Retirement Is a Very Young Idea

The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker

Here is something worth sitting with: your grandparents almost certainly did not retire the way you are retiring, and their grandparents didn’t retire at all. For most of human history, the pattern was simple and unromantic — you worked as long as your body allowed, and then, if you were fortunate, your family cared for you for whatever time remained. The idea that an ordinary person would stop working at sixty-five and then live twenty or thirty more years, funded by savings and a public pension, is not an ancient feature of human life. It is an invention, and a recent one. Planned retirement is barely a century and a half old.

The first big move came in the 1880s, when the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck set up one of the first national old-age insurance programs. It paid benefits beginning at age seventy — at a time when relatively few workers lived long enough to collect for long. The age was later lowered to sixty-five, a number that stuck in the public mind as if it had been handed down on stone tablets. It wasn’t. It was a policy choice, made by a politician, in a world where old age was short.

America’s version arrived with the Social Security Act of 1935. The first monthly check was issued in January 1940, to a retired legal secretary from Vermont named Ida May Fuller. It was for $22.54. Miss Fuller had paid only a small amount in Social Security taxes before she retired — a few dollars, by most accounts. Then she did something almost nobody expected: she lived to be one hundred years old. She collected benefits for thirty-five years, totaling roughly $22,000. The first person in the system turned out to be a preview of where the whole system was heading.

Think about what that means for you. You are playing a game so new that there is no settled wisdom about how to play it. A poker player who sits down at a variation invented last year cannot ask the old-timers how it’s done, because there are no old-timers. The strategies are still being written. Retirement is like that. Your parents’ generation was the first to do it in large numbers, and they did it with smaller houses, shorter lives, and pensions that many of you don’t have. The generation before them mostly didn’t do it at all. There is no family tradition of the twenty-five-year retirement, handed down like a recipe. You are, historically speaking, among the first people ever asked to do this.

That cuts two ways. The hard way: you cannot simply copy anyone. The neighbor who seems to be doing retirement beautifully is improvising too, whatever he tells you at the mailbox. The magazine rules of thumb were written for a game with different cards — different life spans, different health costs, different family shapes. Advice that assumes you will be gone by seventy-five is dangerous advice for a couple with good odds of seeing ninety-five.

But the other way it cuts is liberating. If the game is new, then there is no single correct way to play it, and the people who judge your choices are mostly guessing. The brother-in-law who worked until seventy-two is not proof you retired too early. The friend who moved to Florida is not proof you should. A new game rewards the player who studies his own table — his own health, money, family, and appetites — over the player who copies the strategy of the man sitting next to him.

It also means a little grace is in order. When retirement feels stranger and harder than you expected, that is not evidence that you are doing it wrong. It is evidence that you are doing something human beings have almost no practice at. Ida May Fuller collected her first check when Franklin Roosevelt was president. We have had this institution for about one long lifetime — roughly the lifetime, as it happens, of the woman who collected its first check. We are all still learning the game.

So here is the takeaway. This week, find one person ten or fifteen years ahead of you in retirement whose late game you admire — not whose money you admire, whose life you admire — and ask them two questions: What surprised you most? And what do you wish you had done in the first five years? Write down the answers. In a game this young, that conversation is worth more than a shelf of expert books, because the real strategy for this new table is being written right now, by the people sitting at it — including you.

The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker

Here is something worth sitting with: your grandparents almost certainly did not retire the way you are retiring, and their grandparents didn’t retire at all. For most of human history, the pattern was simple and unromantic — you worked as long as your body allowed, and then, if you were fortunate, your family cared for you for whatever time remained. The idea that an ordinary person would stop working at sixty-five and then live twenty or thirty more years, funded by savings and a public pension, is not an ancient feature of human life. It is an invention, and a recent one. Planned retirement is barely a century and a half old.

The first big move came in the 1880s, when the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck set up one of the first national old-age insurance programs. It paid benefits beginning at age seventy — at a time when relatively few workers lived long enough to collect for long. The age was later lowered to sixty-five, a number that stuck in the public mind as if it had been handed down on stone tablets. It wasn’t. It was a policy choice, made by a politician, in a world where old age was short.

America’s version arrived with the Social Security Act of 1935. The first monthly check was issued in January 1940, to a retired legal secretary from Vermont named Ida May Fuller. It was for $22.54. Miss Fuller had paid only a small amount in Social Security taxes before she retired — a few dollars, by most accounts. Then she did something almost nobody expected: she lived to be one hundred years old. She collected benefits for thirty-five years, totaling roughly $22,000. The first person in the system turned out to be a preview of where the whole system was heading.

Think about what that means for you. You are playing a game so new that there is no settled wisdom about how to play it. A poker player who sits down at a variation invented last year cannot ask the old-timers how it’s done, because there are no old-timers. The strategies are still being written. Retirement is like that. Your parents’ generation was the first to do it in large numbers, and they did it with smaller houses, shorter lives, and pensions that many of you don’t have. The generation before them mostly didn’t do it at all. There is no family tradition of the twenty-five-year retirement, handed down like a recipe. You are, historically speaking, among the first people ever asked to do this.

