I quit my job at 54, but don’t you dare say I’ve retired
We’re not quitting: we’re finding ways to employ our wisdom and expertise with flexibility. It adds up to a whole new life. By Sarah Bailey
Ithink it was the umpteenth uneaten lockdown lunch – prepared by my husband and left sad, cold and coagulating beside my mouse mat – when it dawned on me. The corporate career I’d spent three decades nurturing was no longer loving me back.
My relationship with work has been one of the most exhilarating and defining loves of my life. It’s taken me from being a kid reading Smash Hits in her bedroom in a village south of Stockport, to interviewing Madonna, working in Manhattan with the most extraordinary magazine team you can imagine, to meeting women who rocked my world in Hong Kong. Even when life interrupted – childbirth, illness – my default was to get back on the hamster wheel. “Work is your yoga,” said one colleague and friend, who knew me best. Weird as that may sound, she was right.
Starting work in the 1980s (a thrilling decade for a media wannabe and strivers of all stripes), I was eager to jump from lily pad to lily pad, from role to role... And, as the years rolled by, from print, to digital... Segue into marketing and retail? No problem! In recent years, I managed to weather some bruising restructures. I just gritted my teeth, dug deep and got on with it.
Then 12 months ago, I realised something was amiss (and it could probably be measured in uneaten lunches). Zoom culture during the pandemic had made it worse of course; when the working day offered nary an opportunity for a bathroom break, never mind time to actually eat a bagel. The all-consuming nature of my now very corporate job meant that work worries were seeping into my leisure hours and family time. Even if I wasn’t actually tapping away at my laptop at nine o’clock in the evening, I would be mentally composing an email in my head. When my children talked to me – keen to debate the relative merits of Song Heung-Min vs. Harry Kane, or enquire if I could distinguish the earth’s mantle from its crust – I’d often do a double take. Had they been speaking to me or not?
What happened next involved many epic phone calls with sage and wonderful friends, much puzzling over household finances, the solemn promise to forgo my Uber habit (nine months clean!). A lot of Tony’s Chocolonely got eaten. In the end, I decided the butterflies in my stomach were excitement about the adventure I was about to embark upon, rather than stress about what I was about to leave. I realised that I wanted to reconnect with the things about work that gave me joy – writing, pitching book ideas, meeting friends who run start-ups in coffee shops to help them speed-write a newsletter/ polish a presentation, while putting the world to rights over an oat-milk flat white, accompanied by gales of laughter. Reader, I left my job.
A quick newsflash from this weekend, my son wrote a song (something I hesitated to include here lest it sound contrived, but I swear this did happen!). The theme of said ballad was freedom, and he had composed some very beautiful lyrics about feeling like a meteorite crashing through the moonlit sky. And there was another lyric (slightly less poetic, but very meaningful to me) about feeling like a freelancer, who had just left their job... I kid you not!
Making the decision to leave my job and embrace a new role as a midlife multi-hyphenate – with all its uncertainties and financial adjustments – felt instinctive, rather than strategic. But I also knew I was not the only person feeling this way. I spoke to Dr Eliza Filby, a historian of generations, family and ageing, who also presents the It’s All Relative podcast. “Everyone is talking about the ‘Great Resignation’ now,” says Dr Filby. “A lot of those ‘pandemic epiphanies’ around work are happening not to the young, but to the people in midlife and the much older.”
‘I don’t believe in waiting for life to happen. I believe in doing it now’
Dr Filby believes that 50-somethings represent the super-squeezed middle – as the first generation to have both delayed getting married and had their children later, they often have elderly parents still to care for (“those in their 50s actually I think had the hardest pandemic,” she observes).
Many maxed-out midlifers doing triple backflips on the domestic/caring/parenting front are hitting corporate burnout – but a shift in perspective (do stay with me here) might mean letting go of that deeply ingrained life structure of “education-work-retire” that we’ve grown up with. And this might lead to embracing new, experimental (possibly even rejuvenating!) chapters of life.
Frankly, as official UK retirement dates seem to drift ever forwards into a hard-to-imagine future and familial responsibilities are being reshaped by demographic changes, the “golf and grandkids” model of retirement no longer seems so relevant or as achievable. Previous generations may have seen the middle decades of life as a time of “semiretirement” if you were lucky. Emotionally and conceptually that is just not resonating for me and many of my peers. As Dr Filby says: “The retirement concept was only invented in the early 20th century anyway, so in a sense you’re talking about something that has got a relatively new history.”
