A fifty-something friend emailed the other day: “Will likely stop full-time work this year . . . retirement beckons!” I was surprised, because it seemed only about 15 minutes ago that he’d been my twenty-something student-housemate, sprawled on the sofa in his underpants in mid-afternoon.
At 54, I’ve started hearing from people my age or barely older that they are “running out of ambition” or heading into “preretirement”, that antechamber between career and pension. Others suffer health scares, lose confidence in their bodies and start winding down. Their exits affect my work too: every time a friend retires, a piece of your network dies. As my generation enters the final stretch of the career race, I’m wondering: what did we learn about jobs, life and money that might benefit someone starting now?
First, whatever career you choose will quite likely implode before you finish your race. I trained with local journalists in 1994. Do any of them still work in what remains of local journalism? Friends who became academics, architects or civil servants have seen their salaries and status fall remorselessly, relative to other professions and sometimes even in absolute terms. With hindsight, we should all have gone into tech.