Retirement and Relativity

When I was 17, the drinking age in my home state of Wisconsin was 18, but as I approached 18, it got raised to 19.  No biggie, right?  What’s one more year before I can have a ‘legal’ beer?  So, as I attended my first year at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, I looked forward to going out with my friends as a sophomore, but that was also not to be.  You see, that year, the drinking age got raised to 21.  So, my first ‘legal’ drink was actually as a college graduate!  Looking back, it was too bad that anyone ever let me drink legally, but that’s a topic for another day.  What I’m more worried about now is the retirement age!

When I was a teenager, retirement was at 62, if you lived that long, earlier if you could afford it.  As I began to work, I started hearing about the retirement age being raised to 65, and now that I’m a doctor in private practice, I’m getting things in the mail that talk about the Social Security benefits you get if you continue working until the “full retirement age” of 67 and an added bonus if you work until 70.

Now wait a minute here!

If this trend continues, by the time I’m nearing retirement age, it should be approximately 82.  And, of course, if history repeats itself, they will change it to 83 just before I hit 82 and then to 85 as I close in on 84.  Now, if someone told me I was going to have to work until I was 85, I sure would have taken better care of myself.  (See first paragraph.)

I’m wondering how many other Generation X’ers there are out there who are watching the expectations for their lives and their futures change right before their eyes, perhaps year after year after year.  Do you go to a financial planner who tells you that you can retire any time you want, provided you only live 90 more days?  Will you die teaching Sex Education classes long after you’ve forgotten what sex is?  Are you counting on your 65-year-old children to take care of you during your old age, or are you just putting your head in the sand and refusing to think of such issues that are decades away?

Don’t freak out!  Things will be okay.  You just need to drastically change the ideas you have about your life.  Your life will not resemble your parents’ very closely, but then again, neither did theirs resemble their parents.  That’s the nature of life, constant change.  Every generation gets upset and worried because things aren’t turning out the way the ‘grown ups’ told them they would.  Guess what?  It never does.

The key to a happy life is not to live in the past and dwell on what you can’t have or what someone else got when you didn’t get it, but to open your eyes to the reality of your own life and adapt to what life hands you.  We may not have Social Security when we retire, like our grandparents had, but our grandparents weren’t receiving videos of their grandchildren by e-mail in the retirement home, either.  It’s all relative.

Marlo Archer, Ph.D.
Down to Earth Enterprises
1250 E. Baseline Rd., Suite 102
Tempe, AZ 85283
(480) 705-5007