As Labor Day approaches, it’s worth thinking about something that is inevitably a phase of everyone’s life: retirement. Discussions about retirement these days often devolve into talk about the pending crisis of Social Security. That’s an important question, of course, but shifting what should be a reflection of the years of life after work into worries about the Social Security system’s economic health masks a deeper issue.
Teresa Ghilarducci’s new book, Work, Retire, Repeat, examines American assumptions about retirement from the perspective of people who are retiring. Her views are not encouraging: she believes we face the resurgence of a phenomenon many thought the New Deal had banished: elder poverty.
I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of her arguments. Such debates often turn on binary partisan assumptions: should we have a stronger welfare state with a broader social safety net or a trimmed-back one where individual responsibility prevails? Today’s political polarization often refuses to admit both sides have something to offer in the debate. I want to focus instead on several things that Catholic social thought can contribute to the debate.
Is there a “right to retire?” Catholicism would say “yes,” because man does not live on work alone. But Ghilarducci – who writes as an economist looking at the structure of mainstream American retirement arrangements – argues that certain American cultural assumptions question the idea that a person should have time at the end of life free from labor.
To begin with, there’s the utilitarian notion that free time is idling and wasted. The Puritan Work Ethic taught that idle hands are the devil’s workshop and that prosperous industriousness is proof of Divine approval. We see the effects of this attitude when people feel a need to make excuses for retiring, especially retiring “early.”
But for many Americans, their “investment” in work may even run deeper. Derek Thompson’s notion of “workism” – that for many people work has changed from a way of making a living to a life-defining identity – suggests that stopping work calls one’s self-understanding into question.
And various current factors that contribute to keeping people in or returning them to the workforce after they “retire” – like inadequate retirement income or the deferral of claiming Social Security to accrue higher monthly benefits – send a social message: “Working longer is good.”
In light of those factors, how should we think of retirement? Is retirement a positive good, a legitimate and worthy stage of life? Or is it seen as a necessary evil, imposed by declining vigor and growing infirmity? Implicit in this perspective is the corollary that, with vim and vigor, we might continue working for “seventy years – or eighty for those who are strong.” (Psalm 90:10)
According to the wisdom of Ecclesiastes (3:2-8) about there being “a time for every matter under heaven,” it seems rather that we need to recover an awareness that life’s “retirement” phase is a legitimate and intrinsically good stage. It is not merely the unfortunate consequence of the vicissitudes of age.
Just as there is a time to be an infant, a time to be a child, a time to be a teenager or young adult, there is a time for working and a time to rest from working. Maturity should not be seen as the capacity to work, the waning of which somehow represents a loss of adulthood, identity, or independence. Such notions reduce human beings to mere producers and consumers.
A number of TCT authors cite Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture as an intellectual basis for the much sought after “work-life balance.” As Pieper (and the Judeo-Christian tradition generally) see it, leisure (Lat. otium as opposed to ne-gotium) is not idleness, which is something entirely different. Properly understood, leisure is the necessary precondition for human beings to devote themselves to deeper things and eternal verities.
Which leads us to the question of the eternal.
Retirement is usually the last phase of a person’s life and, as such, time to reckon with eternal verities is ever more precious even as it grows ever more limited. As Ghilarducci reminds us, retirement policymaking is often driven by economics, e.g., the “right” proportion of working years to retired years. But shifting those proportions in favor of work necessarily subtracts from retired years.
As she notes, “fixing” the problem of underfunded pensions by urging people to work longer simply shortens the time they’ll collect before they die. And death is the pink elephant in the room.
“It is appointed for men once to die” (Hebrews 9:27), albeit at an hour unknown. A society that does not want to talk about death and feigns agnosticism about its decisive significance will rather entertain illusions of perennial youth than see the fixed and few sands left in the hourglass. It will keep a polite silence about the foolishness of trying to game biology’s clock.
Speaking instead of retirement as a contemplative life phase challenges the cultural denial of death, demanding confrontation with its reality and likely proximity. Reckoning with that is an even bigger “grasping of the third rail” than reforming Social Security. Is that evasion the other reason why we might prefer the ongoing distraction of work? One way to silence the Divine Voice is to drown it out with multiple distractions.
I am not suggesting that the primary purpose of retirement is to prepare for death, though that should be a consideration. (St. Alphonsus Liguori would remind us that such preparation should occur throughout a lifetime). Retirement should be a time for family, rest, and enjoyment: those things often get short shrift in life.
But as we see with Sundays, which have also been overtaken by the consumer-and-work ethos, times in life set aside for contemplation are increasingly rare and increasingly deemed “optional” (which means “dispensable”). Let us not erode the contemplative significance of retirement.
There’s no denying the economic, social, and demographic aspects of retirement, but is the real “retirement crisis” at root perhaps one of culture and faith?
