By J. Michael Willard
It is damned difficult to die these days. Sure, you can throw yourself in front of a 16-wheeler, but that's messy and not terribly satisfying, much less economical for those left behind.
The fact is that our children -- and mine range in age from 8 to 38 -- have a fairly good chance of living to age 90 or 100, what with cures being found for many maladies and the ability to switch out body organs as if they were automobile radiator hoses.
What does this have to do with the workforce? It has everything to do with how we of the yellow leaf generation -- those of us over 60 -- are viewed, and how this impacts those taking baby steps up the career ladder.
While it is becoming more difficult to die, it is also becoming more difficult to survive professionally. A person over 60 is a target for redundancy. The 30-year-old in the cubicle around the corner is eyeing your spacious corner office with a view.
The youngster on your heels is not necessarily smarter and certainly less experienced than you, the older worker. However, he is perceived to have more energy, more drive, and the ability to adapt better to new technologies in the information age.
While this perception might or might not be true, it is reality. We live in reality.
But you can't retire. You still have a hefty mortgage, first and second family responsibilities, and alimony payments that would feed a medium-sized village in Botswana.
Plus, actuarial charts suggest you have a better-than-even chance of living another 20 years.
What to do? I wrote an entire book about it called "The Portfolio Bubble: Surviving Professionally at 60."
However, this column is about the the increasing trend of older workers, and not necessarily a how-to guide.
Retirement is an invention of the late 19th century. Its use is a sliver in the time compendium. It is one star that has burned brightly for 150 years -- give or take a few -- and is losing its luster. Other social factors are fast making it an antique concept.
This is not bad, merely a certainty with which we must deal.
It implies that with a little luck and a moderately healthy lifestyle, we will live to bounce a great-grandson on our knee in the evening and report for some sort of work the next morning.
In the not-to-distant future, this will be the rule rather than the exception. It will be something we become conditioned to want to do and not something we have to do.
But we are not there yet ... not even close.
The phenomenon has out-raced the structural fabric of how we live and work. Most rules of modern societies have conditioned us to work until we are 60 or 65 and then retire to Sun City.
However, for every professional I know who can choose to retire or not to retire, I know 10 for whom retirement is either not an option or is a depressing one. Their Sun City dream is raging with thunderstorms.
Being financially unready for retirement is only part of the equation. Many professionals simply don't aspire to retire.
My friend Lynn in Houston retired a year ago from a large oil company at age 60 having accumulated $3 million in stock through the company's investment program. The same year, she ran the Houston Marathon.
For folks like Lynn who are full of life, retirement is a drag, and she was shortly back to work as a consultant. She didn't need the money. She needed the reward of simply working productively.
However, the problem presented is not merely one of individual desires, but one that is being forced on us by the happy thought that we will be visiting planet earth longer than the generations that have gone before us.
But it is a problem, and a pressing one.
How do we address it? It begins with thinking -- not about society as a whole, but about groups of people, even individuals. It begins with the realization that one size does not fit all.
In my view, terms such as "retirement" and "pensioner" should be tossed on the garbage heap. We should not merely raise the age for obtaining Social Security and pension checks, but we should more adequately base such programs on individual options.
We should not in any way punish individuals for wanting not to retire by restricting what rewards they have worked long and hard to obtain; and, in most cases, have actually purchased through their taxes.
Companies should be encouraged to take a second look at older workers; and, in fact, age discrimination laws should be strengthened to make it extremely difficult for a qualified worker to be sacked merely because he is older and is more expensive. Great Britain has taken some steps toward this.
What's more, the great defenders of the older individual -- in the United States, the American Association of Retired Persons -- should wake up and realize that their mission has drastically changed.
It is not about retirement, or even about working. It is about living.
All the laws and social re-engineering, however, will not succeed if there is not a change in attitude toward the older worker, a realization that experience counts and that energy and drive are not group descriptors but are assets of individuals, old or young.
The great architect Frank Lloyd Wright did his best work after age 70, famed heart surgeon Michael DeBakey operated into his 90s, and Col. Harlan Sanders started his fried chicken empire after becoming a pensioner.
Oh, and my mother, Mary Willard, worked as a practical nurse well into her late 70s, drove a jet ski when she was 75, and at 86 continues her voluntary unpaid work at a pace that would put most youngsters to shame.
J. Michael Willard is a former Charleston, N.C., businessman who has lived and worked in Eastern Europe for 13 years. He is chairman of Willard, an advertising and public relations company with offices in Moscow, Kiev and Istanbul. He is a former press secretary for Sen. Robert Byrd.
Source: Charleston Daily Mail. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. Powered by Yellowbrix.
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