Rethinking Retirement

A couple of times a week I like to slip away to the old A.C. Lewis YMCA on North Foster to swim some laps. The A.C. Lewis Y has two pools—one indoor and one out—that, despite showing their age a bit, are always clean, patrolled by cheerful lifeguards, and kept warm enough to make outdoor lap swimming a viable option on all but the coldest winter days. Despite not being the world’s best freestyler, I enjoy swimming laps. I like the solitary, meditative nature of the exercise, the brief shock of dropping into water that chills until the exercise quickens your blood, and the rush and sluice of breath and bubbles as you find your rhythm and stroke. Depending upon the exigencies of home, family, and greasing the wheels of our small-time publishing empire, the timing of my visits varies.

Sometimes I’ll make it to the Y before work, when hardcore dawn patrol swimmers in sleek caps and reflective goggles charge up and down the lanes like overachieving sea lions. Other days I’ll go on the way home, when the pool is awash with the noisy exertions of after-school lessons and swim team practice sessions. But once in awhile I’ll manage to tiptoe away at lunchtime, and this is my favorite time to go. The pool is never crowded—the swimmers limited to the occasional desk-jockey like me, burning off a few hundred calories before rushing back to work smelling faintly of chlorine, and the retirees, who are never in a hurry.

The retirees are the ones I envy most. Leisurely, they trundle up and down, float on their backs with toes in the air, wallow in the shallows, and saunter back and forth to the steam room in terrycloth robes, loudly discussing politics as if they have all the time in the world. And by comparison, I suppose they do.

One fellow, who is probably twenty years my senior and there almost every day, is a retired bank president. A fine swimmer, exceptionally fit, and always looking superlatively relaxed, this gent is the epitome of the retiree I aspire one day to be. Once he told me that back when he ran the bank, he would come and swim laps any time he had a difficult decision to make. “My employees knew that, if it was a swimming day, it was a hard-decision day,” he said. “It always helped me work out what to do.” Twenty years on here he is, still swimming, never hurrying. He has done his time, earned his leisure, and is now relishing every minute of it. He does not, to be fair, appear to be missing those hard-decision days.

People say that youth is wasted on the young. Speaking as a middle-aged fellow with most of his youth behind him and his fair share of hard-decision days still ahead, I worry that by the time I reach retirement age, the golden years might be wasted on me. Because I’ll be too infirm to enjoy them. So here’s an alternate suggestion for the generations to come: what if when you graduated from college, society gave you a gold watch, a pension, and twenty years off? Then, when you’re about forty-one you have to show up for work and stay there forever. That way you could devote two decades during the prime of life to the energetic pursuit of rest and relaxation, then enter the workforce ready to pay your debt to society by working all the way to the finish line.

Think of the benefits! The problem of outliving one’s savings would vanish. Hangover-related absenteeism would plummet. The golf and bingo industries might need to adjust their marketing messages but the extreme sports, computer gaming, and online shopping markets would be there to make up the difference. Since I’m forty-five and presumably halfway through my career, I can say this sort of thing since under my own proposal I would just be settling in for the long haul. But the scheme might strike our kids, or our twenty-five-year-old assistant editor, as a pretty good deal.  I’m not sure it’ll sit well with more senior readers though. It might need to be phased in in stages. I suppose those already at or near traditional retirement age could be, (dare I say it), grandfathered in.

Anyway, I have yet to run all this by my former bank president friend, but perhaps I shouldn’t, since I suspect he’d tell me not to quit my day job to become an economic theorist just yet. I realize that my idea holds about as much water as a retiree’s speedo, so suppose I’ll just resolve to keep going to the pool whenever the opportunity presents itself and looking forward to the day when I, too, won’t have to hurry back to work a few laps too soon. Happy New Year, everyone. Keep on swimming.