It makes sense that 50-somethings (characterised by Dr Filby as the original Sex and the City generation) are getting the itch to mix it up a bit now, while they are still strong and healthy. This might mean working differently, say, flipping from full time to consultancy. “The most successful operators in the gig economy are those in their 50s,” says Dr Filby. “The biggest rise in the selfemployed, and the biggest rise in founding new businesses are in that age bracket.” It might mean shifting to a blend of work and education that nourishes the soul and expands marketable skill sets; or pivoting to something completely new.
Given the ever-accelerating demands of corporate culture in recent decades, it’s no surprise that coaching to help buffer and guide professionals through moments of crisis and loss of purpose is itself a burgeoning mini-industry. Dr Yvette Ankrah MBE, 44, is a transformational coach, and “recovered overachiever”, who specialises in helping high-fliers – mostly women – avoid burnout. Ankrah’s own journey, from journalism, to PR, to fundraising in the voluntary sector – powering through every unrealistic deadline, juggling every possible plate – hit a nadir when as a new mother, she had a health crisis and was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia. “Doctors then thought I had meningitis. I did not, but I was given a lumbar puncture anyway. I couldn’t move for a long time, for about a month, so I had plenty of time to think about how I didn’t want my life to be like that any more. And that was the catalyst for complete change.”
Today, Yvette does a mix of client work, delivering training to organisations and writing. She works between 9am and 3pm, and makes the school pick-up. “I might do an hour or so in the evening, but I no longer work weekends. If I look at my week and it’s a bit hectic, I cancel stuff, because I don’t want that any more in my world.
“Do I have the life I want? Not 100 per cent, but I’m pretty damned close. I don’t believe in retirement, I really don’t. I just believe in different chapters, different phases. I don’t believe in waiting for life to happen. I believe in doing it now!”
Ankrah says the women who seek her out for coaching are typically senior leaders who keep up a slick facade, even if they are crumbling beneath. “I always ask them what they want. What is it that they want from their life?
“There’s a technique that I do which is called timelining. If we look five years down the road, which decision would you take which would make you happiest in five years’ time? And you can feel it in your system where you’re going to be happiest.”
Philip Whale is a New Zealand-born lawyer, who arrived in London in the Big Bang years and clocked up 21 years at powerhouse firm Norton Rose, before stepping away from the City at the age of 55. He admits that when his first child was born in 1992, he barely saw her (“I made sure I was at the birth and for a few days afterwards”). The birth of a second child, nine years later, was the prompt to readdress his priorities and ultimately leave the City behind. Today, he commits his time as a trustee of two community charities in his beloved adopted neighbourhood of Archway in north London and seeks out projects that align with his values. “The City has always been about money. But there are different ways of looking at money and one is purpose. And I felt I wasn’t contributing anything socially useful with what I was doing. And the fact is at times, I was very unhappy.”
Whale is careful to emphasise that he had a financial safety net for his midlife adventure. And while it is an important point, I do not think it makes his life pivot any less admirable.
After all, if you have the opportunity to change your life for the better and prioritise happiness, relationships and purpose, should you not grab it with both hands? To quote the great food writer MFK Fisher (whose heart would have truly broken at the sight of my forlorn, uneaten mouse mat lunches): “When shall we live if not now?”
To get a deeper understanding of the meaning of work in our lives, and consider how it might evolve in our era of changing demographics, digital culture and the advent of AI, I speak to James Suzman, the anthropologist, whose latest book, Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, was a breakout hit during the pandemic months (published in 30 languages, no less). “The way we work is not something to do with our instinct. It’s not some part of our nature to work obsessively,” he says. “We know this from studying evolution… Hunter-gatherers actually tended to do the minimum amount of what we call in a job ‘work’ and managed to look after themselves quite comfortably doing far less work than you would imagine and spending the rest of their time and their energy doing work that brought them pleasure like painting or making music.”
Suzman explains that our obsessive striving to accumulate surplus is in fact a hangover from the agricultural revolution and in our affluent, technology-enabled modern world it really is no longer the key to our species’ survival and happiness. As he talks, the words of one of the most quoted lines from Work ring in my ears: “For more than 95 per cent of human history, people enjoyed more leisure time than we do now.“Food for thought, indeed.