Retirement dreams vanish as goalposts are moved again

HOW do you feel about working until you’re 70? Just try to stop me, you might say. Well, you might say that now, with all the fervour of (relative) youth upon you, but fast-forward 20 or 30 or 40 years, and you might feel differently.

You might feel ready to retire, or you might just feel magnanimous, as my mother did when retiring reluctantly from her job in education, aged 60. She said it was only fair for her to go and “give the young people the chance to progress”.

Chances are, come age 70, you will be in the fullness of rude health and just won’t want to go either. In the US, four in 10 women and a quarter of adults aged 65-plus remain in the workplace. Presumably they like it. And I know many people in Ireland who have felt forced out of their careers at a time when they have felt at the top of their game, merely because they had reached a certain number. So perhaps we should say ‘bravo’ to the ESRI’s attempts to enshrine our right to work into our decrepitude, whatever its actual intent.

People say 70 is the new 50 but I don’t buy it. At 70, I might finally have cleared that Celtic Tiger mortgage, but there will be other spectres on the horizon: the illnesses we have come to equate with age – such as dementia or certain cancers, or the onset of diseases brought on by the modern scourges of stress and obesity. I am tired now. I will almost certainly be exhausted at 70.

When I first entered the workplace I could expect to retire at 60, an age that felt still young and full of future hope. If I had grandchildren, I reasoned, I could provide childcare to enable my own children to take up their place in the workforce. I could be as much use to society retired as I was in the workforce. Then, the goalposts moved and the retirement age became 65. More recently, this age was set at 68, and today I hear I’m still going to be clocking in at 70. Who knows what the eventual limit will be.

Retirement has become the elusive carrot, being dangled ever further out of reach. The social contract I felt I had with society is disintegrating, and more fool me.

All this before considering who will actually want to employ us all at 70, or how we will cope with the pressure of remaining current in our employment; caught in the loop of forever upskilling while having to watch your back that someone younger, fresher and with the ability to put in more man-hours is coming for your job. Perhaps the solution would be to downgrade to something less stressful or simply go quietly into the night as you find yourself washed up and on the dole instead of a respectable retiree.

Some people live for their retirement. I saw this in my grandparents, and then my parents, as they edged closer to this holy grail of their working life. They speculated about all the wonderful things they would do in retirement. For my grandparents, who worked for 45 years, it was true. For their post-war generation there were foreign holidays and treats for the grandkids beyond their imaginings.

For my parents, retirement was less full. They dealt with collapsed pension funds as they became carers for ailing parents and grandchildren simultaneously. They became tired and stressed, before my dad became irrevocably ill, four months short of his 70th birthday. No halcyon years on earned State benefits for them. But then, isn’t that just the outcome the Government would be aiming for, were it to move the pensionable age to 70?