We need to retire the word retirement

A couple of friends of mine are retiring soon. Neither is the least bit sad about that. Or at least Linda wasn’t until she started hearing things like this:

“I don't see you as retired. I see you traveling and reading.”

“They are not a normal retired couple. They are very active.”

“Are you just going to binge-watch TV?”

“You are too young to retire.”

She’s still not sad about the decision to retire, but she is trying to figure out how it got such a negative connotation. “To me, it's an exciting new stage of life with endless possibilities to spend more time on things I love to do and find new interests.”

Look up the word retire in the dictionary and here’s what you’ll find. 1. To withdraw to a secluded place. 2. To go to bed. 3. To retreat, as in battle. 4. To give up one’s work, business, etc. especially because of age.

Roget’s Thesaurus is even worse. Retirement can be found under adverbs for seclusion, synonymous with abandon or forsake the world, lead a retired life, shut oneself up, live apart, drop out, give up. I can’t think of a single retired person who would claim those.

What do you get to do when you’re retired? Go see a superbloom of California poppies on a weekday without feeling guilty about leaving colleagues in the lurch.

It’s true that statistically speaking at least for men, retirement used to mean you only had a one or two more years to live. That’s changed. According to the Social Security Administration’s longevity calculator, a 66-year-old woman (the average retirement age) can expect another 20 years of life.

That’s a long time, even if time seems to compress as we get older.

Shortly before I retired four years ago, a friend sent me several advice columns on how to “survive” retirement. She’s fine now, but her first year was challenging. Her view of herself was very much tied to her career as a professor. Since then, she’s travelled the world, connected with family she rarely got to see, taken on responsibilities with a nonprofit organization and found new ways to define herself. She still doesn’t like the word “retirement.”

I appreciated her sending along the advice, but I was more than happy to leave the job I was in when I retired. They didn’t exactly say “don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” but I’m pretty sure a couple of people were thinking that. It wasn’t a toxic workplace, but it was dysfunctional, and I was not a good fit. It’s hard to respect people telling you what to do when they say things like “Her and me went shopping.” You don’t even have to be a grammar snob to not want to take writing advice from someone who talks like that.¹

In a way, it was my second retirement, coming five years after what I feared what might be the end of my work life. Like hundreds of other journalists, I had watched the steady cycle of layoffs and buyouts, escaping just barely. But when it was clear to me that things would only get worse, I and at least 50 of my colleagues opted for a buyout and left the newsroom over a period of a few months. At 61, I was old enough to wonder if I would ever find another job. Even so, I called it unemployment not retirement. And I got lucky, until things got turned upside down again.

Those extra work years gave me plenty of time to think about what I would do once I really wasn’t working for a living. Trust me. There’s plenty to do and a thousand different ways to make this new phase of life enjoyable, fulfilling, meaningful and even self-defining.

It helps, of course, to have a financial cushion, reasonably good health and no recent catastrophes where you live. But that’s true even if you’re still pulling down a paycheck.

“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” — Oscar Wilde

Take that retirement negators. Maybe we should just call retirement “better.”

1. I’ve made too many grammatical and spelling errors in my life to qualify for grammar snobbery, but I can thank my seventh grade teacher for making sure I never use possessive pronoun for the subject of a sentence. Also for knowing what possessive pronouns, subjects and verbs are if not curing me of writing in fragments. Yes, I can diagram sentences!