Charles Handy. Portrait by Tom Miller
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Why we need to reinvent retirement
Charles Handy’s new blueprint for a more meaningful and fulfilling life
“We are having to reinvent retirement, now that it can last for 20, even 30 years, most of them healthy ones, “ says Charles Handy, one of the world’s best-known thinkers, in his new autobiography Myself and Other More Important Matters.
“Retirement is obviously the wrong word. It is another stage of life, an unexpected bonus of prosperity. We would be crazy not to take advantage of it.”
At his farewell party from his job as Warden of St George’s House, a friend sidled up to him and said: “I have just one piece of advice for you. Make sure you have something to do when you get out of bed each morning. Retirement can kill you otherwise.”
Handy says he was taken aback. “He thought that I was retiring. I was 49 and nothing was further from my thoughts; 25 years later, I still think it a bad idea.”
Born in 1932, at 74 Handy is well past normal retirement age, but he believes the principles that guided him at 49 apply whether you are 59, 69 or even 79.
Instead of retirement, he advocates a new beginning – a new life that might have several strands that together make up what he calls a portfolio life.
He goes on to describe how he and his wife Elizabeth, a photographer, collaborated on a book called Reinvented Lives, in which 28 women wrote about what their lives were like in their sixties.
“Some started new careers, a restaurant with her daughter for one, an international legal consultancy for another, an animal charity for a third. One decided to have fun with the girlfriends she had missed out on by marrying young. One couple were happily consumed with grandchildren. One got married for the first time, another for the second. Others had the time now to concentrate more on what they had always done in the gaps in their time and saw their work blossom as a result.
“The common factor in all these stories was the way they had each taken positive steps to make the most of these bonus years. They were busy, fulfilled people, living examples of eudaimonia [contentedness].
“None of them used the word retirement – with one exception, a woman who complained that she had been forcibly retired by her firm, although, as she looked back, it was the best thing that could have happened since it propelled her into a new and more interesting life.
“In time, I suspect, many will look back on their years of formal work as we now look back on our college days: as a long past formative experience.”
“Looking back, I reinvented myself as I approached 50, and I don’t yet feel the need to do it again so radically.
“The books and articles may change their nature and appear less frequently, the lectures get shorter and more occasional but that will leave more time for improving my culinary skills, for eating and talking with my family and friends, for theatres, operas and concerts, other ways of learning because I know, from watching others, that once you stop learning you might as well stop living.
“None of this will change the world or any part of it, but I long ago embraced that part of the Hippocratic Oath, swearing to myself ‘above all, to do no harm’.”
Written by Paul Humphreys
This article was created: 16 August 2006.
This article was last edited: 13 November 2006.
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