Harry R. Moody
International Longevity Center-USA

Rabbi Zusya said: "When I reach the next world, God will not ask me, Why were you not Moses? He will ask me, Why were you not Zusya?"

Data from a recent AARP survey indicate that today's aging Boomers overwhelmingly (80%) expect to be working at least part-time during their so-called "retirement" years. A new trend, and a new marketplace, is coming into being to fulfill that demand. We read now of new "resort-like" retirement communities where retired Boomers can continue working (see a NY Times front page article touting this new prospect). By all evidence, pundits tell us, we can expect this trend grow in the future.

I want to step back from "trend spotting" and instead ask some deeper questions about what this all means and what might be the new face of retirement in America. In my view, what we have in this image of "retirement resorts" is the emergence of what has been called the "post-modern life-course." This post-modern life-course has far-reaching implications for what we think of as the "dream" of retirement.

The modernized life-course, historically speaking, meant the bureaucratization of the stages of life into a linear sequence of "three boxes" (education, work, retirement) demarcated by age-grading. This modernized life-course became dominated by institutions (the school, the corporation) except for the last stage of life, old age, which was "de-institutionalized" and left prey to forces of market definition of leisure time. Thus, in the modernization of the life course, the leisure time of retirement was celebrated as a reward but at the same time left ambiguous, without clear definition. Old age was left as a "roleless role."

The post-modern life-course has begun to change all this, just as post-modern architecture rejected and transcended "modern" architecture, with its rationalized lines of construction. What demands consideration is to ask how retirement leisure will fit into this new schema of post-modern culture.

Retirement as Deferred Fulfillment. Historically, the idea of retirement leisure comprised a "double-displacement:" (1) from the afterlife into this world (that is, from eternity into time), and (2) from working life into retirement living (that is, from midlife into later life, past into future). In the modernized life-course, instead of deferring our dreams to an afterlife, we want it all now, in this world (modernization and secularization). According to the modernized life-course instead of expecting to be fulfilled in the workplace, we deferred our dreams into retirement (work now, save your money, enjoy yourself later). This is the double displacement-- the displacement of meaning and fulfillment-- that drives the rhetoric of retirement, as in the advertising billboard with a happy, gray-haired couple under the banner headline, "You've earned the money, now enjoy the dream." Marc Freedman (Prime Time) documents how this modern concept of a retirement community originated in the original creation of Sun City retirement communities and then spread to promulgate a "dream of retirement" on a wide scale throughout modern American culture.

The Scriptures tell us that "Your young shall see visions and your old ones shall dream dreams." The double displacement has historically meant that the imagery of retirement would evoke a time in life for "living out the Dream." Daniel Levinson also invoked this same metaphor of "the Dream" as a motivating principle for youth development (The Seasons of a Man's Life). Young people, Levinson said, move out of adolescence guided by an image of the future (a Dream) and then choose a mate or career according to the pattern of the Dream. So too something similar is at work in the movement from midlife into late life.

We look to retirement as a time for "enjoying the dream" (as the billboard would have it). Retirement becomes a time of release from alienated labor, from commuting, from fatigue, from responsibility. At another level, retirement becomes a time for doing the things I always wanted to do, for "becoming my true self," for becoming "the person I was meant to be." This is Rabbi Zusya's anticipation of the question God will ask him: not why were you not Moses, but why were you not the person you were meant to be?

Whether this motivational structure was ever realistic, or whether it was simply a form of wish-fulfillment (like the history of romantic love or exploration or the Horatio Alger myth) is another story. What is clear enough, though, is that at present, only around 10% of new retirees will have enough money saved to be able to live out the dream, to live a life of pure leisure (i.e., give up work entirely). Therefore, aging Boomers' expectations of continued part-time work are realistic and not based on the wish-fulfillment of what historical retirement has meant.

But not so fast. Wish-fulfillment (fantasy) does not vanish quickly. True, we are in a post-industrial economy and a post-modern culture. But continuities remain. The post-modern life course in itself constitutes still another variety of wish-fulfillment: namely, the fantasy of getting outside the "three boxes of life," the linear life plan, whatever we may call it. This is a recurrent fantasy of historical capitalism, including its post-industrial form. Just as in Marx's wonderful invocation of the non-alienated life in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1848, so today we continue to fantasize about a world where we will be free to be a fisherman in the morning, a scholar in the afternoon, and then gather around the family hearth in the evening. In other words, we want to have it all. That is, we will have a fulfilled, leisurely life, and we will have time to do all that our heart desires and be free of constraining schedules. The difference between the week and the weekend will simply vanish.

What's Wrong with Our Picture of Retirement. The problem with this fantasy (or cultural myth) is that it assumes that individual freedom and fulfillment will flourish under conditions of the marketplace. That is exactly what is presumed in the N.Y. Times article depicting Boomers at work in their retirement "resorts." Indeed, here is the first problem with this image of retirement: its inequality. The N.Y. Times addresses an elite audience with an image of elite fulfillment (naturally enough). But the truth is that not everyone will be able to continue, or initiate, lucrative part-time occupations working out of an office at home or shared office space in the retirement village. Inequality remains, and an idealized image of the "new retirement" need to take this reality of social class into account.

In the second place, the image of retirement promoted here is essentially one of a second, or extended, middle age. This isn't an image of old age at all but an image that smuggles in all of the assumptions of our dominant youth-culture, now transposed into later life-- in other words, it's a collosal denial of aging. We may wonder what will happen with the "return of the repressed," when Boomers really do become old.

