We all think how we will get to retirement. Retire by the time we are sixty-five or sixty-seven, perhaps even sooner. I have hopes and dreams of getting there well before that age. We of course want to live to be old; the ripe old age of eighty-five or older. We’ve come to expect these things will happen to most of us. We expect that we will buy the big house and put two cars into the three stall garage. Additionally, we expect to have our health, free from viruses like smallpox and polio. We live like kings, eating meat at every meal. Having our cake and eating too.
All of these things are new concepts. Many not even a hundred years old. We have come to demand them from our lives. Yet we are likely one of the first couple generations to experience at least expect some of these things I describe above. It has become so normal that we have come to believe that this is the way it has always been. That we must have it this way, again because it has been this way since the beginning. We have forgotten our place on the timeline of human history.
Retirement is not a new concept but the fact that regular people like myself could even entertain it really is. Since it’s first official beginning in Germany in the late 19th century the age for retirement was seventy years old. Which was far from the average lifespan of the time, so not many people were ever getting to the place of actually collecting that check. Retirement as we know it was a popularized image from the late 1950’s marketing campaign for a community in Sun City, Arizona. We haven’t even had retirement communities for as many years as some of our parents have been alive.
Our life expectancy hasn’t changed much in my lifetime, but it has since the early 1900’s. In 1900 the life expectancy was only forty years by 1950 it rose to fifty-eight. By the time I made my earthly debut it was sixty-seven. Which is just barely beyond the retirement age of today. As of this writing the average life expectancy is seventy-six. This is in fact the shortest it has been in the last ten years, according to Harvard.
My point to all this is not that it has changed but that is all a new change. Prior to the 1900’s the average life expectancy was flat around the forty year mark for hundreds of years. We have been given an opportunity that most people of the last millennia never saw. It is funny to think that I would be considered geriatric not that long ago in our human history.
Sticking with the idea of new concepts there are many more I have come across that we have come to accept and expect in our lives. The engagement ring is another I found entertaining. But what I am trying to convey here is that we expect to get to retire, we expect to live long lives but these are gifts. New gifts that many before us could never dream of having.
Source: Thanks to Scridb for the marketing image.