The Death of Retirement

This is the title of a new report from Standard Life that provides even more evidence to back up the central themes of The Rainbow Years. One in three 46-to- 65 year olds want to keep working in new jobs – “on their own terms” – after the official retirement age. The same proportion will learn a new skill. VSO, the overseas development charity, recruits ten times more people aged over 50 than twenty years ago.

According to the Standard Life research, one in twenty would like to start a new business when they retire from their current full-time job. That amounts to one million new businesses. To give that context, there are only two million businesses registered in the UK today.
Honey Langcaster-James writes " The very word ‘retirement’ - coming as it does from the French ‘retirer’ literally means ‘to draw back’. This carries negative connotations as people are expected to opt out of life once they are no longer ‘useful’. This is no longer true. Increasing life
expectancy and prosperity means we will now spend close to a third of our life post 65. We will be healthier, wealthier and, for the first time, have the genuine freedom to define our own identity and direction, without being shackled by the need to ‘fit in’ or ‘tow the line’. This is the ‘third age’, an age of choice and freedom to do what you want, go where you want and be who you want to be".

And she probably hasn't even read The Rainbow Years!