Table Of ContentRETIREMENT DISCONTENTS
AND ITS
RETIREMENT DISCONTENTS
AND ITS
Why We Won’t Stop Working, Even If We Can
Michelle Pannor Silver
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support for this book provided by
Publisher’s Circle member Stephen Case.
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Copyright © 2018 Michelle Pannor Silver
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54792-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Silver, Michelle Pannor, author.
Title: Retirement and its discontents : why we won’t stop working, even if we can / Michelle Pannor
Silver.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018000805 (print) | LCCN 2018012239 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231547925 (e-book) |
ISBN 9780231188562 (cloth : acid-free paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Retirement—Social aspects. | Retirement—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC HQ1062 (e-book) | LCC HQ1062 .S5375 2018 (print) | DDC 306.6/8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000805
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-
[email protected].
Cover design: Lisa Hamm
Cover image: Shutterstock
Retirement
re·tire·ment
ri-ˈtī(ə)rmənt/
noun
1.
the period of one’s life after leaving one’s job, profession, career, or life’s
work permanently, usually because of age.
2.
the action or fact of ceasing to play a sport competitively.
3.
a pension or other income on which a retired person lives.
4.
the act of withdrawal of something from service or use (such as removal of
military force, according to plan).
5.
seclusion.
Contents
Preface
1 Introduction
2 Renegade Retirement and the Greedy Institution:
The Doctors
3 Refined Retirement and Fulfillment Employment:
The CEOs
4 Early Retirement and Resilience:
The Elite Athletes
5 Late Retirement and Working in Place:
The Professors
6 Undefined Retirement and the Retirement Mystique:
The Homemakers
7 Conclusion
Appendix A. Methodological Overview
Appendix B. Interview Guide
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
Preface
F
or many people, retirement is a much-awaited and enjoyable time in life.
This book is not about those people. Some people retire because of personal
health issues or to attend to caregiving obligations, and some suffer serious
health issues shortly after they retire. Other people struggle in retirement
because of financial obligations or a lack of retirement savings. This book is
also not about those people.
This book is about retirees who struggle with feelings of discontentment in
their retirement because their personal and work identities are intertwined.
Every retiree I interviewed dealt with one of life’s biggest challenges in a
different way, depending on many factors, including their expectations about
retirement and aging, how they prioritized work throughout their adult lives,
how they dealt with earlier transitions in life, and what their work had meant
to them. In many cases, the qualities that made them successful in their
preretirement work were closely linked to the ways they experienced
retirement.
This book is named for Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents,
which focuses on the contrast between an individual’s quest for freedom and
societal norms that restrict primitive instincts. While Civilization and Its
Discontents is about a generalizable discontentment that emerges from social
norms that limit our possibilities for satisfaction, Retirement and Its
Discontents is about the ways that the social construct of retirement can
stymie potential workforce contributions. The discontentment associated with
retirement presented in this book is not a sentiment that can be generalized.
Yet we can ask: if even these highly privileged individuals suffered, how can
others who also identify closely with their work identity, but who have fewer
economic resources, less status, or potential support, be expected to make a
seamless transition to retirement? The experiences shared through this book
illustrate how retirement can lead to what Émile Durkheim termed
“anomie”—a situation whereby relatively no moral guidance is provided. In
retirement, some individuals lose their source and sense of identity.
On a personal note, I am not and never have been retired. My journey into
studying retirement began when I closed the doors to my father’s practice for
the last time almost twenty years ago. After struggling with dementia in his
late 70s, there came a point at which my father could no longer see patients.
As I shredded decades of files, I lamented the loss of a career that had been
meaningful to his patients and a core source of my father’s identity for more
than half a century. He had no retirement party, and to this day, I’m not really
sure if he ever completely realized what had transpired. Because of the
dementia, my father was unable to fully comprehend his retirement. His
emphasis on the importance of work and his retirement inspired my interest
in the study of retirement.
For some people, retirement is a boring or sad topic, associated with
endings. For me, retirement is a concept that has been an endless source of
interest. Retirement is an important transition that stirs up questions about
how we set priorities, create structure, and find meaning in life. For many
people, retirement is supposed to be the ultimate goal and reward after a
lifetime of work. Yet for some, it can be incredibly disappointing, frustrating,
intimidating, and even more overwhelming than starting a career.
Shortly after my father’s practice closed, I started working on my doctoral
dissertation. I developed econometric models of retirement transitions to
examine the relationship between preretirement occupations and several
measures of health outcomes. I became interested along the way in the
variation among definitions of retirement found across different research
studies. Some researchers define being retired as having no working hours
after years of paid employment, whereas others allow for the possibility of a
partial retirement and others rely on self-reported measures, which may or
may not include people who continue to work in some capacity. This led me
to ask many questions: How did respondents define retirement? Why did they
consider themselves retired? What was being retired like? What were their
perceptions of retirement? How did the type of work they did affect the way
they experienced retirement?
I secured my first opportunity to examine perceptions about retirement
after receiving a grant to study a group of women who self-identified as being
“retired.” Among this diverse group of women, there was a subset who self-
identified as retired homemakers who would defy just about any economist’s
definition of retirement because many had never worked for pay in their life.
I began my journey into researching retirement perceptions with this group of
retirees, but they are the last group I discuss in this book. I feature these
retirees last because they are the biggest anomaly when compared with any of
the other groups of people I interviewed. Unlike the others, these
homemakers received no financial compensation and rarely received
recognition for their work. Their experiences, however, make a valuable
contribution to society and to our understanding of what it means to retire.
They also enable us to examine how earlier life opportunities can influence a
person’s reaction to the potential challenges retirement can pose.
My next opportunity to examine perceptions of retirement came when I
was fortuitously connected with the head of a faculty development committee
from one of the largest departments of medicine in North America who had
been tasked with figuring out how to negotiate the retirement transitions for
an important group of doctors. Over the course of several years, I was invited
to participate in committee meetings, new-faculty orientations, training
sessions, and even retirement parties. Although my initial work was focused
on working academic physicians’ perceptions about retirement, it fostered
connections with the retired doctors who I then interviewed for this book.
One day, while presenting my research on retirement from academic
medicine, a gentleman from the audience approached me to ask why I hadn’t
talked with chief executive officers (CEOs) about their retirement transitions.
Admittedly, I first thought the question was odd. In my mind, wealthy senior
executives exemplified media portrayals of the happy retiree and I was
concerned that he had missed the point of my talk. I was also entirely unsure
of how in the world I would locate and convince retired CEOs to agree to an
interview. But once he identified himself as a retired CEO and explained how
several of the concerns I articulated had resonated with him, I was on my way
to developing the study that forms the basis for chapter 3.
I also interviewed professors, a group close to my heart given my own
professional interests. In many ways, the retirement experiences and
perceptions shared by the professors I interviewed surprised me the most. I
likely was so entrenched in trying to establish my career that I had failed to
consider what things might be like on the other end of what sometimes feels
like a long and dark academic tunnel. For the most part, their experiences
contrasted with those of the busy CEOs who were constantly moving up and
changing jobs, or the doctors who were dealing with life-and-death situations.
Many of the professors, however, held a similar distaste for retirement, and
these individuals shed new light on what it means to hold on tightly to our
