Lose the Gold Watch

W. Andrew Achenbaum asks, “What is retirement for?” An excerpt:

The uneasiness surrounding retirement celebrations reflects the fact that sometime during the past couple of decades we lost a shared vision of what retirement is or ought to be. The majority of retirees in the past may not have been handed a gold watch, yet the timepiece still symbolized a certain set of ideas: the steady passage of years spent largely with one employer, and the golden time to come, when all the long-delayed dreams of relaxation and travel would at last be realized. Much of that is gone now. Not only do careers often involve more employers than there are hours in a day, but, in part because of the sheer number of people entering them, the postwork years can now go in any number of directions. In many cases, they’re not even postwork.