Retiring Ourselves to Death

The end of work might leave us directionless. How can we avoid it?

This is a story I heard a while ago from a source I can’t remember: an old man, somewhere around eighty, was working at the same mechanic shop he’d been at for decades. He wasn’t quite agile enough to do any hard manual labor anymore, but he stuck around, putting in maybe twenty hours a week. He still had a sharp mind for diagnostics and could tell you just what was wrong with nearly any car that came in the shop—he wasn’t just a burden by any means.

Still, the younger guys didn’t understand why he kept coming in. He was financially secure, still had his wife around, and all in all seemed capable of just leaving for a calm retirement. When they finally asked him why he stuck around for so long, he said, “I can’t tell you how many of my friends retired and dropped dead in a month.”

Photo by Oli Woodman on Unsplash

Just about anyone working in the trades can tell you that this story isn’t unique. Working yourself to death is a real risk, but retiring yourself to death can be just as frightening. Retirement might be a major goal for life, but it’s also one of the biggest and most difficult changes that we can experience. What is it that can make retirement so hard to survive?

Work, for many people, is the clearest source of purpose in life. I’ve had so many friends who found themselves reaching the lowest points of their lives after losing a job. (I myself faced one of the hardest times in my life when I briefly left college and lost my job soon after.) Many of them found themselves renewed and energetic once they returned to work. Work gives us a sense of direction: that simple reason to get out of bed in the morning can absolutely change how you approach everything in life.

Now, work clearly offers this sense of purpose and direction. We might think that replacing it with another source might be enough: plenty of people enter retirement thinking they’ll pursue a new hobby or travel or finally read all the books they hoped to get to. These might seem like appropriate sources of purpose—and they certainly are worthwhile pursuits.

But work isn’t so easily replaced. We are defined by work. By devoting yourself to a career, it comes to define you. Losing it means losing a part of yourself.

Work, more than just an activity or a job, becomes a new sort of space in your life. For many people, work is a place to lay down roots. It’s a place to justify your life and define who you’re meant to be. Talking about it as simply a small part of your life or something that comes and goes is missing just how much gravity work has in our lives, for better or for worse.

What happens if work is the only place you lay your roots? When work is just one small part of life, it’s easy to rip it up and start anew—it’s not as though a teenage boy has to redefine himself after he quits his landscaping job. But for many people, work and home are the only two significant spaces in life. In the world of manual labor where these stories are so common, it’s often the central space in life. A man becomes a mechanic or a welder in a unique way—leaving that kind of work means leaving a part of yourself behind. Of course, this isn’t reserved to manual labor at all: leaving any field is hard if you’ve come to appreciate it for its own sake.

Of course, work isn’t the only place we lay our roots. We find a place at home as well—one that defines us just as much. But even home life can be unstable. Retirement might coincide with other changes or losses at home. Many people who work so far beyond the expected retirement age do so because they’re afraid there’s nothing stable at home.

Sociologists describe a place of belonging outside work and home as a third space. Most people have some sense of a place at work and home (even if it might be lacking), but many of the old third spaces are vanishing. Communities like churches or social clubs offered a sense of belonging somewhere outside the limits of work or home. Increasingly, we’re seeing these take a smaller role in people’s lives. The neighborhood pub, the church social hall—these were a constant and reliable source of meaning that have become hard to find.

These places offer a different way to define yourself, one outside of work and the home. You’re defined by your family and the things that you do, but also the neighborhood you’re a part of, the history you come from, or the projects you’ve devoted yourself to. Defining yourself by just one part of life can be difficult no matter how worthwhile it is.

The home can be isolating even if you cherish it. If it’s the only place in your life, it can feel like a restriction more than a safe haven. When we’re stuck with nowhere consistent other than work and home, it’s hard not to feel trapped.

There’s no simple way to find what your third space should be. The loss of this sense of local community is something larger than us. Often, we’re left to simply look for whatever stability we can find while the rest of the world seems so incredibly unstable.

What can we do to start rebuilding these spaces away from home and work? For one, we need to have the courage to break out of our everyday routine. If we’re trapped in a permanent back-and-forth between work with no other source of consistency, we’re bound to feel trapped sometimes. Perhaps more than anything, we want a sense of responsibility—we want to know that there is somewhere in the world that depends on us. There’s no greater way to find this than to become the change you want to see. If you become the person trying to build community, strengthen relationships, and create something to share with other people, that’s as profound of a sense of responsibility as you can hope for.

This is not a simple project. I wrote a piece in The Savage Collective recently discussing the struggle to rebuild local identity after we’ve lost this wider cultural identity. But we as humans are certainly not meant to live in just one space, nor even two. We’re meant to become part of something much larger than ourselves, something that’s not contained in just four walls.

If we want retirement to be purposeful, it must be an opportunity for growth. There’s an unavoidable loss associated with the end of work, but there’s also a chance to choose the person you want to be.