That cuts two ways. The hard way: you cannot simply copy anyone. The neighbor who seems to be doing retirement beautifully is improvising too, whatever he tells you at the mailbox. The magazine rules of thumb were written for a game with different cards — different life spans, different health costs, different family shapes. Advice that assumes you will be gone by seventy-five is dangerous advice for a couple with good odds of seeing ninety-five.

But the other way it cuts is liberating. If the game is new, then there is no single correct way to play it, and the people who judge your choices are mostly guessing. The brother-in-law who worked until seventy-two is not proof you retired too early. The friend who moved to Florida is not proof you should. A new game rewards the player who studies his own table — his own health, money, family, and appetites — over the player who copies the strategy of the man sitting next to him.

It also means a little grace is in order. When retirement feels stranger and harder than you expected, that is not evidence that you are doing it wrong. It is evidence that you are doing something human beings have almost no practice at. Ida May Fuller collected her first check when Franklin Roosevelt was president. We have had this institution for about one long lifetime — roughly the lifetime, as it happens, of the woman who collected its first check. We are all still learning the game.

So here is the takeaway. This week, find one person ten or fifteen years ahead of you in retirement whose late game you admire — not whose money you admire, whose life you admire — and ask them two questions: What surprised you most? And what do you wish you had done in the first five years? Write down the answers. In a game this young, that conversation is worth more than a shelf of expert books, because the real strategy for this new table is being written right now, by the people sitting at it — including you.

The lessons we can learn from the game of Poker

Here is something worth sitting with: your grandparents almost certainly did not retire the way you are retiring, and their grandparents didn’t retire at all. For most of human history, the pattern was simple and unromantic — you worked as long as your body allowed, and then, if you were fortunate, your family cared for you for whatever time remained. The idea that an ordinary person would stop working at sixty-five and then live twenty or thirty more years, funded by savings and a public pension, is not an ancient feature of human life. It is an invention, and a recent one. Planned retirement is barely a century and a half old.

The first big move came in the 1880s, when the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck set up one of the first national old-age insurance programs. It paid benefits beginning at age seventy — at a time when relatively few workers lived long enough to collect for long. The age was later lowered to sixty-five, a number that stuck in the public mind as if it had been handed down on stone tablets. It wasn’t. It was a policy choice, made by a politician, in a world where old age was short.

America’s version arrived with the Social Security Act of 1935. The first monthly check was issued in January 1940, to a retired legal secretary from Vermont named Ida May Fuller. It was for $22.54. Miss Fuller had paid only a small amount in Social Security taxes before she retired — a few dollars, by most accounts. Then she did something almost nobody expected: she lived to be one hundred years old. She collected benefits for thirty-five years, totaling roughly $22,000. The first person in the system turned out to be a preview of where the whole system was heading.

Think about what that means for you. You are playing a game so new that there is no settled wisdom about how to play it. A poker player who sits down at a variation invented last year cannot ask the old-timers how it’s done, because there are no old-timers. The strategies are still being written. Retirement is like that. Your parents’ generation was the first to do it in large numbers, and they did it with smaller houses, shorter lives, and pensions that many of you don’t have. The generation before them mostly didn’t do it at all. There is no family tradition of the twenty-five-year retirement, handed down like a recipe. You are, historically speaking, among the first people ever asked to do this.

That cuts two ways. The hard way: you cannot simply copy anyone. The neighbor who seems to be doing retirement beautifully is improvising too, whatever he tells you at the mailbox. The magazine rules of thumb were written for a game with different cards — different life spans, different health costs, different family shapes. Advice that assumes you will be gone by seventy-five is dangerous advice for a couple with good odds of seeing ninety-five.

But the other way it cuts is liberating. If the game is new, then there is no single correct way to play it, and the people who judge your choices are mostly guessing. The brother-in-law who worked until seventy-two is not proof you retired too early. The friend who moved to Florida is not proof you should. A new game rewards the player who studies his own table — his own health, money, family, and appetites — over the player who copies the strategy of the man sitting next to him.

It also means a little grace is in order. When retirement feels stranger and harder than you expected, that is not evidence that you are doing it wrong. It is evidence that you are doing something human beings have almost no practice at. Ida May Fuller collected her first check when Franklin Roosevelt was president. We have had this institution for about one long lifetime — roughly the lifetime, as it happens, of the woman who collected its first check. We are all still learning the game.

So here is the takeaway. This week, find one person ten or fifteen years ahead of you in retirement whose late game you admire — not whose money you admire, whose life you admire — and ask them two questions: What surprised you most? And what do you wish you had done in the first five years? Write down the answers. In a game this young, that conversation is worth more than a shelf of expert books, because the real strategy for this new table is being written right now, by the people sitting at it — including you.

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