The New Retirementality, Fifth Edition

CHAPTER 8The Retirement That Works

Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.

—Leonardo Da Vinci

In the Industrial Age, work became a four-letter word, saddled with the baggage of soulless tasks and exploitive industrialists. In the Modern Age, where the majority of us trade intellectual, relational, and experiential capital toward a paycheck, the very definition of work is going through a revival. We are squarely in a renaissance period in the evolution of what work means to our lives. In many ways we find ourselves in our work. We discover who we are and who we are not. We discover our strengths and weaknesses, but also at a deeper level we find affirmation of our purpose on this planet and of our potential to positively impact others.

In Man's Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 2006), Viktor Frankl states that each of our lives resembles the work of a sculptor who chips away everything that is not, to reveal what is. Our work, in many respects, is a process of chipping away at the things that we are not, to discover who we are. We are literally hammering out our values to someday reveal the absolute best form that we can become. We can no longer afford to gloss over or ignore this core discussion for the next generation of “retirees” (for lack of a better term). We are in fact “searchers” or “remodelers” of our own lives more than anything else.

An irrefutable fact of our times is the potential collision at the junction of life where retirement ...