Late Work: From Recreation To Re-Creation

This is the first in a series that continues with Retirement, Redundancy, Rejection: The Extreme Emotionality of Endings.

Michael and Linda decided back in their 40s that they’d like to work together in retirement. Clive doesn’t even entertain the ‘r’ word – let alone the concept. Helga knows she has done her most impactful work in her 70s, after the earlier work-family juggle familiar to many women. Jonathan suddenly got laid off after decades with the same company and began accumulating a portfolio of occupations like pearls illuminating his values and wide-ranging passions. Deborah left behind the pursuit of profit and a lifetime in entrepreneurship for the pursuit of purpose, accompanying hundreds through a ‘sageing’ process for later life. All are redefining how we live our third ages – the September of our lives.

Increasing longevity has gifted humans with extra decades of healthy and active life. Companies and countries have not yet caught up with the consequences – nor have most people. We still approach our 60s thinking about retirement, or are pushed into it by ageist employers, a phenomenon which accelerated dramatically during the covid crisis. Yet we are likely to have healthy decades yet to live. Careers are stretching from 30-year sprints to 50-year marathons, but most of us aren’t training for the long haul. We aren’t even thinking about it. A growing body of research is starting to show that inactivity is not only bad for our stretched and under-funded pension systems; turns out it’s bad for humans too.

While lifespans have expanded, mindsets have not kept up. Long lives require a rethink and a roadmap for transitioning gracefully through entirely new phases – from millennials to perennials. Longevity will impact the young as much as the old as it redraws the very shape of what careers and lives will morph into and how to pace yourself across perhaps ten decades. The second third of life may one day be seen as the building block for the third – our late work. Or what Ram Dass summarises as the shift from ‘roles’ to ‘souls.’ At its best, this autumn season of life brings an extraordinary freedom – to re(define) the narrative of lives and legacies. Yet many people experience it more as a shocking tumble into a phase of life they have not thought about and for which they are sorely unprepared. 

There are a flurry of emerging concepts, from ‘encore careers’ and ‘un-retirement’ to ‘the age of no retirement,’ but no real playbooks yet. Most of the people attending The Midlife Rethink workshops I run admit they have few role models for positive, purposeful maturity. Many of us are marked by how our own parents, some of whom were taken aback by their own, often unexpected, longevity (mis)managed it. There are many examples, and mountains of guilt, multiplied a thousandfold by the pandemic, of nightmare endings. Age has for too long been a negative. We’ve internalised these messages in a strange form of collective self-harm. We all age. Too many of us still hate the idea.

The opposite is also on offer. A growing number of books present idealistic dreams of an army of wise elders who will rise up to save humanity from itself. That through mindfulness and meditation we will become mature adults, able to resist the loneliness of capitalism’s care homes, reverse the breakdown of family structures, and fight inequality and climate change with grey-haired grandparents and inner serenity.

It sounds appealing, but I’ve been looking for a modest middle ground. On the cusp of 60 myself, I am wondering how to design my own late work and have been interviewing people who seem to hold some part of the answer I am seeking. They are alive, engaged and vibrant. They are an inspiration, offering insights into alternative roadmaps for our collective ageing adventure. They come in all shapes, cultures and backgrounds. They share an energy I can only call joy.

There is a veritable explosion of models of how and what people do in ‘late work.’ But it is generally a million miles from a model of retirement dedicated to recreation. Golf and cruises don’t fill decades. And the loneliness of irrelevance can be far more brutal than we suspected when still locked in unsatisfying jobs.  Here are some of the models I’ve heard described (feel free to reach out with alternatives).

There are obviously overlaps between them. They are offered here less to categorise than to start a conversation.

