I don't think there's a middle age person right now that isn't having a nervous breakdown over what they're going to do instead of retiring in their sixties. With new surveys showing that most Americans expect to work four more years past the age they planned to retire, the question that comes to my mind is: work at what?
Ironically, just as this cheery news was breaking, I heard from a fellow colleague in the non-profit cultural world who I'm pretty sure had been comfortably retired. The reason? She was looking for work.
Suddenly her phone call turned into a wake up call, and I was envisioning my life ten years down the road: mid-sixties, suddenly a displaced worker, decades of experience, professional qualifications up the yin yang, and I'm trolling friends for a job.
Being the anxiety-prone type, I started making lists months ago pre-apocalyptic phone call. The lists basically boiled down to four ways I could make a living while filling the gap before retirement: work I'm trained to do, work I would like to do (otherwise known as the "dream on" list), work I would be willing to do, and the "last resort" list.
We all make these lists, whether they're just mental notes we keep to ourselves, or actual written-down lists that we pull out whenever we get an inkling that pink slips are on the horizon. Given the worst case scenario, I would hope to land back in a job that I can actually perform with some competence. There's nothing more soul-killing than to have spent your life learning and training to reach a level of professional success, and then being booted down the ladder to junior-something with all the status of a thumbtack. I'm not talking about making a fresh start in a whole new profession, say, going from Wall Street trader to harried chef at a top New York restaurant. In the business world, we'd call this a lateral move. Stress is stress. At least as a chef, you can eat your mistakes.
