What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an interview between Bec Wilson and Dan Haylett on Bec Wilson’s Prime Time Podcast.
Dan Haylett: I think work should be part of everyone's retirement plan. In the book I talk about purpose and identity. If we sit down and be true to ourselves and take away any financial reward that work gives us, there's a long list of other things that work gives us. It's quite dangerous to feel like you can just stop that.
For a lot of people, particularly in a modern society where knowledge work is the predominant way, we don't need to retire. Retirement is a man-made thing designed for people that couldn't work in the factories anymore. They physically were unable to do the job - the only job - that they were able to do.
Bec Wilson: It was an industrial revolution, right? It was, it was designed to drive more productivity out of the industrial revolution?
Dan Haylett: And we still kind of subscribe to that, which is mad in a modern-day world where knowledge work [dominates] and you can work from anywhere.
I think about that accumulated load of wisdom that people have the ability to give back to mentor, to continue to work, to be able to do things that they love doing. I see this part of life as you do more of the things that you love doing and less of the things that you don’t. And you've got the ultimate freedom to choose what that looks like.
Personally, I think “retirement” as [it is usually] defined should be pushed all the way back. Retirement, to me, is if you're lucky enough to make it into your early 80s, or something like that.
Where you've got that last bit of life and you're going “great, I'm now in my reflecting mode. I'm definitely not working, I'm not spending a huge amount of money, and I'm just kind of reflecting on my life and spending some time with people”.
That part is probably the time [to call it retirement]. This first bit of it I would define as your exploring years and those years where you really want to start doing stuff and spend time with people intentionally. I don't know how we define it. I think I'd love to ban the word [retirement] but it is so ingrained.
Bec Wilson: Oh I love the word and think it plays a role, but I don't think it plays a role until much later in life. The IMF found that in the Western world, people who are 70 have the same cognitive capability as someone who is 53 in the year 2000. It's boggling that we are still behaving like 53 is the end of our life, and that we can't work until we're 70. We gained 17 years of cognitive capacity.
Dan Haylett: It's mental, isn't it? People need to get to a point where they feel financially and emotionally free enough and psychologically free enough, whatever that means, to decide their own fate.
I think the trouble with corporate careers that we are conditioned and wired and told what to do and constrained to a degree, and we need that ability to be able to go “right, now we've got control. If I want to work two or three days a week, work two or three days if I don't want to, if I want to go away for six weeks, I can go away for six.”
Arthur Brooks talks about this in his brilliant book, From Strength to Strength. He talks about two lines. When we hit our mid 50s, we go into this knowledge line of our career. And actually that line, as you rightly said, continues to go up. We continue to absorb knowledge and learn and do things.
Bec Wilson: If we stay curious.
Dan Haylett: If we stay curious. If you decide to retire and step back, I think there's a lot of stats out there that suggest that cognitive decline can happen pretty rapidly. So, yeah, I think that to me, is the big thing. It's not the goal. It's not the end.
It's a transition and a next phase of taking more control, using your wisdom, using your accumulated knowledge, to give back to maybe earn a bit more money, to allow you that time to be able to go and do things that you want to do. Then maybe we get to our point where maybe the traditional retirement has been pushed back 25 years.
This was a lightly edited transcript of an exchange between Bec Wilson and Dan Haylett on Bec Wilson’s Prime Time Podcast. You can listen to the episode here.