• Passion: Many people have early passions that go unheeded or undiscovered until they stop what they spent their middle years doing. When they tap into them late, there is a shock of recognition. A sort of coming home to oneself. Francesca had a long and seemingly glamorous career in theatre, at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. She got into this line of work somewhat unintentionally. She had dreamed of being a nurse as a girl. She left 30 years later to everyone’s surprise, but without an ounce of regret, burned out by the pace and pressure. She was one of the hundreds of thousands of British citizens who volunteered with the NHS during the pandemic – and discovered, to her surprise, a passionate connection to accompanying the elderly through the operating room. A literal and metaphorical hand-holder who simultaneously extended a hand - to her inner self.
• Duets: Duets are people who construct and design late work as a means to working (and playing) with their personal partners. They leverage purpose with love and thereby multiply both. Michael and Linda Hutcheon were exceptionally early planners of their later years. Michael was a medical specialist running the respirology practice of a big hospital. Linda was a university professor and culture critic. Since their forties, they had discussed what they might work on together after retiring. They shared a passion for opera and travel. So they began to build on their respective skills to analyse the role of health and disease in operas, and wrote a book, the first of several, called Opera: Desire, Disease and Death. They built a new life together where they travelled the world, interviewing musicians and scholars and giving talks about opera. A veritable duet of pleasure and purpose.
• Continuums: There are some lucky people who so love what their main careers were, that they never want to stop. This is most common among knowledge workers – from thinkers and tinkerers to writers and professors. Work has been a source of meaning, energy, purpose and/or community from the beginning and they have no intention of stopping until they must. Mike has been an engineer in the area of power plant turbines since he graduated from college. He is one of the world’s rare experts in his highly specialised field. His work is important, essential and appreciated. He has no intention of withdrawing his expertise while it’s still needed. He carries on, fascinated and challenged by each crisis.
• Magnus Opus: This is the model for people who do their very best and greatest work in their latter decades. Either because they have the time and focus that weren’t available earlier, or because they are appointed to their most impactful roles in a natural progression of skill and experience. Like Helga Nowotny who was a Founding Member and later President of the European Research Council (ERC) in her 70s after a long career as a professor connecting the social sciences with science and technology. The ERC identifies and invests billions in Europe’s best scientific innovators, a key pillar of Europe’s future. Or like Sir Clive Gillinson, the British arts manager invited to run Carnegie Hall at age 60 after an illustrious, 35-year career at the London Symphony Orchestra. (Only Americans, he notes, would offer such a job at such an age). Now in his seventies, he has just renewed his contract for another five years – rejoicing in the ability to spread the music and the talent he adores to ever broader populations through an ever-expanding stretch of the brand and its reach. Profoundly influential late work, broadening and deepening knowledge and networks built across a lifetime.
• Portfolios: Jonathan was suddenly made redundant from a long career in professional services in the early months of the pandemic. He used the lockdown to pivot towards a range of occupations some revenue generating, some not, that share a red thread: his commitment to contributing to environmental issues and climate change management. A mix of consulting, non-profits boards and dedicated family time. A year on from leaving, Jonathan is busy, happy and feeling more engaged than ever. Liberated from the uniformity of a single employer to contribute wherever his mind (and heart) take him.
• Transitionists: A growing number of people are beginning to realise that managing older decades well takes will and skill. Ageing is compulsory, but learning is optional. There will be many people who find meaningful work in creating the transition mechanisms to support people’s meaning-making in later life. Deborah was a successful entrepreneur all her life, revelling in the monetary measures of success. But with age she discovered a powerful urge to focus inwards, to understand and harvest the experiences and wounds of her life, to slow down, breathe deeply and achieve a level of serenity that was neither the hallmark of her personality nor background. She followed a programme, tellingly called ‘From Ageing to Sageing’, which accompanies people transitioning into later life, then certified as an instructor, and now rejoices in drawing on the lessons of her own transition to help people around the world intentionally manage their own. She is committed, carefree and convinced of the overwhelming, daily need she witnesses and nourishes.

Transitioning Mechanisms

Transitioning consciously (rather than just stumbling oldwards) towards the second half of life may require taking some time to mine the first half for its lessons and treasures. You have to ‘do the inner work’ the sages of all cultures, faiths and traditions advise. How, where and when people will do this is now the big question. You can find lots of financial advisors who will help you with your pension planning. Harder to find people and organisations devoted to helping you find your place and purpose in an ageist world.

They will come. Educational institutions could play a big role and are just starting to talk about what it might be. They may want to contemplate a subscription model suggests Sri Reddy, SVP Retirement and Income Solutions at Principal. You sign up in your 20s and your annual membership is geared to lifelong learning and regular re-invention (and perhaps your degree expires if you don’t update it, like any professional certification). They urgently need to develop what Chip Conley calls ‘long life learning’ which builds communities as much as content. He has done that with his Modern Elder Academy designing programs aimed at “fostering communities of midlife peers who cultivate, harvest, and share wisdom with one another.”

Companies and countries have a role to play, but I’ll reserve that for future columns. They are just starting to awaken to the implications of one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in our human history. There is huge diversity and inequality in their stories. The gap in life expectancy between the well off and worst-off men in the US is an astronomical 15 years. A first major Global Report on Ageism has just been published by the World Health Organisation and a working group bringing together a cross-sectoral group of stakeholders at the World Economic Forum is focusing on Redesigning Retirement for financial wellness.

For the moment, it’s individuals who are moving first. A groundswell of change agents are rethinking, re-creating and re-designing late work for themselves, nudging the institutions to follow. The stories of these individual efforts are as yet little known and little told. But watch this space. Learning how to age well will become a key 21^st century skill. It may also be an adventure, a calling or a revelation. Up to you.