KEY POINTS:
When a workmate said he had no intention of retiring at 65, I thought his plan was a bit unusual.
Then a book titled Avoid Retirement and Stay Alive landed in the intray. Its basic thesis, you may have guessed, is that a secret to living longer is working longer.
Authors David Bogan and Keith Davies think they are the first to go so far as to argue the word "retirement" should be banished.
Hired guns for businesses in crisis, they think retirement is a manufactured personal crisis with a simple solution: don't do it.
"We were talking one day about what are all the crises that people have in their lives and it was the typical things like divorce and selling and buying houses," Davies said.
"Then the question of retirement came up and we both almost simultaneously said we're not going to retire."
People did not retire before the industrial revolution, they said. But retirement later became popular as a way of getting older workers to make way for younger people.
"We were conditioned to almost believe that we were pre-ordained to retire," Bogan said.
From the day people started working they worried about whether they would have enough to retire on - an anxiety that was fed by an army of financial planners. But humans were "genetically hardwired to keep going", Bogan said.
He and Davies are both baby boomers and their book traverses the usual arguments about how nations will struggle to pay pensions when their generation retires. The fact that the baby boomers are healthier than any generation before them and will live longer compounds the problem.
But the book is not really about the macroeconomic problem posed by an ageing population or an individual's economic circumstances. It is about personal development and about whether it stops when work stops.
The retirement dream we strive for all of our working lives could, in fact, be a nightmare, these men argue.
And they believe the biggest mistake retirees make is to flee to the traditional retirement destinations such as the Kapiti Coast, Nelson, Taupo in an attempt to "get away from it all".
The authors argue that a quiet life is not a full life and that it is silly to leave the communities we are a part of.
It is much better to "live where the action is, stay in your community. That's where we belong, being useful to ourselves and others".
Retirement can be traced to a French word that means to be invisible and that is exactly what you will become in a retirement community.
"We found people in rest homes had given up. They had written themselves off," Bogan said.
"It was quite spooky to see people in their late 50s waiting for the inevitable, which used to be a five-year wait and now it is 20 to 30 years," he said.
The answer was not to disengage from either your community or your workplace, he said.
However, those who continued to work had to accept that it might not be fulltime and it could be in a position of lesser authority.
Davies, author of the corporate histories of logistics company Mainfreight and whiteware maker Fisher & Paykel, believed people such as Mainfreight founder Bruce Plested would always be involved with the companies they created, even if it was not every day.
And the superstars of global business generally do not retire.
"It doesn't cross their minds," Davies said.
Why then should anyone else? It seems the chap at work is on to something.
People did not suddenly go over a cliff edge when they turned 65, said Bogan. By all means run marathons and backpack around the world, but you don't have to give up work to do it.
"What we are trying to do is give people a much greater range of options so they can see all the things they can do once they have deleted this word retirement out of their vocab."
Bogan and Davies said they intended to work forever. I, however, am going back to my retirement home brochures.
- NZPA
