I’m Nearing Retirement. Shouldn’t I Be Happier?

I was at a holiday party last year, the professional kind where people you’ve just met will be looking over your shoulder for someone more important to talk to, and friends and acquaintances will sidle up and ask, “So what are you working on?” even if you’re in a full body cast.

As an experiment, I started to say I was “retired” — I may have actually mumbled the whole word, even though I have been loath to use it or to face the fact that it is an increasingly accurate, and ultimately inevitable, description of my professional status. What a mistake. You would have thought I’d confessed to testing positive for Ebola. Patronizing nods of checked panic. Sorrowful looks of pity and disappointment. Abrupt discoveries of drinks needing refreshment.

For a while, I thought this obvious social impediment might explain my longstanding aversion to what many people, citing an apparently apocryphal Hemingway quote, call “the ugliest word in the language.” Of course, it’s not the word “retirement” that repulses but the status it connotes — the status of no longer having the self-definition of a professional identity, of no longer mattering to the degree that one ever mattered at all.

When the father of my friend Blaine retired after a long career as a welder who’d worked on the Grand Coulee Dam, he was proud to call himself retired. His changed status did not unravel his sense of himself, and he might have rightly looked with scorn at callus-free former professionals rueing their inability to swap shoptalk at holiday parties. If you spent your life hanging Sheetrock or emptying bedpans or teaching fifth graders or being shot at, it’s hard to imagine why “retirement” wouldn’t be the prettiest word in the language.

But if you have had a job you loved, and your goal was always the work itself, what sociologists call the “retirement transition process” entails a certain amount of mourning and a lot of tricky, even torturous, psychological adjustments. Thanks to increased life expectancies and the advent of benefits like Social Security, our period of post-employment life is likely to be much longer than our forebears’ was. In the early 1900s, some 65 percent of American men were still in the labor force at age 65.

By 1990 that number had dwindled to 10 percent, and millions of retired workers had the challenge — or perhaps the privilege — of grappling with the psychosocial problem of reconfiguring their identities around something other than what they had done for a living.

Gerontologists have called this chapter the “crown of life,” when we are supposedly free to concentrate on personal fulfillment before the unhappy festivities of the final chapter, which they describe as being characterized by “dependency, decrepitude and death.”