Workaholistic Repose
Fixation on retirement seems to take three forms from my observation. The first is the most obvious that people who are looking forward to retiring are usually very fixated on the financial preparation for the blessed event and all the lifestyle issues associated therewith. Finding that perfect spot with the right weather to suit your temperament and presumably the right pace and proximity to civilization to fit your expectations of how you will spend your time. Some want to move to the sun and near a nice golf course. Some want to reclaim their lost youth by moving back into some City or other to be near the cultural events they might have missed or skipped in the folly of their youth. Some want to move closer to family. Some want to move further away from family. Some want to move closer to some family and further away from other family. How one intends to spend their retirement is the key to the direction taken by these fixations.
I know people who move to be close to their grandchildren and want their lives to revolve around that proximity. I know people who want to have every day be a sunny day so they can languish either in a golf cart or in their pools. I know people who want to stay close to their friends so they can go to dinner and theater at will in the evening and wander through the Met or MoMA on lazy afternoons. I even have one friend who likes being the Master of the Manor on a hilltop in a little out-of-the-way Mexican village and enjoy the comfort and prominence that such a stately existence must entail. Everybody’s got their reasons and everyone follows their own vision of perfection in repose.
In fact, some people want to relax and slow down in retirement and some people use it as a time to catch up on all the things, including physical activity, that they feel they have not had enough time to pursue in their working years. I knew one guy who had done very well in commercial real estate and had accumulated a large, but largely loosely-curated collection of modern art that he wanted to sort through and give away for some combination of tax purposes and cultural posterity. That caused him to feel the need to run around town and go to three or more museums and galleries each day to know everything there was to know about modern art in the current world. The point is that everyone seems to approach the whole final period of their lives in very personal and idiosyncratic ways that defines “repose” as ranging from napping and sitting on the porch to strapping on your track shoes and trying to outrun the inevitable.
I am loathe to discuss too much about an arbitration hearing process that I am the middle of, but I am merely an auditor of this hearing this week and I do run into periods where I am a more casual listener than not when the realm being pursued does not relate to my testimony (like all the parsing of tax benefits and advances to and from an expatriate partner of a firm that was a partnership and is now a public company…yikes). This is my rationalization for why I am finding my mind wandering to the issue of how different people choose to spend their retirement.
Specifically, on this hearing I see one person who is about five years older than me (call it mid-70’s) who had a long and successful legal career at the highest levels and with a sterling pedigree from the finest schools. Presumably (and I know enough to know that everyone spends their money in different ways and has different needs) he does not need to work to have a comfortable retirement. And yet, he has recently formed a firm to engage in arbitration and mediation and thereby stay firmly in the saddle of the legal profession. He is spending perhaps fifty hours this week being very attentive to the proceedings plus all the time he must spend above and beyond that reading the voluminous array of related documents, which number over 1,000 from what I have seen. This is serious work and cannot be thought of as a part-time job. This guy clearly wants to work and work hard. He has a strong mind and seems to be of equally strong body to handle the needs of the work. I find myself thinking that he loves the legal arena and finds the work engaging and interesting. He is in the game and likes being in the game.
There is another guy who is a finance guy who is probably five years younger than me (I am almost 67) and he is wealthy enough from a very successful finance career that you can google his net worth and get what is probably an understatement of that, sufficient to conclude that this is not a guy worrying about his monthly pension check to pay the rent. What I have learned through this arbitration is that he has multiple homes in Europe (and probably the U.S.) and seems to be always in motion for work. He is deemed to be a very hard-working guy who spends more than 75% of his time on the road or, more accurately, “in the air”. He is like the George Clooney character in Up in the Air. He probably is a candidate for one of those 10 Million Mile special privilege cards that Clooney wanted so badly (on probably more than one airline…or maybe on Netjets!). By the nature of his business, despite his wealth, he has a position that “requires” him to commit to stay in the saddle for another five years or so if he is doing the responsible thing for his employer or investors. He has power and position in addition of wealth, but he seems to have something else burning in his gut that makes him want to stay in gear and not retire now or any time soon.
One additional observation is that I had to jump on another arbitration hearing yesterday on a case that has run on for four weeks now with each arbitration grouped with up to 5-10 claimants. This has caused me to “meet” more than thirty arbitrators and judges with no particular end in sight for how many more weeks of this I have ahead of me (I know that there are 477 claimants, so there is a finite number, but I just do not know it since some settle and some arbitrate). So, the lone arbitrator in the other case is hardly alone in this occupation he has chosen for his legal afterlife. It seems plenty of lawyers like that gig in their later years. I know the same to be true of expert witness work, but that is less of a business and more of a gig here and there. So, how one approaches their retirement careers can involve another full-time job (with all that word entails) or it can be episodic dipping in to keep one’s professional skills as sharp as possible.
I guess it is not a monumental observation to suggest that some people simply don’t retire, they just shift jobs and perhaps strap on full body armor (suit and tie?) less often or work from a less formal or distant workplace. My pondering this morning is how much COVID and social distancing has changed this. It seems that now younger people are able to enjoy most of the benefits of what were retirement jobs that had people working remotely and with more casual surroundings. I wonder whether this is good or bad? It does suggest that there is less to move on to and less of a delineation between full-steam and half-steam work. My experience tells me that without that clarity, the casual may prevail, but the 24X7 workaholism will also likely prevail. I think that means there is another category of employment status; besides employed and retired, there has always been self-employed, but now there is even more granularity. The category with the greatest potential impact (at least on some scales like leisure and experience…and perhaps even wisdom) is the intensity of the work input one takes on in a later-life career. Don’t be surprised to see a new box waiting to be checked called Workaholistic Repose.