Is Retirement Dead?

There some depressing stuff in McLean’s magazine — Canada’s equivalent to Time or Newsweek — in a piece called Retirement is Dead.

There’s a few ways to read that sentence. Maybe retirement is dead because the whole idea of conventional employment — the conveyor belt from school, to work, to grannification, to grave — is out of date. After all, if you bow out of the rat race with a relatively beefy escape fund while generating a small income through investment or by monetising your creative interests, retirement doesn’t make a lot of sense any more. Why would you want to stop if you’re having fun?

The article acknowledges that “an abrupt phase change from productive, useful working life to complete non-work is pretty bizarre on the face of it.” It is quite extreme isn’t it? No wonder so many people struggle to adapt to retirement.

Alas, the focus of the article is that Canadians (i.e. the people of one of the most civilised and efficient countries in the world) can no longer afford a comfortable retirement. The writer clearly has high ideals about what comfort should entail, but the sentiment is probably accurate. It’s not uncommon to see elderly people working in American supermarkets and fast food places. It’s not right.

My 22-year-old daughter is convinced that, for her cohort, communal living will be the norm. I’ve asked her to save some space in the yard for us to pitch a tent — with an extension cord to plug in my laptop.

Meh. As fates go, is that so bad? It’s just a shame (a scandal really) that people might be working for forty years or more, just to reach the basic setup that any barely-employed person can have immediately. It is to toil under a scam.

Reduce your material needs. Adjust your ideas about comfort. Research the alternative models.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.