Excerpt

When Dad retired after working for the same company nearly all his adult life, he celebrated with a party and collected his gold watch. Then he bought a copy of The New York Times, found a comfortable spot on the deck of the family cabin and hunkered down. Or, he picked up his golf clubs and headed out to the links at his age-segregated retirement development. That was what you did in those days.

How times have changed!

A 2003 news release from the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement says that by 2010, nearly 11 million Americans will have stepped away from their place of employment, headed for retirement. But today's about-to-be retirees are no doubt among America's 76 million baby boomers, those born between 1945 and 1963, who make up about a third of the American population. They have a vastly different notion of what retirement means than did Dad.

Increasingly, boomers, people with multidimensional lives and roles, will see retirement as a time to rewrite the rules and reinvent themselves. This generation, the largest in American history, will eschew the script Dad handed down, viewing the second half of life as a period of continued growth, not decline a notion its predecessors might have thought a contradiction in terms.

Boomers will ask themselves why they should wait to do what they truly want to do. They might also question the idea that they should disengage from society and quit working, rejecting the notion of formal retirement as a mechanism for removing older people from the workplace. And boomers will seek to find meaning, rather than just busyness, in the time they have left, viewing their lives in those terms as opposed to counting the years since birth. Retirement, they will contend, grew out of a different demographic and cultural milieu than is operative today.

After all, these are the people who marched in the streets and explored sex, drugs and rock n roll. Cookie-cutter solutions won't work for them, nor will they tolerate situations in which people deem them unproductive and irrelevant as they age. Rejecting isolated, age-segregated enclaves, people in this group will also choose adventure over the risk-averse safety that characterized their parents' retirement. They will see retirement not as the sad end of their active lives but as the beginning of a trip to exciting new destinations.

Boomers will trade in their green eyeshades for whisks or pick up a painters palette instead of a calculator. Lawyers will become innkeepers and bureaucrats will take up acting.

Or maybe, like Margot Durham, who recently retired from her job at the University of California at Santa Barbara, today's about-to-be retiree will scale the heights; Margot climbed 10,547-foot Lassen Peak in the Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California just three weeks after leaving her job in academia. An adventurer like Margot, retiree Karen Milan of Fort Worth, Texas, enjoyed a trip to Morocco, but she savored even more the opportunity it afforded her to camp in the Sahara Desert.

And then there are fellow Texans like David and Barbara Burns. After Dave's retirement from a national railroad, the Burnses began teaching Texas history classes at a local community college.

Today's retirees will not only explore heretofore undeveloped skills and interests. They will also seek to deepen their connection to self, friends, family, the wider world and God. They might desire as well to leave some kind of legacy. That could mean establishing a family foundation, writing a family history or starting a lobbying initiative.

People in this generation will also live longer, healthier lives than any previous group, so they will have lots of time to explore life's options. Rather than having only enough time to regret, as may have been true of previous generations, boomers will have time to reinvent themselves. Statistics show that today's 50-year-old woman with no history of heart disease or cancer could live past 90, Rieva Lesonsky notes in Start Your Own Business: The Only Start-Up Book You'll Ever Need. When the Social Security retirement system began in 1935, Jeri Sedlar and Rick Miners say in Don't Retire, Rewire: Five Steps to Fulfilling Work that Fuels Your Passion, Suits Your Personality, or Fills Your Pocket, benefits started at age 65 whereas the average person lived to age 61. Things have changed since 1935!

And if they continue to work in one form or another and many boomers may choose to, whether for self-fulfillment or, increasingly, to cover health-care and insurance costs and discretionary expenses they'll have more money to fund that life exploration. The Retirement Confidence Survey, released in April 2004 by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and others, found that 68 percent of current workers expected to work for pay after retirement. A nationwide poll conducted by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University produced similar results.

Lots of books cover the subject of planning for retirement. For the most part, they deal with its financial issues and pitfalls.

This book, by contrast, addresses the many options for spending our time in retirement, as opposed to the usual look, which focuses on how we spend our money. It assumes that retirement is a financial possibility. Putting financial issues aside for the moment, it helps readers think long and hard about how they would spend their time all other things being equal. The "what I would do if I had all the money in the world" game allows untrammeled investigation of (perhaps hidden) life goals.

The book has two parts. In Part One, consecutive chapters profile options for retirement, including continuing work (As in not retiring? Yes, that's an option if you want to stay in the game.); starting a new job or business; working part time or cyclically; or not working, for example, taking up golf, volunteerism or philanthropy, travel, going back to school, etc. A final chapter addresses an intermediate option, taking a sabbatical before returning to work again.