https://thewalrus.ca/the-end-of-retirement/
"I’m standing on my back stoop looking out at the eighty or so people jammed
into the backyard for my retirement party. They’re here to celebrate my forty
years in journalism. There’s the gang from
Domino fashion magazine, where I
got my start in the can’t-spend-enough, cocaine-stoked ’80s. The
Globe and
Mail crew, from the ambitious middle of my career, hang out with colleagues
from
Maclean’s, the
Toronto Star, and
Metro. (I moved around a lot.) The
CBC News crowd are huddled to my left, protecting themselves and their fat
budgets from the circling sharks of underfunded journalism. My final job was
with them: we were together for the COVID-19 shutdown, the murder of George
Floyd, the storming of the Capitol in Washington, DC, the invasion of Ukraine,
nuclear threats from Russia, and blazing forests and atmospheric rivers at
home. It was the most punishing news cycle of my career. I wasn’t sad to be
leaving.
Just beyond the guests and beyond the hornbeam trees where I’ve strung fairy
lights for the party, I think I can see my future. The grind of work is finally
over, my retirement dream cued up. April in Paris! Reading by the sea! Spanish
lessons in Antigua so I can better speak to my grandson. I’ll be playing with
him, too, in the open-ended days my children rarely knew with me. I’m not
saying I deserve a life of ease. But I worked hard to earn my retirement,
dropping giant chunks of my salary into company and government pension plans
throughout those forty years. It’s time for the famous social contract to hold
up its end of the bargain and take care of me, the way it did my father before
me, to deliver on the idea that retirement is my right after a life of work and
the promise that I will have the time and means to enjoy it.
Except none of that happened. The year since my retirement party has not been a
dreamy passage to a welcoming future but a nerve-shattering trip into the
unknown. My debt is swelling like a broken ankle; my hard-won savings may or
may not be sucked into the vortex of an international market collapse. Can I
keep my house? Who knows? The macroeconomy is messing with my microeconomy. The
future keeps shape-shifting. And none of the careful planning I put into my
retirement is going to change that.
When I left my last job, I felt sad for friends determined to keep working to
seventy and beyond. How eccentric they seemed. Now I repeat the same two words
whenever I see them: “Don’t retire.”"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-tb-emissions-china-deforestation-colombia/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
