What Is Retirement in Its Fourth Era?

What is retirement? The answer varies historically according to Ken Dychtwald, who coined the phrase Fourth Era of Retirement.

What Is Retirement according to Ken Dychtwald?

Gerontologist, psychologist and author of 16 books, Ken Dychtwald describes the “fourth era of retirement.”

The first era lasted about 100,000 years and ended in the early 20th century. People worked all their lives, a reality that then was not considered a bad thing. No one was asking the question what is retirement.

What Is Retirement? Social Security

The second era of retirement began around the 1920s. The passage of Social Security in the 1930s was its crowning moment came with. The goals of Social Security were two-fold:

It served as a thin safety net for older adults during the Great Depression
With unemployment levels reaching 25%, Social Security helped remove older people from the workforce in order to make room for the young.

What Is Retirement? The Golden Years

The third era of retirement unfolded during the 1960s and 1970s. Americans began to think of retirement as the Golden Years of life. Americans began regarding retirement as an entitlement. The younger people retired, the more successful they were perceived to be. What is retirement? Perhaps even a symbol of social status.

Concomitant with this third era was an increase in longevity. As a result, the post-work period became a stage lasting two or three decades rather than two or three years.

According to Dychtwald, that third era, which has lasted a quarter century, is “fraying at the edges … and [is] coming to an end.”

In Dychtwald's view, the modern retirement experiment is not working anymore for most people. In fact, half the retirees in this country say they would rather be working. They would rather be working, but this is what they don’t want:

Working full-time
Continuing in the same old grind as before—they want to try something new
All the pressure they had when they were young

The Fourth Era of Retirement: Work

Dychtwald uses the word “rehirement” to describe what is retirement during the current fourth phase.

As Dychtwald puts it: “In the years to come, we will see more older men and women starting their engines and jumping back into the work force, and maybe even having the most productive years of their lives.”

Topic: Working in Retirement Subtopics: The Fourth Era of Retirement • How Many Retirees Work? • Why Work in Retirement? • Job Skills • The Job Hunt