By Marianne Janack
Most discussions of retirement focus on the financial aspects of leaving the workforce: “How to save enough for retirement” or “How do you know if you have enough money for retirement?”
But this might not be the biggest problem that potential retirees face. The deeper issues of meaning, relevance and identity that retirement can bring to the fore are more significant to some workers.
Work has become central to the modern American identity, as journalist Derek Thompson bemoans in The Atlantic. And some theorists have argued that work shapes what we are. For most people, as business ethicist Al Gini argues, one’s work – which is usually also one’s job – means more than a paycheck. Work can structure our friendships, our understandings of ourselves and others, our ideas about free time, our forms of entertainment – indeed our lives.
I teach a philosophy course about the self, and I find that most of my students think of the problems of identity without thinking about how a job will make them into a particular kind of person. They think mostly about the prestige and pay that come with certain jobs, or about where jobs are located. But when we get to existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I often urge them to think about what it means to say, as the existentialists do, that “you are what you do.”
How you spend 40 years of your life, I tell them, for at least 40 hours each week – the time many people spend at their jobs – is not just a financial decision. And I have come to see that retirement isn’t just a financial decision, either, as I consider that next phase of my life.
Usefulness, tools and freedom
For Greek and Roman philosophers, leisure was more noble than work. The life of the craftsperson, artisan – or even that of the university professor or the lawyer – was to be avoided if wealth made that possible.
The good life was a life not driven by the necessity of producing goods or making money. Work, Aristotle thought, was an obstacle to the achievement of the particular forms of excellence characteristic of human life, like thought, contemplation and study – activities that express the particular character of human beings and are done for their own sake.
And so, one might surmise, retirement would be something that would allow people the kind of leisure that is essential to human excellence. But contemporary retirement does not seem to encourage leisure devoted to developing human excellence, partly because it follows a long period of making oneself into an object – something that is not free.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between the value of objects and of subjects by the idea of “use.” Objects are not free: They are meant to be used, like tools – their value is tied to their usefulness. But rational beings like humans, who are subjects, are more than their use value – they are valuable in their own right, unlike tools.
And yet, much of contemporary work culture encourages workers to think of themselves and their value in terms of their use value, a change that would have made both Kant and the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers wonder why people didn’t retire as soon as they could.
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‘What we do is what we are’
But as one of my colleagues said when I asked him about retirement: “If I’m not a college professor, then what am I?” Another friend, who retired at 59, told me that she does not like to describe herself as retired, even though she is. “Retired implies useless,” she said.
So retiring is not just giving up a way of making money; it is a deeply existential issue, one that challenges one’s idea of oneself, one’s place in the world, and one’s usefulness.
One might want to say, with Kant and the ancients, that those of us who have tangled up our identities with our jobs have made ourselves into tools, and we should throw off our shackles by retiring as soon as possible. And perhaps from the outside perspective, that’s true.
But from the participant perspective, it’s harder to resist the ways in which what we have done has made us what we are. Rather than worry about our finances, we should worry, as we think about retirement, more about what the good life for creatures like us – those who are now free from our jobs – should be.
Marianne Janack is John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy at Hamilton College.
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Kevin says
I retired at 59. After working my entire career in IT, walking away from the corporate world was priceless. While some seem to lose their “identity” I don’t regret my decision one bit. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed to anyone. While I fully understand the financial aspect of retiring, turning that alarm clock off, and spending time with family/friends, doing what you want, when you want is such a great feeling. I feel sorry for those that face the identity crisis. My job paid my bills, but certainly define me.
Jan Cullinane says
For the past 20 or so years, my second career has been speaking and writing books/articles about retirement (my first career was as a high school/college professor). A person I interviewed for one of my retirement books summed things up nicely. He said you should ask yourself these three questions when thinking about whether or not to retire:
Do I HAVE enough?
Have I HAD enough?
Do I HAVE ENOUGH TO DO?
Good advice!
Jan Cullinane
Laurel says
I think it may be harder for men as they often identify with their jobs. I did a good job, but I was always me, not just my work position.
What I learned as a bartender was how many men had only one retirement goal, and that was to play golf. Then, they found that golf got old quickly. I highly recommend everyone have different hobbies before retiring. Both hubby and I have multiple interests, which makes a big difference.
As to the actual retirement attitude, I remember one engineer stated that he would be gone before the paper clips hit the floor! When Witch Hazel got a new idea on how to pull something off, she was gone leaving her hair pins swirling in the air! When I went to tell my boss I was retiring, I said “I’m leaving.” He said ” Oh, where are you going?” as if I was going out for a stroll, and he was shocked when I clarified. I left my hair pins twirling in the air and never looked back.
The dude says
This city stands as a fine example of what happens when too many people with too much time on their hands, and too little to do, come together in large groups.