But in some fundamental way, it wasn't fulfilling. "I was at the top," says Navarro, "but I was spending my time writing reports and crunching numbers, which I hate, and doing the bureaucratic maneuvering that's essential for a rising executive. I wasn't having very much fun. What I really wanted was to wear casual clothes and make a real difference in the quality of people's lives."
One day during lunch, a male colleague who was about 45 years old started complaining to Navarro about how much he hated his job. He calculated that he had 10 more years to go before he could take early retirement.
That conversation really bothered Navarro. Driving home that night, she told herself that if there was a different way to live, she didn't want to wait until she was 55 to discover it. Realizing that, she did something quite miraculous. Without knowing what she wanted to do next, she resigned so that she could figure it out.
It wasn't a flip decision. She agonized long and hard before making the move. Her friends thought she was crazy. Her husband tried to talk her out of it. So did the people she worked with, as well as the CEO who had recruited and mentored her. "You can do anything you want here," he told her.
But there was nothing there she wanted to do.
Not that she had some perfect vision of what she really wanted. She just needed the time and space to figure it out.
A few years of introspection, brainstorming and research brought her to an awareness that resulted in the founding of Work Transitions, a service based in St. Louis that helps others navigate out of career ruts like the one she was experiencing.
Navarro apparently hit her midlife career crisis early. For most people, it strikes around age 50. While there's nothing magical about that age, the five-decade mark seems to send out warning signals that it's time to cross some new developmental threshold. At 50, you can no longer pretend that you're young, but if you're healthy, you probably aren't feeling old either.
This is what it means to be middle-aged. Your youth is definitely behind you, but your most productive years may still be ahead. If you're like most of the 50-year-olds I know, you're probably asking yourself: "How do I really want to spend my time?"
The answer to that question is a highly individual one. But the prevalence of midlife career changes makes it unlikely that you'll be alone if you decide that you want to spend the next stage of your life doing something different than you did before.
How Old Are You?
Often, a crisis such as a layoff or forced retirement leads people to shift from "cultural adulthood" to "emotional adulthood," says Steven Baum, a gerontologist and psychologist in private practice in Detroit. Baum, the author of Growing Up at Any Age (1994, Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications), believes that people are culturally railroaded into accepting artificial limits that have nothing to do with their individual abilities and shortcomings. True adulthood arrives, he says, when you're able to develop a personal definition of what is meaningful rather than submit to socially and economically prescribed set points.
Retirement at age 65 is one of these arbitrary set points. While many arbitrarily assume that people are "old" at 65, there is no biological imperative that makes it true. Some people are emotionally (and even physically) old at age 35, while others are young at 75.
Consider the late actress Jessica Tandy and her husband, actor Hume Cronyn. In the film "Cocoon," they teamed up to play an aging couple who were given the gift of renewed youth. To prepare for their roles, the then-75ish pair had to be taught how to "act old" because they had too much spring in their walk and gleam in their eyes. In a wonderful ironic twist, this energetic couple had to learn how to look worn out and worn down in order to fit the traditional stereotype of the elderly as doddering and frail.
When you turn 65, you don't suddenly become a gray-haired monster. The reason 65 is the traditional retirement age has more to do with an economic formula based on company pension plans and Social Security regulations than the norms of human aging. What that means, however, is that you might get kicked out of the workforce before you're actually ready to go. Worth magazine believes that the whole concept of retirement should be retired.
Why?
First of all, it isn't financially feasible for most people. The math just doesn't work. Nor does it make most people happy. To have years of idleness and leisure isn't everyone's idea of the ultimate good time. Some people prefer to remain active, contributing participants to society.
"Retirement isn't about doing what you want and it certainly isn't a Golden Age," according to the magazine. "Retirement is a weird social experiment... its collapse will be a triumph for common sense."
Indeed, on the day after your 65th birthday, you may feel much the way you did the day before, except that you don't have a job anymore. Rather than slip into the role of an old person that society has declared you to be, take stock of how you personally feel and how you want the next phase of your work life to look.
"Most of us tend to think of retirement as the end of the story," says Lydia Bronte. "But people who retire wake up the next morning, much as they've always done, and start another day of life. Retirement is another phase in life, not the end of it."
For increasing numbers of professionals, retirement isn't the end of life; it isn't even the end of work. Instead, it's the end of a specific job or career with a specific company. As one 50-year-old former IBMer says, "The key to retirement is to do it early and often."