In the third place, there is something suspiciously like "more of the same" in this picture of retirement: that is, it is a perpetuation of a lifestyle to which we are already quite accustomed. This perpetuation of a previous lifestyle is exactly what David Eckerdt described in his classic article on retirement living: namely, it is "the busy ethic." We hear this sentiment all the time among a segment of retirees: "I've never been so busy" since I retired.

One is entitled to wonder, "What's wrong with this picture?" The answer is, two elements are missing (and by implication a third). The first thing that's missing is any sense of intergenerational community or, at bottom, any sense of the world beyond the self. There is something suffocating and narcissistic about a "resort" world, this age-segregated community which purports to be a Shangri-la for aging Boomers in the future. Has concern for social justice, for helping others, completely vanished from this discourse? Are there hidden dangers with acting out this narcissistic fantasy on a larger scale?

The second thing that's missing is the whole idea of "The Dream" (in Levinson's metaphor). Does "becoming the person I was meant to be" mean simply prepetuating a style of hyperactivity into which we were socialized when young? Is the "busy ethic" the only image we can have of retirement living? Hyperactivity is evidently the preferred, the admirable style of living. Psychologist James Hillman suggests that we live in a hyperactive culture-- fast food, fast cars, multi-tasking, instant messaging: all action all the time. Anything less than mania is regarded as depression. Indeed, we have people, many people, who get recognition pins for having gone on forty, fifty, eighty or even a hundred Elderhostel trips. These hyperactive Elderhostelers are a welcome asset for enrollment projections. But they are not the only image of what a good retirement or a good life might be about. Whether we continue working, or spend our time on cultured leisure (the Elderhostel model), or just linger around the pool at a "retirement resort," we are responding to commodified images of living-- acting as workers or consumers, not as citizens, not as seekers after fulfillment beyond the marketplace, or even outside activity itself.

This last idea may seem utopian, but it is not. It constitutes what some older people would call self-actualization, in Maslow's phrase. Now this form of fulfillment can take place in work or in volunteer activity, as urged by groups such as Civic Ventures. Or it can occur in periods of lifelong learning, as promoted by groups such as Elderhostel. It can also occur in moments of pure contemplation-- where we are "doing" nothing at all, as traditional spirituality has it, whether Christian, Sufi, Zen, and so on. In short, self-actualization has nothing to do with the marketplace, nothing to do with conventional images of fulfillment propagated by the dominant culture and its marketing experts.

"Becoming myself" or "becoming the person I was meant to be" will mean, in the end, escaping from images of what other people think I ought to be, even images I've lived by my entire life. This is indeed the "late freedom" found in certain artists (Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Louise Nevelson) in their later years. What's missing in our conventional picture of retirement-- and nothing is more conventional than the front page of the New York Times-- is a new Dream for the second half of life.

Education for Self-Actualization. I have stressed that key elements are missing from today's picture of retirement: namely, wider social concern and attention to personal growth or transformation. But by implication a third element is also missing. This third element missing from the picture is the process of personal change, transformative learning, which is what genuine education is all about. To speak of "genuine education" here is to be implicitly critical of all that goes by the name "education," whether in conventional institutions of higher learning or in activities of lifelong learning. This critique demands a positive answer. We need to entertain images of a future radically different from, and much more hopeful than, what we have at present. And so we ask the question: How can we imagine a new social institution for life planning, for making tangible these Dreams for the Second Half of Life?

This question is ultimately a question about "education as the practice of freedom," in Paolo Freire's words. Genuine education is never merely about information, nor even about knowledge, but it is also about the cultivation of wisdom: an understanding what really matters. This last phrase is the title of a wonderful recent book by Wendy Lustbader where she collects insights of very old people who talk about what they've learned over a long lifetime. Lustbader's stories are inspirational and hold out for us some genuine hope and purpose for old age.

A society that fails to distinguish between information and knowledge, between knowledge and wisdom, is a society that has little to say about the purpose of the second half of life. Since we are reluctant to talk about "purpose," we naturally end up with a pure marketplace model-- a marketplace where individual freedom is interpreted as the freedom to choose among competing commodities by personal preference. Elderhostel as it presently exists, corresponds to that model, and it may be the best we have to offer: indeed, we have 10,000 programs from which to choose.

This model is admirable in its dazzling pluralism of possibilities. But something is missing. Without attention to genuine education-- to the pursuit of wisdom and self-actualization-- we are leaving fulfillment and self-actualization to individual chance and isolated choices. The choices sometimes work out well. There are countless cases of transformative learning that take place in Elderhostel settings all the time. But we do not monitor them, do not document them, do not really understand the conditions for their appearance, and therefore can't design institutional structures (classes, workshops, retreats, books, websites, etc.) that promote transformation and fulfillment in later life. This magical transformation does exist. But we usually don't see it because, for the most part, we aren't even looking for it.

The skeptics will say that all this is a dream, maybe a pipe dream. "People want what they want: they go for what they go for. Our job is to give people what they want." In sum, the customer is always right. In the epoch of global capitalism we have all become customers. Increasingly, too, universities and museums, public television channels and publishers, will agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment: "Give them what they want."

But I do not agree. It remains the task of visionaries to imagine a future that does not yet exist, to create institutional structures that have no precedent, to insist that people will one day want things which today they cannot even imagine. Marty Knowlton, founder of Elderhostel was one of those visionaries, and his vision of yesterday became has become today's reality. "Your young shall see visions and your Old Ones shall dream dreams." It is, ultimately, a field of dreams on which we labor: "If you build it, they will come." Imaginary? Maybe. A dream? Absolutely. But as the poet Delmore Schwartz put it, "In dreams begin responsibilities."