At 50, I made a startling realization: I was burning out, but nowhere near retirement -- and I wasn't alone
Remarkably, the first recipient of Social Security, a bookkeeper named Ida May Fuller, started to collect her checks in 1940. She proceeded to live another thirty-five years, long enough to witness the ascent and disbanding of the Beatles and the landing of the man on the moon. (For her total $24.75 contribution, she received $22,888.92 in benefits, perhaps qualifying her as the nation's first de facto lottery winner, as well as its inaugural Social Security recipient.) Indeed, the time between the end of work and the end of life was already starting to raise uncomfortable questions in the decades following the establishment of Social Security and mass retirement -- most fundamentally, what do you do with yourself during this period? Medical experts were advising a quiet existence, rocking peacefully in Whistler's Mother-like fashion.It took ingenuity to redesign lives to keep up with changes in longevity and society in mid-twentieth-century America, but we rose to the occasion. We plugged the purpose gap with something called the "golden years," a stunning innovation that almost overnight turned an arid economic institution, retirement, from an anteroom to the great beyond into a core component of the American dream. We did such a good job of making virtue out of seeming necessity that soon retirement at sixty-five wasn't enough. Even as lives were already lengthening, we wanted retirement earlier and earlier. We couldn't wait to stop working and start playing in a period that was fashioned by financial marketers and housing entrepreneurs as a kind of second childhood. Golf became the new symbol of late-life success. A new deal was struck around shorter working lives that turned the push out of the labor market into a powerful pull. The golden years shored up the postmidlife purpose gap for fifty years and then some, filling the unstable space with something aspirational and attainable. This was a dream for average Americans, not just the elite. But as lives lengthened and careers shortened, this fix grew shakier and shakier, especially as the vast wave of boomers began approaching. read more:
