Continued Summer Thoughts About Work and Retirement

We continue with our recent summer thoughts about work and retirement. 

We've gone through a cursory outline of what we might dub the practical side of retirement. That's where we focus on matters financial (e.g., whether we will have "enough" money to retire) and personal (e.g., what we will do when we retire). Basically, we need to know how much income we'll be getting from social security and - for those who still have one - a pension. We need to know how much we've got in savings and investments and how much these might reasonably provide to meet our necessary and discretionary expenses - both of which we should pretty much know off the to of our heads.

Without minimizing the importance of addressing these issues, we did note that a good steward should naturally be concerned with these. But we noted that these are in a sense "superficial."  We need to make all this more "Catholic." Our reasoning here: retirement isn't really - or shouldn't be - a time of "not working." Work is basic to us as human beings. And, as we've seen, the very concept of retirement didn't exist for most of human history.

We might even consider how this retirement thing has in some sense messed with our human nature a bit. If work is essential to us as God's creatures, what sense does it make to think that we'll be not working when we retire?

Maybe it's better to not even think of retiring at all. After all, if work is indeed an essential component of human nature, does it make sense to stop working?

But before we create any confusion here, perhaps it's best to step back an remind ourselves of exactly what is human work, as designed by God, our Loving Father, for His creatures. We covered much of this beginning in 2016 when we presented a long series of posts about human work. Here's an excerpt from that series:

...when we talk about work, we include more than just the "job" we have that pays us a salary. For many of us, work doesn't start and stop there. What about the work many of us perform at home. How about helping our children doing their homework? There's the work of stay-at-home Moms (and Dads), the work some of us do pursuing an avocation (for example, playing a musical instrument, writing the great American novel or -ahem - posting on a blog. And let's not forget the work of cloistered monks and nuns. Nobody "pays" these folks. The Vatican doesn't send them three squares a day or maintain their monasteries. In addition to their daily regimen of prayer and spiritual works, these folks work.

You can probably think of many other forms of work, paid and unpaid. Thinking about it in this widest possible sense, it becomes clear that many of us work a good deal of the time. And while there's such a thing as working too much, let's not forget that old saying, "An idle mind is the devil's workshop." (Perhaps you've had direct experience with this. I know I have.) Yes, we need a respite from our labors. Nothing wrong with a little R&R - rest and recreation. But that doesn't mean we grab a six-pack or a quart of scotch when we get home from the job and sit in front of our digital screens for endless hours. (At least I hope it doesn't!)  

So it's clear that work doesn't cease when we stop working for our regular paid employment. With this in mind, it seems that when we typically talk about "retiring," we're really talking about a time when we no longer work for pay - or something like that. Let's not muddy the waters by mixing in some idea that we'll "stop working." Which means that "retirement" is not the end of our work life.

This distinction is critical. If understood it should help us make better decisions when it comes to our "retirement planning." Indeed, we might just jettison the whole "retirement planning" ball of confusion and simply look forward to a time - for most of us - when we will no longer be receiving that regular pay check from our accustomed employment. (Or in the case of business owners, when we will either pass on or wind down our business and the income it provides us.)

Looks like we've made some progress digging deeper into the real connection between work and retirement. More next time...