Print 
PDFBy Alexandra Lopez-Pacheco
Alexandra is a writer for ThirdQuarter, the job site for mature workers. She is a journalist and strategic thinker. See more from her at www.Thirdquarter.ca
Here’s why I think it’s time to replace the word “retirement” with a new term: the age of choices.
Most of the “retired” people I’ve met in recent years inspire me with all their energy and endeavours. They’re busy with everything from second careers to launching a new business, travels, hobbies and pursuing new passions, getting involved in their community and volunteering. Their zest for life is contagious.
They are people like André Carrière, a retired organizational psychology consultant and professor at the Université de Sherbrooke whom I interviewed for a National Post article a few years ago. In the mid-1990s, just as he was getting ready to walk into a life of retirement, he strolled past a tango dancing school in Montreal. Although he’d never danced before, he had a “why not?” moment and signed up for lessons. It changed his life.
Instead of walking into retirement, he danced into a new passion. Within a few years, he was not just an avid tango dancer, he was also the owner of Tango connivance: Sherbrooke, Quebec’s first tango dance school. Fifteen years later, Carrière, who is now in his 70s, is still dancing up a storm and teaching others to do the same.
I’ve always wanted to learn to dance, so earlier this year, inspired by Carrière , I signed up for classes. Unlike him, though, I’m not retired and still have two kids at home to put through school so as much fun as it is I don’t have the time or finances at this point in my life to really, really get into it.
“When you’re at the age that you’re building a career, you are very single tracked,” says Charles Feaver, the creator of www.youngretired.ca, a site designed to help people transition through the retirement years. “You have to dedicate yourself 100 percent to your career or raising a family, but in retirement you have many options.”
Typically, when people reach the point in life they can consider retiring from their jobs, they have a pension or retirement savings to draw on, they’ve paid off or shrunk their mortgages and have fewer if any dependents. All this translates to more free time and choices. People can choose if they want to work or volunteer, whether to do it part time or full time. They can choose to go back to school or travel or both. I’ve heard of retired couples who have become truckers so they can travel and adventure together and a retired executive who chose a job mowing lawns, away from the high-pressured responsibilities of his first career. Others who have become consultants or artists. The possibilities are as varied as the people themselves.
If there is one thing we’re seeing today, it is that this new generation of mature Canadians is different from previous generations who believed retirement and aging equalled the end of choices. Instead, an increasing number of mature people are embracing all the choices that come from having more free time and often financial security. So in the days when people retired and rested away the rest of their days, the word retirement made sense. But today, it no longer makes sense. People are enjoying the age of choices.
So what do you think? Do you agree “retirement” should be renamed “the age of choices?” Email us here with your ideas and thoughts.
