Will Coronavirus Change Retirement?

By Karen and Erica

Well yes, of course it will. Leaving aside financial impact, which we are not qualified to address, the psychosocial picture has changed.

Retirement is the end of a career, not the end of involvement in society. But because of coronavirus, social involvement pretty much evaporated for a bit. Not only for retired people, of course, but for retired people its loss may resonate with other messages that cause us to feel as if we are being sidelined. We were told that the way we can contribute is to stay home. We understood the health imperative, and adhered to the directive. But the message sounds a lot like: aren’t you lucky that you now have the time to sit in your rocking chair and smell the roses, which actually means, you have reached the end of your useful life so step aside while the rest of us keep the world spinning.

Now it appears that some parts of the country and the world are coming back—though others are still in crisis. Reopening, even slowly, seems like an epiphany. But we are still told that people over 65 need to take special care of themselves. Again, that message resonates with concepts we dislike. We accept that older people may be at more risk than younger people because our immune systems are not as powerful as they once were, but that cannot mean that every person over 65 needs to be kept away from other humans for the rest of her life.

People who retire today have a third of their lives ahead of them. No benefit to them, or to society, comes from isolating us. Indeed, huge benefits would come from using our experience. Keeping us isolated may be the easy way to keep us from contracting the virus, but it will cause us to succumb to loneliness and other illnesses, and will waste what we have to offer.

It is essential to come up with a more discrete approach to identifying vulnerable people, and to identify ways that allow those people to maintain health while staying in the mix. Masks, testing, contact tracing, palliatives will surely soon be developed to the point that we can once again participate in society. (Of course, it would be a good idea to make sure any remedies for COVID-19 actually work for us. Keeping us out of clinical trials is counter-productive. Reminds us of the male lab rat problem.)

Yes, coronavirus has changed retirement by reinforcing the stereotypes that define retirement. But it has also introduced new ways of living virtually that enables us at any age. So we will not turn back. We are not sitting at home doing nothing. We are thinking about how we can contribute now, and when people get back together again, as we know they will. We plan to be there, with everyone else, creating a new world for all of us. With fewer stereotypes of any kind.