CLOCKED IN. CLOCKED OUT

By Hilary Woods

I have a very good friend who was a stockbroker.  He made a lot of money.  His wife begged him to retire so that they could spend more time together.  So he did, but then he couldn’t.  

Instead he set up a new wealth management company and finds Angel Investors for new start ups.  He still gets up to walk the dog before taking the train into London (as he did when he was ‘retired’) and he still loves to grow vegetables in his plot at home;  but he just couldn’t ‘retire’.

When we were talking recently, I realised that what he missed certainly wasn’t the commute or administrative details of the job.  What he missed was the sense of empowerment he felt when doing, at work, what he was very good at doing.  

This in contrast to the golf he played somewhat badly and the cacophonic (if such a word exists) saxophone lessons he had taken up when he ‘retired’. 

He also missed having somewhere to be, people to talk to and problems to solve. In short, he missed having a purpose.

It turns out he's far from alone.

We've long treated retirement as the finishing line. Work hard, collect the watch and disappear into a life of cardigans, slippers and the occasional cruise to keep you lively. Lovely for some, but an increasing number of people are discovering they're not quite ready to stop.

And it's not simply about the money.

Research suggests that well over 60% of people returning to work after retirement do so to stay mentally active, while around a third say they simply missed having a reason to get up in the morning and go somewhere that they felt still mattered.

The Centre for Ageing Better has argued for years that boredom, loneliness and a loss of purpose are often just as powerful as financial pressures.

Experience, after all, doesn't retire.

You can't download perspective or teach calm judgement on a training course. They come from years of getting things right, occasionally getting them spectacularly wrong, and learning the difference.

Perhaps that's why employers are beginning to realise what quietly walks out of the door when experienced people retire.

I rather like the idea of this “Great Unretirement’. 

Because Retirement, it seems, isn't the end of the story, but a potentially new and interesting chapter.

Hilary Woods is Co-founder and Strategy and Insight Director at A3A