Work Doesn’t Have to End When You Retire

On this episode of The Long View, author and entrepreneur Marc Freedman discusses the importance of having more crossover and interaction between different generations in the workplace and how someone can reinvent themselves with an “encore career.”

Here are a few excerpts from Freedman’s conversation with Morningstar’s Christine Benz and Amy Arnott.

Work Provides More Than a Paycheck

Amy Arnott: We’ve talked about the overall demographic trends and the societywide need to have more crossover and interaction working together between different generations. But maybe you could talk a little bit about how working longer can help people individually, too, both from a financial and quality of life standpoint.

Marc Freedman: I think the financial aspect is critical. I feel that personally—I turned 65 last year and I have eighth, 10th, and 12th graders still in my household. So, retirement is not in my near-term future for sure. But I think some other reasons are equally important to the essential economic security of working longer. And a lot of it has to do with a sense of purpose in life, a reason to get up in the morning, and the kind of social connection and ties that work provides. Freud said that the keys to life were love and work, that reason to get up in the morning and those ties. We did research a decade ago in which we asked retirees what they missed most about work. They said they certainly didn’t miss the alarm clock going off in the morning, but they missed productive relationships and the idea of working together with other people to do important things. So, I think along with the financial imperatives are these social imperatives and really in some ways psychic imperatives as well that work helps to address.

Christine Benz: There seems to be a disconnect, though, in terms of people’s desire to work longer and their ability to do so. When you look at the data a lot of people say, “Well I want to work past 65, maybe until after I’m 70, whatever.” But people in general do tend to retire earlier than they expected. Can you talk about some of those headwinds, how this is unfortunately not entirely within our control when we actually do retire?

Freedman: I think it brings up the importance of helping people who are approximating retirement and they’re stopping doing the work that they’ve been doing for a while. But there are people who will and plan to unretire. But the problem is it’s so hard to do that. It’s a do-it-yourself process. You can see people stopping working to address a need—caregiving, for example—or really to get a much-needed break. But that doesn’t mean that they’re retired permanently. In many cases, they will need to, want to return to the workplace. But the problem is that we’ve made that difficult. It’s so much dependent on the individual and their own heroic efforts to do that. I do think we need more infrastructure, for lack of a better word, to help people step in and out of the workplace in the second half of life.

I’m starting to see some really encouraging developments on that front. There has been a proliferation of higher-education programs that started with Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative and spread to Notre Dame and Stanford and the University of Chicago and the University of Texas. I’ve been involved in the creation of one of these programs at Yale. And they’re essentially schools for the second half of life where people go back and can spend a year rediscovering their purpose and getting a breather in the process.

At our organization, we created 15 years ago a fellowship program, a one-year internship for people who were experienced in the workplace but wanted to move in a different direction. The Encore Fellowship program enables them to try on a new role. These education programs, these internships like the Encore Fellowship program, they approximate what we routinely do for young people who are trying to go from being adolescents to adults. They do it through school and internships. And I think we can learn a lot from that experience and adapt it to the second half of life.

The 3 Benefits of Continuing to Work

Benz: Marc, can you talk about the many benefits you see from continuing to work? It seems like it ticks a lot of boxes in terms of physical activity, relationships, and so forth, but maybe you can walk us through what the data say about that.

Freedman: I think that the three main benefits are financial security, social connection, and this sense of purpose. And there’s so much research now on the link, including through the Blue Zones series that’s been airing over the past months, that purpose and health are inextricably intertwined. And then also on the social connection; we are in the middle, according to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, of an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. And a lot of people get that kind of social connection from the workplace. So, I think the kind of holy trinity of benefits of longer working lives is income security, social connection, and an ongoing sense of purpose.

One of my favorite quotes is from the poet Marge Piercy. She has a poem called To Be of Use, and it closes with the line, “The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.” And that’s not something that has an expiration date, that’s not confined to midlife. It’s something that I think people feel deeply even as they move into their 60s, 70s, and beyond. So, purpose, connection, and security, I think all are inextricably intertwined in the benefits of longer working lives.

Finding Your Encore Career in Retirement

Benz: We wanted to talk about something that you pioneered, this idea of an encore career where someone reinvents themselves or builds on their career to transition into later in life doing meaningful work. Maybe you can talk about how you define an encore career and how, as people are approaching their later years, they might think about what their encore career might be.

Freedman: We were inspired by a lot of famous people, Jimmy Carter being a powerful example, who’d had these second acts at the intersection of passion and purpose. Second acts that maybe didn’t last as long as their midlife career but weighed as much, were as significant when they thought about what their contributions to life had been. So, we came up with the idea of an encore career to celebrate that. The tagline we used was “Second Acts for the Greater Good.” Because for so many people, like Jimmy Carter, these second acts were a way to take their accumulated experience and apply it to issues focused on improving the quality of lives for other people.

And one of the lessons that emerged is that very rarely were these encore careers entirely new kinds of work. We have the image of the person who’s a banker and then they open the vineyard, or the B&B, and it all happens magically and the sun shines and nobody ever breaks a sweat. But, in fact, the people who won the Purpose Prize, and thousands of nominees, were people who were frequently building on what they had done in their middle years. One example was a guy named Gary Maxworthy who had wanted to go into the Peace Corps when he was younger but had a family and couldn’t afford to do it. His wife died of cancer when he was in his 60s. He decided he was going to launch a new chapter in his life. In midlife, he had worked in the food distribution business, and he discovered that food banks were only giving out processed and canned foods, but he knew from his food distribution work over decades that farms and growers were throwing out a lot of fresh food because they were aesthetically blemished. So, he created the Farm to Family program where he created a distribution network of farmers and growers to food banks that I believe last year distributed something like 120 million pounds of fresh produce to food banks. It’s an example of how experience and innovation can go hand in hand.

What we discovered is that 5 million Americans were already in encore careers at that point, but 21 million more gave following that path a top priority. And they all said that they saw their encore career as being about a decade in duration. So, that’s 25 million people, 10 years—that’s 250 million years of potential human and social capital that society could benefit from if it made it easier for people to go from what’s last to what’s next.