking forward to is being “re-treaded,” not “re-tired” — and finding something else to do.

Never before in any past society has retirement been the goal for the average person. Considering average life expectancies these days, early retirement could mean you will spend as much of your life playing shuffleboard as you did working!

Granted, in some professions involving physical labour, the body starts to wear out as you get older, but in others, the quality of your work actually improves with age. (I have long been told that academics, especially historians, only start to hit their stride after 55, for example.) It is not far fetched to say 70 is the new 50, for many people.

Further, you could argue that the whole idea of retirement embeds the discriminatory attitude of “ageism,” the prejudice that regards people to be worth less and less as they age. Ageism becomes a problem long before you hit 65 — too many people have trouble retraining for new professions, or even getting good jobs, after being laid off in their 40s or early 50s.

We try to overcome barriers to employment based on race, gender, orientation and ability — why are we still allowing employers to dismiss an applicant as “too old?”

I totally get why people feel they have to retire, because our society doesn’t present any other obvious alternative. I “retired” the moment I could, because I was tired of pushing a rock uphill, constantly opposed by a system that just wasn’t working with me anymore.

But I immediately started doing something else, working longer hours than ever as a contract instructor and a writer, and rediscovering what I loved so much about both. Seven years later, I wish I’d had the guts to leave sooner, despite the lack of benefits and job security, and embraced being “retreaded” instead of hanging on to be retired.

Right now, our world desperately needs older people to be retreaded, not retired. Seth Klein’s recent book, A Good War (about the mobilization of Canadian society during the Second World War), describes how we must rise to that same challenge again today, in order to confront a growing climate crisis that will soon make the pandemic look like a picnic.

We have about five years left to do this. We need to transform how we live together, to change everything we do — including how we work — into what a sustainable future requires. This isn’t the moment to plan 20 years, or even 10 years ahead — in your business, your institution, or in your career.

There isn’t enough time for younger people to gradually gain experience on the job, at the cost of ignoring or retiring the older workers who already have it. We need all hands on deck right now, however young or old, working together with every bit of wisdom and energy we have to keep the Canadian ship afloat in the approaching storm.

Peter Denton is an activist, writer and academic who’s just hitting his stride. His latest book, The End of Technology, is in press.