Q&A: Unretiring is not always about the money
Some insight on the rising tide of unretirees from author Mark Walton.
More Americans over 65 want to work.
These folks used to be the outliers, but no more. They’re part of an "unretirement" movement that’s transforming the workplace.
Unretiring, or going back to work after having decided to pack it in after decades in the workforce, is gaining steam across the country. Many retirees have stepped off the sidelines and headed back to work, especially after many were forced to retire earlier than expected during the pandemic. According to a recent report from T. Rowe Price, around 7% of retirees are looking for work in retirement, while 20% say they’re already working part-time or full-time.
Mark Walton, a Peabody award-winning journalist and management consultant, traveled across the US to meet with unretired CEOs, Mayo Clinic doctors, attorneys, neuroscientists, psychologists, financial experts, journalists, and more for his new book, "Unretired: How Highly Effective People Live Happily Ever After."
Walton was seeking answers to why folks keep on showing up to work at a time when they could opt to step off the merry-go-round.
The number of college-educated Americans in their 60s and beyond who have kept working rather than retire has more than quadrupled over the past few decades, Walton told Yahoo Finance. "And these numbers keep rising as people recalibrate their careers."
Roughly 1 in 5 Americans ages 65 and older were employed in 2023, four times the number in the mid-1980s. That tallies up to around 11 million workers, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center.
Read more: Retirement planning: A step-by-step guide
Here's what Walton had to say about why retirees are heading back to work. Edited excerpts:
What motivates people to keep working besides money?
Engagement and contribution are the keys. To make a distinction here, the people that this book focuses on have been successful and accomplished their whole lives. The idea of discontinuing work that matters to them and discontinuing the ability to make a contribution is a very painful thought. So what motivates them is fascination and love for their work and the desire to continue to make a contribution.
Why this book now? Haven’t successful people always kept their hand in as consultants or board members to give back their expertise?
I'm a journalist, and a couple of years ago, I began to see how this story was bubbling up. I knew that overall, the number of 65-plus-year-old workers had been growing, and certainly, part of the motivation for many of them was the need to continue to generate income. But what I wondered about was what those people I kept meeting and hearing about who were saying that it’s not all about money for them. I found it's college graduates who are driving this thing, and it’s professional women. That's what's changed in the last 30 years.
Are they spooked by the pitfalls of retirement? You write that retirement can be a bad idea.
That’s for sure. The first pitfall is a loss of personal identity. Nobody really pays much attention to it. But they’ve invested their lives in something that matters to them, and their identities are tied up with that work.
Pitfall number two is loss of daily structure and schedule. And that’s no small thing. There's a number of stories in the books about accomplished people who retired, and within two or three months, have no idea what day it is, what time it is, or what to do with themselves.
The third one is the loss of friends and social networks.
Oh boy, Mark, how long does it take those who have retired to throw up their arms and unretire?
When I use the word unretire, often it's used to mean that someone flunks retirement and then goes back to work. I wrote about people to whom that happened and also those who choose never to retire at all. For those who retired at around 64 or 65 during the pandemic, a lot of them have already gone back to work.
For those who have never retired, it bubbles up from a lifetime of commitment to work that they've enjoyed, and they keep extending that path into their 80s, and in some cases, into their 90s.
What kind of work do they do next? Lots of people I’ve interviewed made complete career pivots to follow their passion.
I call those folks rebels. These are people who discover something that fascinates them or maybe fascinated them all along, and they create a structure to do that. And some of them make a great living in the process of doing it.
It's sometimes a radical reinvention. It might be a re-engineering of what it is that they've previously done. It's almost always a mixture of talents and abilities that they've had all along, just putting it to work in a different way. What they have done is transform themselves into an entrepreneurial being.
Another group is people who've found a way to continue to do the same kind of work that they've done since they came out of college or graduate school. In some cases, it's with the same employer, like the doctors I write about at the Mayo Clinic.
And then the third category are the creators. These are people in their 50s and 60s who discover creative skills and abilities that they never knew they had. Often, these are folks who, for instance, they loved writing as a kid, or they loved art as a kid, but they put it aside to do something else, to become a doctor or a lawyer. But this desire has always been there. And what they discover when they have an opportunity, or create an opportunity to put it to work, is that they're really good at it. Their love for it enables them to take the risks necessary to put it into action.
You spend some time in the book discussing the legendary professional management guru Peter Drucker? Can you fill us in briefly on his role in the unretirement movement?
Drucker was way ahead of his time. He was a management consultant who wrote most of his 39 books after age 65. He foresaw in the late ‘90s the inevitability of the need to manage the second half of life. He worked with high-level executives.
Unlike manual workers. who work with their hands and their muscles and would need to kick back after a certain number of years of work because their bodies couldn't support it, he saw the emergence of the knowledge professional. In fact, he coined the term "knowledge workers" in the 1950s — people who work with their brains and not with their bodies.
He said if your brain isn't injured, or doesn't develop a disease, it's not going to wear out. You'll have that mind and the ability to continue to succeed, maybe even supersede what you've always done. And you must put this to work. You must create a second half of life for yourself, or you'll have an unsatisfying life. That was his philosophy.
The goal of the unretiree is to work at something they care about, something they love, right?
People at this age who are truly successful in all fields are successful because they really care. It's meaningful to them. It provides them a sense of meaning and satisfaction. The old-fashioned retirement paradigm requires that you give that up and fill that void with something else, and it's not really doable.
How did people you met in your research find skills they were not aware of?
Experimentation. They were and are open to new things.
Parting thoughts?
If you are one of those growing millions of people who find that the track of life that's been laid down, this idea of going to school, going to work, and then tuning out, is not right for you, you’re not alone. Your interest and desire to continue to work and express yourself, rather than being lost in a lifestyle that doesn't work for you, is something that you ought to pursue. It's very possible to continue to work and succeed and express yourself to a very old age. This is the future.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist, and the author of 14 books, including "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in The New World of Work" and "Never Too Old To Get Rich." Follow her on X @kerryhannon.
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