Are we witnessing the end of retirement?

In today’s Big Story Podcast, the concept of retirement used to be a few years at the end of your life between when you stopped working and when you died. But the average lifespan kept increasing, while the retirement age stayed at 65. Now Canadians believe they’ll need $1.7 million to retire in comfort, and most of the 1,000 people retiring each day in this country don’t have it. When you combine that with the economic turmoil, high interest rates and increasing cost of living, the savings they do have aren’t stretching as far as expected, either. So many “retirees” are going back to work.

Cathrin Bradbury is a formerly “retired” journalist who wrote about retirement for The Walrus. She says part of the problem is a lack of conversation about what comes next as we near the end of our careers.

“We made it illegal to say people had to retire [and] the conversation sort of stopped there, nobody said, ‘well, what’s that going to look like?’,” says Bradbury.

How did we end up here? And given what we’ve learned about aging recently, is working during “retirement” really a bad outcome?

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