The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

5

The horrible idea the Germans had that ruined things for everybody

Where did retirement even come from? No purpose, no ikigai?

It doesn’t matter which way you go if you don’t know where you’re going.

Sure, we all have bad days at work. Bosses agitate, coworkers frustrate. But work gives us purpose, belonging, and direction. Retirement plucks us out of the spinning gears of the world and drops our withered bones off at the beach. Now you’re nowhere, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Ever again!

Why did we think this was a good idea?

Who came up with this plan?

The Germans.

Yes, it was their invention of retirement completely out of the blue in 1889 that established the concept for all of us. Retirement was meant to free up jobs for young people by paying those sixty-five years and older to do nothing till they died.

But there was one big difference between 1889 Germany and the world we live in today.

The average life span was sixty-seven years old.

“Those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state,” said Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Germany, in 1889. Given retirement age and average life span were two years apart, that was easy for him to say. Penicillin wasn’t discovered for another forty years!

Otto ended up setting an arbitrary world standard for retirement age at sixty-five. The number had no significance other than its proximity to the age people died. Other developed countries kept following suit in the years to follow, which brings us to today.

Harold Koenig is an expert on retirement. A table from his Purpose and Power in Retirement shows the percentage of men over age sixty-five still working by year:

1880 − 78%

1900 − 65%

1920 − 60%

1930 − 58%

1940 − 42%

1960 − 31%

1980 − 25%

2000 − 16%

Here is an excerpt from his history of retirement painted in his excellent book:

At first, retirement—especially forced retirement—was viewed negatively by a significant proportion of the American population. Some studies indicated that 50–60 percent of those over age sixty-five would continue working if retirement could be deferred . . . “Activity theory” argued that retirement was a violation of older persons’ need for social and occupational integration . . .

After World War II, older persons in America became more and more a generation separate from the rest of a society that did not value them or their contributions. Young adults, who in the past often lived, raised their families, and worked near their parents’ homes, were becoming increasingly mobile because of jobs that frequently took them to a different state or across the country. At the same time, older adults were becoming more financially secure because of pensions and entitlement programs. They were also living longer and having better health because of advances in medicine and healthier lifestyles. Because of increased finances and improved health, older adults began to rely less and less on children and other family members. It was into this “cultural vacuum,” says [author Marc] Freedman, that the leisure entrepreneurs stepped in to offer older adults their vision of the “golden years.”

The first inkling of such efforts were seen in 1951 when the Corning Corporation had a roundtable discussion in which a national marketing campaign was proposed to educate people over fifty about how to enjoy leisure. The strategy was to glamorize leisure and to make every older adult feel like he or she had a right to it. Insurance companies, deeply involved in the pension business, got into the act by mass advertisement of retirement preparation classes that encouraged separation from society and focused on consumption and self-preoccupation. This began the transformation of retirement as a time of rest, relaxation, and fun that every American would look forward to as the reward for a lifetime of hard labor . . . Efforts were made to counteract the principle that work had value in itself, arguing that the psychological and social needs met in the workplace could be fulfilled just as well outside of it . . .

On August 3, 1962, the cover story of Time magazine featured the rapid aging of Americans who had lots of time and money but no place in society . . . The article talked about how Del Webb’s Sun City and similar age-segregated housing developments that focused on leisure in Arizona and elsewhere were transforming America’s image of retirement into a time of self-absorption and fun . . . The results were stunning. In 1951, among men receiving Social Security benefits, 3 percent retired from work to pursue leisure; in 1963, 17 percent indicated that leisure was the primary reason for retiring from work; and by 1982, nearly 50 percent of men said they were retiring to pursue leisure.

While there were positive results for some older adults who took this path, it also led many into self-absorption and prejudice, tensions with younger people, boredom, and lack of a sense that they were contributing to society and to others’ lives.

Let’s remember three things:

Retirement is a new concept. It didn’t exist before the twentieth century anywhere in the world except Germany. It didn’t exist before the nineteenth century anywhere.

Retirement is a Western concept. It doesn’t exist in Okinawa or much of the developing world. Old people in those places don’t play golf every day. They contribute to their families and societies.

Retirement is a broken concept. It is based on three assumptions that aren’t true: that we enjoy doing nothing instead of being productive, that we can afford to live well while earning no money for decades, and that we can afford to pay others to earn no money for decades.