You’ll have to excuse us those of us in the middle-age-plus
population. We’re all a little collectively confused right now. It seems that just recently we were tossing
six bucks in the ticket window to go inside and watch Winona Ryder and friends
face up to the challenges of adulthood in Reality Bites, a tale of rich-kid
college goof-offs now pitted against the isolation of making choices and
responsibly fending for themselves, and a young woman’s shock of realizing how
mentally unprepared she was.
No sooner have many of us somehow survived that traumatic
blast, than we’re pitted against this next unwelcome frontier known as “retirement”. It’s a word uncommon to our cool, young
Generation-X lexicon, one reserved for the more dignified, clueless aged, like “arthritis”,
“shuffleboard”, or “The Lawrence Welk Show”.
But according to economists, sociologists and even some
numerologists, this is one of those things categorically arrived at and dealt
with in life, not like taxes and what the next generation prefers to refer to
as “becoming unalived”.
The real matter for most of us U.S. citizens just trying
to affordably exist through the end of the week at our tender middle-ages really
is, what’s our plan to continuously afford to be able to do so..? For so many of us, it’s just not about “hanging
it up”. Of course, if you’re a
pension-equipped civil service worker or teacher with forty years of daily work
behind you, you’re on the retirement clock, and after a grueling several
decades, you’ve earned your departure.
For many, that alone is traumatic, and for many even equipped
financially with presumably enough money to “outlive their lives”, many of
these people have only a week or two of blessed commemoration before they can
start beginning to fear the financial scare of outliving their life’s assets in
the next five years.
It’s those very folks that will accept only a brief
sabbatical before returning somehow to a paying job of some sort, whether advanced
and industrial or small and menial. Many will not do so in the pursuit of their
life’s longtime wants, hopes and dreams.
They’ll do it to pay the rent.
The word retirement bears a definition, but not
the connotation it once did, the universal one we as teenagers long associated
with the effective image of that white-maned portly chap, standing in front of
his two-story, twelve-room, immaculately white-decked mansion on a gorgeous
southern field against a majestic sunset in that financial brokerage commercial
in the middle of CBS NFL Sunday. That
was our 1980s, and a good many folks of that white-maned chap’s age back then
were the first to correct any misapprehensions about the fact that under the Reagan
Administration, what was then the imposed Mandatory Retirement meant a sparse
fixed income and an occasional dinner of the cheapest shelf pet food. The
strength emerging at senior age back then was in refusing to stand down one’s
pride in enduring this new strip of one’s so-called dignity, one now almost
fully relinquished. One of those folks
might have even been the actor playing that fictional guy in the commercial. The agency producing the spot probably got
the faux mansion-front on loan from some movie studio.
Even those who proudly in discussion, upon “what do you
do.?”, will offer “Oh, I’m retired”, are not likely “comfortable” for life. There is a tidal wave of clarity abundance
over the fact that with age comes invariable health challenges, need for
conventional medical attention, unmeetable costs, minimal healthcare on absolutely
any level and the realization that if you are not the President of the U.S.
with trillions in a backlife of personal wealth, you can forget about the
freedom to be treated to a full analytic physical exam by twenty-two physicians,
even in two lifetimes. Need we remember
that around the time of the Obamacare laws, a good many citizens of this
country opted to face the tax burden and live uninsured, due to costs, and in
many cases, due to unemployment.
Depending upon how your last four decades have gone since
turning legal age, this so-called “retirement” thing may not be something you’re
not only not ready to embrace, but not interested in actually
embracing. Burgers and hot dogs on the
grill on July 4th are a trendy, All-American, succulent thing. But with all due respect, maybe not everyone
has an appetite for those.
In the same vein, not everyone is necessarily willing or
ready, for more than just immediate financial reasons (but primarily those..)
to walk off the treadmill of their daily lives and jobs and just “retire”. For many, more than we realize, our jobs,
these so-called yolks, these harnesses we complainably bear for so long in our
daily lives, are in fact the nucleus of our lives. While my own “X” generation was told in the
1980s that the old paradigm of going to work for one employer for two or three
decades or more is now thoroughly extinct, there is, among this very generation
a considerable body of people who have, almost unbeknownst to themselves, found
themselves gratefully employed by the same employer, complaints, warts and all,
for decades, amidst life changes, loss, relationships, endeavor, survival and visibility
of the sixty-yard line. Throughout it
all, not a day of work missed, not a deadline met late, and not even every
vacation day or sick day claimed. And
they’ve no intention of relinquishing their responsibility, if their employer
is willing to continue to hold them in their trust.
These are not folks, mind you, of immense salary of any
sort. If there’s one unattractive factor
leading an employee to the sack heap, it’s an overpriced salary. If one’s salary
is truly far overpriced in the face of some company’s all-new economic design,
then the sack is kind of a foregone conclusion.
But if that employee is one whose stipend is actually scalable enough to
meet that company’s ledger, and the work output continuously reliable, effective
and well-received enough to help turn profit and generate positive outward
image for the company, almost no employer in this day and age is going to pass
that up.
The fact is, the “X” generation is likely the first to
embody a kind of agelessness, a type not really known to the one-time
draft-protest and Vietnam-vet baby-boomers, the war-veteran, government-mortgaged,
homeowning grandparents we knew as white-haired Dinah Shore-watchers, or even
ones a few years younger, who came up during the Great Depression and read the
earliest Marvel Comics and attended CCNY in the 1950s. All those folks lived more than one action-packed,
death-defying life before we even knew them, and between war service, jobs in
what was then high-paying U.S. industry and solid investments cooked in the go-go
1980s, they had no financial qualms about easing on down the road. Many of us aimless college moneyspenders of
the 80s didn’t live such full lives.
Some of us emerged from those concealing campus book forests to a world
of barren cost, debt and unemployment, and simply clawed onto what we could
when we could. And now, decades later,
here we are, things gratefully for the moment okay, maybe for the first time
ever. And now we’re told, we’ve got to plan
on giving it all up.
Those of us who have not made too many bad choices ever
since Reagan left the White House, those of us who have maintained much of our
physical and mental well-being, have preserved a base amount of whatever we’ve
earned and managed to squirrel away and invest moderately since Millenium’s end
may not be ready to leave a more enjoyable resort to which we’ve only in our
mind just arrived: A liveable life. One
that begins our day with the challenge of having to get up, work out, change
into our outfits, check our e-mail for the day’s gripes ahead, and board the
train into the office for our predictable stack of responsibilities, a relay
race that awards us that invisible trophy each day. The challenge ahead for this generation is
largely not that of racing toward the finish line, but recognizing the
endorphin boost and creation owed directly to that race. It’s not just income,
albeit a huge overriding factor And
those who have chided us long ago about defining yourself by what you do for a
living just might want to re-consider the definitions of that.
One thing I recall as a kid that’s gone away almost
entirely is a term used to define “what you do”. People didn’t call it a “job”, or “what you
do for a living”. They called it your occupation. That’s really a beautiful term. There’s lots of new, soft terms for unpleasant
realities, like “unalived”. Maybe it’s
time to reboot this old and very respectable term for “what you do”. Because much in the way You Are What You Eat,
the truth is, whether you know it or not, by inner values, what you do is in
fact who and what you are. Be it a shirt folder, a grocery bagger, a broadcast
producer, an office administrator, or a ticket clerk, your excellence in
performance defines you, and your embrace of that task helps you to be the best
you are. There is often no one prouder
than a life-long stay-at-home parent.
There’s no such thing as “done”. If anything, this
generation is ready. Let’s try and stay that way. This soap-opera we’re living has long to go. We’re not about to be written out.
Noah F.
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