Is Retirement Dead?

There some depressing stuff in McLean’s magazine — Canada’s equivalent to Time or Newsweek — in a piece called Retirement is Dead. There’s a few ways to read that sentence. Maybe retirement is dead because the whole idea of conventional employment — the conveyor belt from school, to work, to grannification, to grave — is out of date. After all, if you bow out of the rat race with a relatively beefy escape fund while generating a small income through investment or by monetising your creative interests, retirement doesn’t make a lot of sense any more. Why would you want to stop if you’re having fun? The article acknowledges that “an abrupt phase change from productive, useful working life to complete non-work is pretty bizarre on the face of it.” It is quite extreme isn’t it? No wonder so many people struggle to adapt to retirement. Alas, the focus of the article is that Canadians (i.e. the people of one of the most civilised and efficient countries in the world) can no longer afford a…