Can We “Unteach” Traditional Retirement? Maybe We Should.

Image by CoxinhaFotos from Pixabay

Quiz for you: Name two major industries that are ripe for disruption but remain rigidly unassailable.

If you guessed education and healthcare, you are spot on.

Both are yellow brick roads to rising costs and decreased value. Both are heavyweight political playgrounds where the needle just doesn’t get moved.

In his book “The Practice”, Seth Godin riffs on education, saying:

“– we’ve built an industrial solution to teaching in bulk” and “seduced ourselves into believing that the only thing that can be taught are easily measured hard skills. We shouldn’t be buying this.”

Seth’s point is that we can teach people to overcome fear, innovate, express our uniqueness but our entrenched system unteaches bravery, creativity, initiative.

Take healthcare.

I’ve written before about how ineffective our U.S. healthcare system is. 

It occurred to me, as I pondered Seth’s comments about education, that our healthcare system unteaches good health. As the general health of our population continue to cascade downward, where is the proactive teaching that will reverse the cascade?

Let’s not hold our breath that it will come from a system that is currently shoveling truckloads of money out the door as they struggle to prop up a system built on a broken model.

I doubt that any of the efforts to right the healthcare ship will change the fundamental “drug it or cut it out” foundation of the system.

We unteach preventive healthcare by only offering cure. Doesn’t it seem reasonable to unteach cure by teaching prevention? 

We’ve been taught that healthcare is a $35 copay experience available when thing skid off the tracks. The monoliths and the providers within them are not schooled to help us unlearn bad habits and take possession of our birthright of good health.

We shouldn’t be buying this either.

Is there a third?

I believe there is a third entrenched concept that is subject to, and deserving of disruption and unlearning. I won’t win any popularity contests amongst my cohort by saying it, but here it is – – –

Traditional retirement

I’m talking about the off-the-cliff, labor-to-leisure, vocation-to-vacation retirement. The total-rejection-of-work type of retirement. The park bench, beach, bingo, bridge, backgammon, and bocce ball type of retirement.

The one that continues to invade and entrench our psyche with the questionable theory that work is best avoided and that leisure is healthy.

The one that has enriched the financial services industry for a half-century while our population continues to stack more years of chronic illness onto the the post-career phase of life.

How do we “unlearn” retirement.

Start by accepting the fact that retirement- –

1. — is an unnatural act that doesn’t exist in nature and didn’t exist anywhere on the planet 150 years ago.
2. — was conceived by politicians, business owners, and unions for business and political purposes and not humanitarian.
3. — doesn’t exist in many cultures, some of which demonstrate the healthiest and longest living populations.
4. — goes against our basic biology which offers us only two choices – growth or decay.
5. — encourages people to abandon one of the key components of longevity – purposeful work.
6. — warehouses or puts out to pasture one of society’s most needed resources – wisdom.

The GenXers and Millennials are starting to figure it out.

They’ve witnessed the generations ahead of them burn themselves out trying to abide by the 20th-century linear life model:  Earn – Learn  – Adjourn – Die. 

They see plainly the futility of expecting to be able to support 30 years of doing little or nothing with 40 years of working and saving.

The average savings by generation tells it all:

Total household retirement savings among all workers is $93,000 (estimated median). Baby Boomer workers have the most retirement savings at $202,000, compared with Generation X ($107,000), Millennials ($68,000), and Generation Z ($26,000) (estimated medians). (Source: Medium article by Rocco Pendola, Never Retire)

Can we get our egos out of the way?

I know it’s difficult for hard-headed modern elders like you and me to accept advice from someone two generations back. I’m still dealing with having my 48-year-old daughter show me how to dead lift at Lifetime Fitness last week.

But, given the times and conditions, I believe they are onto something that we need and that will stick.

And I believe the financial planning industry will finally be forced to change their approach to planning with an increased focus on healthspan-oriented lifestyle design and less emphasis on work abandonment.

I sat through a webinar last week presented by ROL Advisors featuring a young financial planner, Jake Northrup, that I believe is a model for how financial planning is beginning to transform. This is not a commercial for Jake, but you can check him out at https://experienceyourwealth.com/

What are your thoughts?

Should we “unlearn” our education and healthcare systems and traditional retirement?  What else should we maybe be unlearning?  We’d love your feedback – leave a comment.