As our technology has become more efficient, fewer workers have been needed to do the work of the country, even though standards of living were rising and people were consuming more goods and services. When the depression of the thirties brought unemployment, the older workers were discharged first, and the Social Security Act was passed to give these people an income. Then World War II brought full employment and kept older workers on the job but did not modify the expectation that had been built up especially in big business and industry and in government and civil service--the expectation of compulsory retirement at a fixed age, usually 65.
Retirement is a new way of life. The elderly man who has filled his day with eight or ten hours of work must find new ways of living these eight or ten hours daily. His wife must also learn new living patterns, with her husband at home much more of the time. The person at retirement must learn to do without the things that his work has brought him; and his work has brought him more than his weekly or monthly pay.
For some people retirement is a goal toward which they have been working. It is the culmination of years of hope, sacrifice, and planning. For others it is a trap, a piece of bad luck for which they are unprepared. What retirement means to a person depends partly on what his work has meant to him. If he can get the satisfactions out of retirement that he formerly got out of work, or if he can get new and greater satisfactions in retirement than he got in his work, then retirement is a boon to him.
What does retirement mean in the life-cycle? Is it merely a narrow band of years coming at the end of a full life and ending in death, or is it a broad stretch of opportunity to enjoy one's self, to do things one always wanted to do?
In either case retirement is a new way of life and carries some problems with it. There are problems of leaving work--of finishing things off, of breaking off sharply or tapering off slowly, of deciding whether to look for another job or a part-time job. Then there are the greater problems of entering the new life. These problems consist of learning how to manage on a reduced income, how to use more leisure time, and how to get new satisfactions to replace the ones that went with work.
Today about one person in four over the age of 65 is employed. Very few of the women are employed. Less than half of the men are at work. But a number of retired people could be effective workers. Estimates of the number of retired people who are capable of doing productive work under present-day working conditions vary from about one and a half million to three million, from 12 to 25 per cent of the age group. All thirteen million persons over 65 are consumers. By 1975 there will be eighteen million people in this age bracket--all living on goods and services produced by the members of society who are at work. Our tremendous productivity makes this possible. But the cost is a real one. If more older people were productive, several advantages might be gained--older people themselves might live more comfortably, young people could be given more education before they commence work, people in the 20-65 age bracket might reduce their hours of work, or the whole society might have more goods and services to consume.
The economic cost of retirement to the nation will grow as the proportion of older people grows, unless we revise our retirement policies.
For the individual there is sure to be some cost to retirement, if only the loss of the income which he has been earning. In addition, most people get other satisfactions from their work, and retirement means the loss of these satisfactions unless they can find other ways of gaining similar satisfactions.
As the time comes when work is not a necessity for the whole of adult life, older people are most affected by the change in significance of work. The primary function of work as the means of securing income is beginning to lose its significance for older people. Less frequently does the veteran of forty years of work say, "I have to work to eat. How can a workingman retire?" A pension can answer that question for him. He has earned the opportunity to retire and to live for ten or fifteen years of comparatively good health free from work if he wants to.
If work had only the function of earning a living and this function was discharged for life by the age of 65, everyone should welcome retirement at that age. But other essential functions of life are included in work. If these functions and the satisfactions they bring are lost by retirement, then retirement is an undiluted tragedy for a man.
The problem of retirement is to secure the extra-economic values that work brings and to secure them through play or leisure-time activity. Can this problem be solved? Can play have the same functions as work? Can play provide the satisfactions to older people that they formerly got out of work?
In Western society, work is by cultural definition sharply set off as the enemy of pleasure, love, consumption of goods, and almost every sort of freedom. Work is a task defined and required of one by other people. This historical cultural definition of work is not valid for many of the workers. They have found other and more pleasurable meanings in their work.
Let us consider the extra-economic meanings of work and inquire whether leisure-time activity, play, or recreation also have similar meanings, and, if so, how the meanings of work can be realized in leisure.
Being with other people, making friends and having friendly relations with people, is one of the principal meanings of work to people in all the occupations we have studied. This function is also served by clubs, churches, recreation agencies, and a variety of formal and informal associations in the person's nonwork life. The pattern already exists; the problem is to fill the void created by loss of work associations in nonwork life.
Work is not intrinsically more satisfying than play as a source of meaningful experience. On the contrary, recreation offers more variety and more flexible opportunity for creative self-expression and interesting experience than work does. The person who makes a hobby of woodworking or pottery-making, or plays golf or bridge, "just for the fun of it," or travels or goes hunting or fishing, is getting the same values from his play as though he were doing work for the sheer enjoyment of the work itself.
Our studies of the significance of work in the lives of people underline for us the importance of an activity that fills the day, gives people something to do, and makes the time pass. Sheer passing of time seems to be an important value of work. Work is admirably designed to provide this value, since it usually requires orderly routines. Even the people who dislike their work as dangerous, unpleasant, or monotonous often recognize the value of the work routine to them and cannot imagine how they would fill the day if they were to retire.
Retired people work out a routine for themselves, reading the newspaper regularly, visiting the library every morning or at definite times, attending church, sitting in the park on pleasant days, working around the house in the morning, taking a walk downtown in the afternoon, going to a club or a tavern at regular hours. But many people have grown so accustomed to having their days organized about a job that they are ill prepared to create a new routine upon retirement.
Nevertheless, leisure-time activities can be organized and scheduled so as to fill the day and make the time pass happily. Play can be made to serve this function fully as well as work.
In a work-centered society such as ours has been in the past, work is certainly more effective than play in providing self-respect and gaining the respect of others. It seems unlikely that the present generation of older people reared with work-centered attitudes can get much self-respect out of leisure-time activities. Most of them, if they are forced to retire, will maintain their own self-respect and the respect of others by their reputation as successful workers and their feeling that retirement is a reward for a well-spent lifetime of work.
Women, however, have mostly gained their self-respect and the respect of others through being good mothers and housekeepers and neighbors. Women who have not been employed will usually be able to draw on the sense of worth and social prestige as they grow older that they discovered in their middle years.
Thus we see that leisure activities can conceivably offer the extra-economic meanings and values which work has supplied to people. This is fortunate, because leisure is on the increase at all adult years. A good many people now work forty hours or less a week, which is only a little more than half of the average work week a hundred years ago.
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