Is it an irony, a hint or an encouragement that the traditional gift to a retiring employee is a watch? It is an irony if retirement is the state in which time no longer matters, and the days drift into each other, all resembling Sunday. It is a hint of mortality if retirement is seen as the last chapter in life’s story, for then it will measure the counting down of one’s days.
But it is an encouragement if it suggests that the time has at last come to have freedom, fun, opportunities, variety, classes, travel, projects, hobbies, new beginnings.
All this is obvious. So too is the fact that all but one of the things just mentioned – namely, travel – need not cost much, a consideration when the reward for a lifetime of work is straitened circumstances. Which of these three meanings the gold watch acquires will depend on the determination of its possessor; the third requires most of that tough substance.
What is less well known is that the one thing better than retirement is not retiring. The following explains why. I had a friend who played so much rugby while reading medicine at Cambridge that he was astonished when his name appeared on the final pass list. Knowing scarcely any medicine he decided not to inflict himself on live patients, and therefore became a pathologist. His first job was at a large London hospital, and began shortly before Christmas. The chief mortuary technician told him that he would not be much needed until January; ‘Not many people die at Christmas,’ said the technician, ‘but we will be swamped after New Year.’ My friend asked why, surmising flu and pneumonia, but the technician said, ‘People see family and friends over the holidays. But for the old and ill, early January is the start of a long, cold, dark time, with nothing to look forward to. They switch off in droves.’
So struck was my friend by this that he always thereafter examined the history of his autopsy subjects. He found that people with vivid interests in life or work lived longer, and defied illnesses better, than people who had become muted and unfocused in their post-retirement years. He was amazed at how some folk, who by textbook standards should have died long before, outlived people with relatively minor complaints: the classic case of the latter, he said, was the recently retired man, feeling useless and purposeless, giving in to an otherwise survivable heart attack.
If governments require us to work longer before retiring, they could be doing us a favour. Otherwise it is the third use of the retirement watch we must choose: the one that requires determination.