The Collapse of Traditional Retirement is a Good Thing.
What will you do when you’re done working? Chances are, some image popped into your head about moving to some warm climate. Maybe you also think of all of the hobbies you’ll pick up. How’s that pickleball backhand?
The post-WWII retirement blueprint of working for 30 years and then living off a mix of savings, pensions, and Social Security is so embedded in our culture that you may have never stopped to consider an alternative.
But most of the signals are telling us we need to change our expectations. Consider:
The number of Americans with pensions has been more than halved since 1975, from 27 million to fewer than 13 million.
As of this writing, Social Security is due to run out of money in 2033.
The median years of tenure for private sector workers is 3.5 years.
Early retirement is linked to shorter lifespans.
Our “retirements” are no longer in the hands of institutions—they are now up to us.
If you’re operating with the “work for 30 years and then call it a career” mindset, this can be terrifying. And this is where most of the conversation around this topic usually stops.
Never let a good crisis go to waste. There is an upshot here: the benefits of diligently working at a single job, industry, or company are lessening. This gives us more control over our own journey, and the chance to be more varied (and interesting) humans. The feelings of being “on track” are ours and ours alone to determine.
There are many types of sabbaticals. There are also more than one approaches to retirement.
Three to consider:
Traditional. Front load work, back load retirement.
Mini-retirements. Episodic career with two or three chapters and long “mini-retirements” in between that stretch six months or longer.
Thin-sliced. Borrowed from Richard Banfield, this is interjection adventures and breaks that are a few weeks long as often as you can. Best if you have freelance, remote, or fractional work set up.
A few reasons this is uniquely possible now:
The remote work boom. In 2019, only 8% of workers in “remote capable” jobs were fully remote. In 2023 that number climbed to 29%. Many knowledge worker fields such as computers, media, and finances have remote worker rates greater than 50%. If your mini-retirement involves travel you decouple your work from your location and keep some cash flow.
Fractional and freelance employees (especially in tech). The wave of tech layoffs in recent years have led to the rise of “fractional” leaders and executives. Companies keep a full-time employee off their books, maintain flexibility, and the fractional employee can focus on a highly specialized part-time role. This makes it easy to build your career like a lego set, with pieces of fractional employment across several companies. When you’re ready for a mini-retirement, you can wind down a client.
Careers are long. Many retirement expectations are rooted in a world where most workers do manual labor, die in their late 60s, and retire in their late 50s. The baby boomer generation is one of the first to regularly have careers that stretch into their 80s. That’s 60 years of working at the extremes. You could have three 15-year “chapters” with mini-retirement in between each one. At 54, Richard Banfield called this approach his “second harvest”.
Cultural expectations. The younger you are, the more obvious the above will be to you. It may be youthful naivete or galaxy-brain smart: but Gen Z is planning on retiring early. Via Vanguard “In 2006, 30% of employees ages 18 to 24 participated in their [401k] plan. This rate rose to 62% in 2021.” Movements like FIRE and digital nomading are picking up steam. The episodic career with mini-retirements is becoming the expected.
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“Knowing” that a mini-retirement is possible is different than giving yourself permission to do it. It involves untangling the role work has in your identity. For you over achievers it also means being okay with a chapter in your life where you’re not moving “forward” — at least not by traditional standards.
But these intermissions give you the structure for the next phase of your career to be more aligned with your values. Rather than sleep walking through it all, you can ensure that the path you are on is the best one for you at that moment.
(Consider Greg’s story, and how he overcame this feeling of laziness to reorient his career about autonomy.)
For more resources on planning your own mini-retirement subscribe to the Sabbatical newsletter, and browse interviews with people who have successfully done it.