Keep Working? Or Retire? Consider the Middle Road.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

Where in the handbook of life (you have one, don’t you?)  does it say that career and work have to end by a certain age?

If you do find your handbook, dust it off and look at the publish date.  If your copy is an heirloom from pre-FDR (and the old, non-green New Deal), there isn’t likely to be much said about not working.  The authors from that time pretty much worked until they couldn’t.

In fact, 150 years ago retirement was virtually non-existent.

Maybe we were smarter then and recognized that retirement is an unnatural act and doesn’t happen in nature.  We’re the only species smart enough (???) to come up with the concept of intentionally going backward (look up the definition of retire) and planning it into our lives.

I grew up in rural, agricultural Wyoming where, for most, retirement started a couple of days before the embalming.  My uncles died farming until they couldn’t, physically.  My dad worked until he couldn’t, physically.  That was a big part of the life handbook in my early world.

If you just dusted off a 2.0 version of the life handbook, you’ll find a hard 90-degree turn happened along the way between versions.  You’re not supposed to work after –  well, it’s a moving target.  Thanks to FDR and his corporate and union cronies, age 65 remains the number embedded in most heads.  But it shifts around.  Some like 59, some like 62.  There’s even a F-I-R-E (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, popular among millennials, that has participants staking claims for retirement before 40.

Well, I had a  conversation this week with a  gentleman who had just experienced an unplanned career inflection point that is happening to a lot of folks these days.

A 68 ½-year-old senior exec in supply chain management, he was unceremoniously terminated via telephone with two hours notice – totally blindsided following fourteen years of exemplary performance as a Senior VP with nary a nick on his performance reviews.

You’ve heard the drill:  your “position has been eliminated” as part of a restructuring.

He didn’t buy it and later confirmed his suspicion that his job was still there but now filled with a younger, less expensive understudy.

Well, Frank (not his real name) is in the second of the four stages any of us would go through dealing with this sort of ego-altering groin kick:

• Panic
• Anger
• Acceptance
• Seizing Opportunity.

Frank skipped panic, which is understandable in his case.  He proudly informed me that he had exceeded his goal of seven figures in retirement funds several years prior.  Plus, he and his wife are debt free, no mortgage, kids launched.  His wife (we’ll call her Sara) still works 50+ hours a week in a management role in (I’m not kidding) supply-chain/materials management. (Can you imagine the mealtime conversations?  Do you see possibilities for “seizing opportunity” here?)

But Frank has a decades-long fixation on working until he is seventy.  He admits to being a bit anal about it and it still angers him up – how dare his employer ignore this and kick him out 18 months short of his goal?

It didn’t help that, just prior to this happening, he had two experiences that had him questioning the wisdom of not working.

One was his fiftieth high-school reunion where he observed once-vibrant classmates expressing boredom in retirement and sporting 50” waistlines.

The other, his neighbor, who retired at 59 and is relentless in reminding Frank that he is beyond retirement age and should be taking it easy while admitting that his days are pretty much made up of caring for his lawn – and who-knows-what in the winter.

Frank’s self-inflicted dilemma is simple.  He wants to re-enter the job market so he can hit his work-until-retirement goal of 70.

LOL!

Before I stick too hard to my guns, let me do a quick poll – is there an executive out there that could use a $200,000/year, 69-year old materials management exec full-time for 18 months?

I thought so – crickets!!

So, it’s fork-in-the-road-decision-time for Frank:  work – no work.

But wait.  Is there a middle-road?

Another senior exec was just referred to me who I noticed had just changed his LinkedIn profile title to “semi-retired”.

I’m anxious for that conversation because that is a middle-road concept that makes sense.

How about that idea, Frank?

I suggested to Frank that maybe he should give some thought to a “lifetime, lifestyle business” where he could take his exceptional experience and skill set and put it to work doing:

What he wants to do

When he wants to do it

Where he wants to do it

I took it a step further and told him I could envision “Frank and Sara Supply Chain Management Consulting, LLC”. Charge a boatload for it, do it when you feel like it for clients that you like, and pick clients at sites that you’d like to visit (i.e. work/vacation combo).

There was extended silence on the other end.

I have a hunch that our next conversation, if we have one, may have a different tone to it.

I’ll stick my neck out and say that, especially amongst the Boomers, that semi-retirement or unretirement will soon become the new prestige.

It’s an unfortunate reality that re-entering the job market post-60 in a self-directed job search is very difficult.  There’s a general guideline that career coaches and experienced recruiters will invoke when counseling a job seeker in that age range:  plan on one month for every $10k in salary to secure your next position if conducting your own, self-directed search.

That’s a pretty freaky thought for a $300,000/year exec. It’s even freakier for a stay-at-home spouse/partner who would have to tolerate guaranteed mood swings and confidence lapses.

Working with a qualified career transition coaching organization can significantly reduce that span and smooth out the emotional swings.

Ageism, as blatantly demonstrated in Frank’s case, is rampant.

If there is a positive impact of ageism, it would be that it shakes loose the rigid thinking that says end-of-work is expected and entitled and that one is a defective anomaly if they don’t stop working by a certain age.

I’ll wrap by borrowing from my 12/18/17 post “Work Yourself to Death? Not a bad idea!”

It’s a critical fork-in-the-road time of life.  One road gives in to the “social self” that has indoctrinated us into an artificial age-related culture and encourages us to remain a part of the crowd and stay-the-course to a landing called retirement.

The other road acknowledges a long-suppressed “essential self” that is insensitive to age and puts us on a trail that can enable a new takeoff (semi-retirement?) rather than a landing.  Only this time the takeoff is launched through a re-discovery and resurrection of our deepest dreams and desires but applied using our deepest talents and acquired skills.

Warning!

The second fork may mean you will, willingly, work yourself to (until) death.

Second warning!

You may:

• • Live longer
  • Live healthier 
  • Change the world in some positive way

I’m betting on Frank to take the second – or middle – road.