This can be a hard message to learn late in the work game, especially if you’ve been entrusting your career to your employer all these years. You may discover (if you haven't already done so) that the job market isn't cooperating with your desires anymore. Outplacement counselors know this mentality all too well. In every workshop we teach, there is inevitably someone whose only career ambition was to get a full pension and retire.
If you've spent your career stockpiling money and years of service rather than marketable skills, losing your job can be a downright catastrophe. It's daunting to face a discriminatory job market when you're in the twilight of your career and lack both self-confidence and a set of abilities that employers value. It makes for a lot of bitterness, insecurity and cynicism.
There are lucky professionals who manage to make it safely to retirement without any hitches. But even these folks have been learning some rude life lessons. Many are finding retirement to be un-affordable financially or emotionally - or both. As one 55-year-old former sales manager commented after only three months of retirement, "It's OK for a summer vacation. But I can't spend the rest of my life chasing a ball around the golf course. I have to do something more productive."
Ditto for a 60-year-old data-processing specialist who returned to work part time after less than a year out.
"I could only pot so many plants," she says. "Once the garden was finished, I needed a little more mental stimulation."
The idea that every person's life should begin with education and end with leisure (with an extended period of work in the middle) is too narrowly proscribed to meet the complexity of modern adult lives and desires. For starters, it ignores the possibility that some people might actually enjoy their work and want to go on doing it for as long as they're physically and mentally able. And that even those who don't like their jobs may prefer to tackle a new challenge than spend the rest of their years rocking on the front porch.
A New Phase of Life
New York gerontologist Lydia Bronte, who wrote, The Longevity Factor: The New Reality of Long Careers and How It Can Lead to Richer Lives (1993, New York: Harper Perennial), posits the existence of a whole new stage in life between ages 50 and 75. She call this period "second middle age" and says adults in this phase need fulfilling activities to motivate them, especially since people are living longer and are healthier today.
"When adults over 50 realize just how much time there is left to accomplish new things, a whole new sense of adventure takes over," says Judy Rosemarin, a career counselor with Sense-Able Strategies in Roslyn, New York. "It can be a very ex citing time."
Anita Lands, a New York City career counselor who specializes in working with older adults, sees the age-50 transition as a time of greater introspection.
"A lot of people start questioning what's really important to them," says Lands, "and they make some trade offs usually in terms of money and upward mobility for greater satisfaction," Rosemarin agrees.
"People over 50 are usually looking for better ways to integrate who they are with how they make a living," she says. "They want to use and develop some parts of themselves that they may have neglected in earlier years."
In this era of rampant layoffs and forced retirements, these reevaluations are sometimes forced on people. A 55-year-old anesthesiologist had to face a stark emotional reality after changes in the healthcare industry and increasing threats of litigation drove him out of his profession.
He wasn't incompetent, just unhappy. For him, retirement solved one problem but opened the door to a host of others. He had never really enjoyed medicine and didn't regret his decision to leave it behind. He'd only chosen the field to please his parents, anyway. Nonetheless, his career had been the centerpiece of his life. Without it at stage center, he felt lost and confused about his role and purpose in life.
To make medicine work as a career choice, he'd put emotional blinders on for much of his life. "If I thought too much about how much I disliked it, I would've had to quit and that was a move I couldn't afford to make," he says. "But now I think I'm paying a high price for that."
It was a very sad counseling moment when he turned to me and asked, "Do you think I wasted my life?" However, the process of questioning is healthy and will lead him to a more meaningful second career dream.
