What's your late-career superpower?
Maybe it's time we talked about retirement differently.
Simply put, it was a rant. From a lawyer friend who is 68 and at the top of her game —and good and tired of being asked when she would retire.
“No, I don’t have any plans to retire. Please stop asking me.
“I’m very fortunate to have a great job that I like a lot, and that I can keep doing so long as my brain and eyes and hands keep working. I like performing at a high level. … After 41 years, I almost always either know the answer or I know how to figure it out.
“I’m not married nor will I ever be again so there isn’t anyone I want to spend more time with. Or anyone I have to put up with or take care of. (Yippee! Done my time in those trenches.)
“I’m able to travel to fun and interesting places. I’m able to financially support causes I believe in. I’m able to eat out when I want. I have a lot of wonderful friends to do things with. I have a fair amount of free time that I never previously had, that I get to waste if I want to, and I frequently do.
“I’m able to continue saving and investing money for retirement.”
Then she got to the big question: “What’s the rush to retire? And do what?”
Okay, let’s stop for a minute and recognize that even having a conversation about being able to retire is a tremendous privilege; my friend knows that, too.
And yes, money is a deciding factor, for her and for most of the women I know who have worked their whole lives and are spending a lot of time these days watching their investments lurch sickeningly.
As my friend shared with me when I asked her more about what led to her social media rant: “Given that savings wasn’t one of our family values when I grew up and all I inherited back in 1990 was $4,000 and a bunch of antique furniture, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, both in my career, earning power and retirement savings.”
I’ve thought a lot about how we talk about retirement for successful, ambitious women since I read my friend’s post. Or why we really don’t talk much about it.
First, these conversations are still relatively new. We are among the first generations of women who have been able to work as long as we have in careers we love. I launched this Substack because I think we don’t talk often enough or clearly enough about the value we still bring — wait, the value we ADD — because we’ve been working and learning and growing for decades.
As I’ve said before here, I know to my core that I am better able to serve my clients and my community, solve problems and produce excellent work than I was earlier in my career, because I know so much more. I know, like my friend, that my decades of experience are my superpower. Why would I want to step away from the thing that energizes me and, oh yeah, provides me with a comfortable living, too?
(Let me insert here, again, the caveat of privilege — and luck. I found my passion for writing and storytelling early in my career and have been able to continue to develop it and build a good living for myself and my family. I know many women don’t have that opportunity.)
Maybe we need to stop talking about retirement for late-career women in the traditional way AT ALL. Maybe it’s not about when you leave your salaried job and learn mahjong. Maybe it’s not about an ending but about thinking on a continuum.
Instead of asking a late-career superstar about when she’s stepping away, let’s instead ask about passion and progress. What do you do that you love, and how do you still see it working for you later in your life? What are you proud of? What is it that energizes you, still? What do you know now that you didn’t know earlier? What do you still want to do?
What’s your late-career superpower?
No, those questions won’t prevent my friend from being asked at every turn when she’s planning to be finished; the way the world thinks about older women and our options changes slowly.
But I think I hear some of the answers to those questions, in what my friend told me about why she’s not going anywhere.
“My brain has been my calling card all my life and it just makes sense to me to keep using it, especially when I’m at the pinnacle of my career and in a position to be a trusted advisor.”
Also: “All my life it’s all been up to me. Especially for the 20 years since my divorce. (Now) I get to be independent, make my own decisions, and have peace and serenity in my life.”
Amen, sister.
Exactly! I want to keep thinking/talking about this, especially for women who come to the end of a big, salaried corporate job but still have work they want to do. It’s a little easier for an entrepreneur like me to blur the retirement line, not that I’m close to it yet! Thanks, as ever, for reading.
Several things conspired to send me into retirement before I was ready, I think I had more to contribute and I think our model is seriously flawed: Prepare for a career from birth to thirty-five, save for retirement between thirty-five and sixty-five, then live on those savings (plus whatever the working people are contributing to social security) from sixty-vie to ninety-five, then die. Can we really afford to have most of us contributing to the economy for approximately one-third of our lives? ON THE OTHER HAND: It seems wrong to me that so many of our institutions are being run by seventy-somethings while so many of our forty-somethings are still paying off student loans. I do think we need to have those young people in positions of leadership. I say YES to coming up with new models.