“Freedman and others who are mapping encore adulthood imagine innovations like Individual Purpose Accounts, which would help people save up for gap years and adult education, or reforms allowing people to use a year’s worth of Social Security benefits so they could go back to school or do an internship.

Jonathan Rauch
The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better after 50

The concept of Individual Purpose Accounts has been on my mind since reading Jonathan Rauch’s excellent book, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better after 50.

In the book, Rauch notes a few things:

• For many people, there is a life transition period as they approach “traditional” retirement age, even if they continue to work. This period is marked by shifts in roles and responsibilities that can come from many things — no longer needing to provide daily care for children, for example, or having a degree of financial stability that affords new options. Of course, this age can also bring less positive things like physical challenges and loss.
• Our society has developed structures and norms that help younger people transition from childhood into adulthood. Rauch suggests that high school, post-high school education, apprenticeships, summer jobs, the military, and specialized mental health care are a few examples of efforts to smooth the way into being a grownup.
• However, structures and norms related to the often stressful period of midlife are practically non-existent. As life expectancy has increased over the years, and physical health later in life dramatically improved, it is no longer a given that a person reaching their 60s is ready for ‘retirement’ as it’s been considered for decades. In fact, this period can represent a kind of second chance — “a new stage between midlife and old age.”

Having recently turned 60, I find myself knee-deep in a version of this.

By all measures (including my financial advisor’s!), I should soon be ready to stop working. To live off my retirement income, maybe find a few hobbies, and settle in for the inevitable decline and ultimate end that old age will bring.

To that, I say BULLSHIT.

Bring on the encore adulthood!

Like many people today, I’m not really ready to follow that (frankly terrible) trajectory. I acknowledge that I may not be able to do everything I could when I was younger, but there are plenty of things I know and can do today that I couldn’t have then.

The problem is that, despite my personal situation becoming more common, society still isn’t quite prepared for this new paradigm. Older workers still face discrimination, people are locked in by the need for health insurance or other benefits, and many people just accept that the old way of aging is the only way.

This is why something like Individual Purpose Accounts is so intriguing to me.

What if a person in my shoes could take some time to assess the direction they want to go? Something like a gap year, but for 50- or 60-somethings who are looking to maintain their vitality and engagement with the world in a meaningful, impactful way.