"Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for."
Viktor E. Frankl
At my stage of life, it's only a matter of time before the R word crops up in polite conversation. People used to ask, “What do you do for a living?” Now it’s “When do you plan to retire?”
For me, the answer is “never”. Sure, I don’t plan to work 9 to 5 in my 90s. But the idea of never working again? That’s not appealing at all.
I used to think I was the odd one out in this regard, but I now know I’m not. In fact, there are far more of us than most people realise, and the reason is simple: what keeps us ticking as people in our 60s, 70s and beyond is surprisingly similar to what motivates us in our 30s and 40s.
Why Work Still Matters
Behavioural finance expert Dr Daniel Crosby made this point in his talk at last week’s Adviser 3.0 event. Dr Crosby is a proponent of the PERMA framework developed by the American psychologist Martin Seligman to explain the five things that help us to “flourish” — positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Work, says Dr Crosby, can contribute to all five.
Of course, when you no longer need to work, it frees up time to do all sorts of other things that can also contribute to our general sense of wellbeing, particularly time with our loved ones. But we often take for granted the non-financial benefits that work provides, and, when those benefits disappear, they can leave a big gap in people’s lives. As Dr Crosby writes in his new book, The Soul of Wealth, “Is it any wonder then that retirees are far more depressed than both the population broadly and same-aged non-retirees in particular?” (1)
Someone else who sees the value in doing some form of work in later life is the financial planner and podcaster Pete Matthew. He too has just written a book, The Meaningful Money Retirement Guide, and, as Pete explained in a recent episode of The Investing Show, one of the book’s key messages is that, for many people, stopping work altogether is a thoroughly bad idea. (2, 3)
“It’s impossible to fully separate the idea of retirement from stopping work, but really, they’re not necessarily linked,” he writes. “For me, I have no plans to stop work, ever. Oh, it’ll change form and frequency for sure, but doing nothing? That’s unimaginable to me.”
What’s more, Pete Matthew argues, that continuing to work, whether that’s full- or part-time, paid or voluntary, is good for our health. “There’s no doubt,” he writes, “that a lifetime of work followed by doing absolutely nothing is a sure way to an early grave…
