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Key points
- Older workers often fail to look beyond their accomplishments when deciding when to retire.
- As you age, adopting the perspective of the position you are in can prevent you from taking things personally.
- Public safety careers often cap employee work years for a reason—to keep us safe.
Many baby boomers saw their parents retire at 65 to 70 years. But in corporate America today, mandatory retirement ages are now more of an exception than a rule, although they're standard for public safety and boards of directors.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore stepped down at age 75 from Apple’s board due to an age-based restriction for its directors.When applied to boards, age policies refresh the talent pool, diversifying advice and experience (e.g., a background in emerging technologies).
Some companies may have a mandatory retirement age on paper but disregard it to keep a particular person seated in a role, especially if there’s a crisis to be managed or a lack of a suitable successor.
Aging Feels Very Personal
In psychology, personalizing falls into what we call cognitive distortions, which include about a dozen thinking errors like maximizing, minimizing, catastrophizing, generalizing, and others. We all do this. Every one of us. Those who have worked on themselves in counseling or learned cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) have a more immediate sense of when they veer into this territory and how to right their thinking.
Age-related decisions feel deeply personal. Automatic thoughts about what one will do in life and how one will spend time following the work years have profound consequences and land many newly retired into a funk or full-blown depressed mood. It’s not uncommon for them to be irritable around the house and toward loved ones and just simply…a little lost.
“Most high achievers have encountered emotional difficulties in retirement because they miss the action of their professional life and can’t seem to live without it,” writes Robert Delamontagne, Ph.D., author of The Retiring Mind: How to Make the Psychological Transition to Retirement. “Their self-image largely stems from their identity as diligent, smart and very capable individuals…”
As Ted Kaufman and Bruce Hiland report in Retiring? Your New Chapter Is About Much More Than Money, people pay attention to financial planning and overlook, ignore, or avoid the nonfinancial retirement challenges. They lapse into denial, an unconscious defense mechanism for avoiding issues or problems.
Aging Is Actually Very Positional
When there’s difficult information to assimilate, it often helps to see the position you’re in rather than personalize the matter: The parent or stepparent who feels pushback from children after a remarriage. The interim manager who feels the team longing for the leader who once held the spot. The substitute teacher who feels homeostasis, where the system pushes back from where it once was.
Frustration and resentment set in, as do blame and defensiveness. If the parent/stepparent, interim manager, substitute teacher, or any other person facing this shift sees things less personally and accepts where they are and what they face—sees the position they’re in—they’ll get beyond it faster. Indeed, the situation is usually not as much personal as it is purely positional. Anyone in their shoes—in their position—would face similar challenges.
Erikson’s Eighth Stage: Integrity vs. Despair
If you’ve taken a human development or psychology class—so helpful in today’s world—you learn about Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, stretching from infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood into old age. At each stage, a psychological “crisis” unfolds, and how we navigate it shapes our personality.
Integrity vs. despair is Erikson’s eighth stage, which includes the virtues of wisdom and fulfillment as one looks upon past successes as well as a tendency to let regrets or failures (even perceived failures) lead to despair or bitterness.
Anyone who has moved from one home to another knows the painstaking job of sifting through a lifetime of possessions. What’s meaningful to retain? What’s worth selling? What gets passed along to others—the keepsakes and the donations of one’s legacy?
Now imagine compartmentalizing decades of a career. A retiree with a treasure trove of achievements, skills, and talents wishes to retain some for other work or pursuits. Retirees experience platitudes and retirement parties and get to play golf or travel when they choose.
As retirement settles, there’s often a void of camaraderie, a wavering of one’s identity/self-esteem, and personal squabbles. Counseling can help individuals or couples decide what to do with their next life chapter.
Aging in Public Service and Politics
People like to say age is just a number, and that with being older comes wisdom. This is all very true. However, disregarding the challenges of age, especially for those 75 years and older, is unwise.
There’s a reason that public safety careers are capped—to keep us safe. Think about the talk we have with our elders about giving up the car keys. It’s the same with the fire engine, police car, ambulance, or school bus. Diminished attention, physical mobility concerns, mild memory loss, forgetfulness, and confusion often present by age 75. Mastering new technology or complexities becomes harder, and while many insist that they are still on top of their game…many are not. Some may even experience impairment.
How are these discussions any different than those surrounding a job that carries with it “the nuclear football,” a briefcase held by a military aide for the U.S. president to communicate and authorize a nuclear strike?
In 2024, the American electorate has become disenfranchised because three political parties have embraced septuagenarians at a time when the stakes are terribly high, with newer, more profound issues that will define generations to come.
Young old age (65 to 74) is very different than old-old age (85 plus), according to the phases of aging published by LibreTexts Social Sciences, which points out that the young-old group remains healthier, happier, and better off financially than the same group decades prior.
That 20-year gap is still significant. Time changes us; our jobs and life experiences change us. CBS News published photos of all American presidents when they took office and ended it, which highlight very real contrasts. Presidents may do well to look upon their years in office as a “possession." As they move on, they must decide what to keep, what to donate, and what parts of their legacy they entrust to others.
In time, we all travel through this, and this fact can’t escape us as we make decisions about candidacies and ballot boxes this year.
Copyright © 2024 by Loriann Oberlin, MS
