Retirement was designed for a shorter life
The idea of stopping work at 65 was built for a world where few people lived long past it. That world is gone, and our planning has not caught up.
By Sue Emanuel · 4 min read
For most of human history, people worked until they died or could no longer do the work. Retirement as we know it is a surprisingly recent invention, and it was designed around a much shorter life.
A brief history
In 1889, Otto von Bismarck introduced one of the first government pension plans in Germany, paying citizens 70 and older to leave the workforce. Life expectancy in Germany at the time was around 40. In the United States, the Social Security Act set the retirement age at 65, and the first benefits were paid in 1940, when life expectancy was 60.8 for men and 65.2 for women.
By 2019, average life expectancy in the United States had reached 78.8 years. About 16.5 percent of Americans were 65 or older, a share expected to reach 22 percent by 2050 as the baby boom generation, some 83 million people, moves through retirement.
What the numbers mean
Retirement is no longer a short final chapter. For many executives it can last twenty or thirty years, as long as some of the careers that preceded it. Yet most retirement planning is still focused almost entirely on money. Financial firms have spent decades on research and seminars about how much to save. The questions of identity, structure, relationships and purpose have been treated as secondary.
That imbalance shows up in how people feel. Where earlier generations looked forward to retiring, researchers have found that many baby boomers dread it, and fear becoming disengaged from friends and from society. The two executives I interviewed who were still working were both financially secure. What worried them was losing the structure of work, the intellectual stimulation of their colleagues, and the sense of being valued.
“It will help people feel their value when the world is writing you off.”
Planning for the years, not just the dollars
Researchers increasingly describe retirement not as leaving work, but as a late-career development stage with real potential for growth and renewal. That framing changes the planning question. It is no longer only whether you can afford to stop. It is who you want to be, how you want to spend your days, and who you want beside you for what may be a third of your adult life.
Those questions deserve the same care you have given your finances. The earlier you start, the more room you have to try things, learn what fits and adjust before the decision is made for you.