What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [2]
Introduction
I am now in the final year of my sixth decade. If I were a generation older, I would be anticipating the finish line of my working life and the greeting Happy 60th! would loom above it like an anvil waiting to drop on my surviving dreams and aspirations of youth. It was not long ago, after all, that novelist William Styron, in the grips of a depression that began on that same birthday, called sixty “that hulking milestone of mortality.” Gratefully, the prospect of turning sixty has improved significantly. The age at which we imagine limitation encroaching on our abilities to perform mentally, physically, and sexually has been receding rapidly. But far too often the old beliefs cling to everyday language, attitudes, behaviors, hiring practices, and, perhaps most important, to the conversations we have with ourselves.
In recent years, neuroscientists have been providing news that is a powerful antidote to negative views of aging. In one of the most optimistic developments of our time, a scientific revolution has found that the brain is plastic and that what we do, think, and experience changes it throughout our lives. Moreover, a groundswell of research has been confirming that our brains can remain fit, like our bodies, for a quarter of a century beyond sixty and, increasingly common, longer still.
Such good news could not come at a better time.
With devastating speed, the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has destroyed hopes for early retirement entertained by many of the nation’s seventy-eight million baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964. A “once-in-a-century” economic event—as former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called the recession—has depleted savings, devalued homes, and ravaged stock portfolios, college savings, and retirement accounts. Even if economic recovery takes place in 2010, people are likely to have to work years longer than they ever dreamed to regain lost financial ground.
This will further stoke the already growing trend of longer work lives. With average life expectancy surging beyond seventy-seven, the potential for boredom and the expense of living two or three decades of idle life were already making retirement less alluring. Even before the economic downturn, when they were feeling considerably more flush, 79 percent of boomers between fifty and fifty-nine did not intend to voluntarily retire from full-time work at the traditional age, according to a MetLife Foundation/Civic Ventures Encore Career Survey. Rather than pursue the life of leisure their parents’ generation had, they intended to find meaningful employment, at least part-time. About half of those already in second careers have chosen to remain as consultants in familiar professions, while nearly a third have chosen to enter new careers in education, health, and nonprofits.
For a decade, students of successful aging have been promising that the trend of encore careers would benefit older adults and be a boon to American society. Some—notably Marc Freedman, the cofounder of Civic Ventures, who has built on the groundbreaking work of John Gardner, the architect of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the founder of Executive Corps and Common Cause—have been making the case for socially connected work in the second half of life as a source of individual and societal renewal. As a result, the discussion has been shifting away from how to protect the rights of older Americans to work to how to cultivate work that enriches their lives, allows them to play vital roles in improving and strengthening their communities, and employs skills, talents, and creativity generated over a lifetime.
Considering what is being