For high-status professionals, retirement is anything but traditional, with golfing, gardening and traveling replaced with new rules of retirement that include scaled back, but still active, careers, writes Christina Binkley for the Robb Report.
Barry Schwartz, best-selling author of The Paradox of Choice, announced he was retiring as a Swarthmore College psychology professor to be closer to his family on the West Coast.
But even as he finished his final semester at Swarthmore, he embraced an opportunity for a new teaching role at UC Berkeley.
“I underestimated the importance of social networks and being able to talk with people,” he said.
These days, 78-year-old Schwartz has been slowly de-escalating his professional life, now no longer with Berkeley, but teaching a course at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and working on a new edition of his book.
“It wasn’t that I was tired of teaching. It was just, the grandkids change so much from one visit to the next. Not gonna live forever,” he said.
For a hundred years, having a life of leisure after working was seen as a well-earned right, particularly for those with high-status careers in which a luxurious retirement became its own status symbol.
Read more about how retirement has changed in modern times in the Robb Report.
