the end of retirement

“The end of retirement” names the erosion of retirement as a reliable period of rest. Economist Teresa Ghilarducci uses the phrase for a future in which many people cannot live on their savings and benefits alone, and must keep earning paychecks even as they age. The book presents this not as a change in personal preference but as the outcome of thinning retirement supports, insecure work, and responsibilities increasingly borne by households.

From a stool to a pogo stick

The post-New Deal model of retirement finance was often described as a three-legged stool: Social Security, private pensions, and personal savings and investments. The image suggested that several supports could hold a person up. But the book describes two legs as having been kicked away. The Great Recession destroyed many households’ assets, while saving had already declined; since the 1980s, employers increasingly replaced defined-benefit pensions with 401(k) plans that depend on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Presented as financial independence, the shift also moved risk from employers and public structures onto families. Social Security consequently became the largest single source of income for most Americans over sixty-five, yet often could not provide enough. Economist Peter Brady’s counter-image was a pogo stick: a far less stable basis for later life.

The consequences reach beyond reduced leisure. Teresa Ghilarducci estimated that nearly half of middle-class workers might face a retirement food budget as low as five dollars a day. Many retirees, she argued, could not survive without a paycheck, while jobs available to older people paid less and demanded more physical effort. The phrase “the end of retirement” captures that reversal: the formal idea of retirement persists, but its promise of economic security becomes increasingly difficult to realize.

Older workers and accumulated insecurity

The book situates this change within a broader generational reversal. Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute described younger baby boomers and successive generations as less able than their predecessors to retire without a decline in living standards. In 2016, nearly nine million Americans aged sixty-five and older were still employed, 60 percent more than a decade earlier. Economists expected both the number and share of older people in the labor force to keep rising; a survey found that only 17 percent of older Americans anticipated not working at all in later life.

David Roderick’s workamp experience shows what continued employment could demand. At seventy-seven, he and his wife sold Christmas trees while living in a fifteen-year-old Lazy Daze RV. His work included carrying trees as tall as nine feet and lifting them onto customers’ cars and trucks for eight to ten hours a day, six days a week. Roderick valued the selling, but described the cutting and hauling as work for a much younger person. His need to work followed earlier losses: during a divorce he had cashed out a pension earned over sixteen years of teaching, receiving $22,000 to divide with his first wife rather than the at least $500,000 it might have grown to with the state’s match. His second wife had also lost a substantial financial cushion when Executive Life collapsed.

At Adventureland, older employees were visible across the park’s workforce. A seventy-seven-year-old former recruiter described coworkers with age-related disabilities, including an eighty-year-old colleague, a wheelchair user assigned to count with a clicker, and a one-armed ride supervisor. The Tornado operator was eighty-one. But continued employment did not mean that older workers were protected from workplace danger: retired postal carrier and pastor Steve Booher, sixty-eight, died after a conveyor belt on the Raging River ride started while one of his feet remained on a raft. He fell onto the belt and fractured his skull. The ride reopened the next day; regulators later issued a violation notice requiring safety upgrades and imposing a $4,500 fine. The contrast makes the cost of extending working life concrete: age does not remove the need to earn, or the physical risks of the jobs on offer.

Linda May and the family safety net

Linda May’s circumstances show how retirement insecurity intersects with gender, health, and family obligations. Among older women living alone, more than one in six were below the poverty line in 2015; the number of poor elderly women was nearly twice that of poor elderly men. Women received, on average, $341 less per month in Social Security benefits, reflecting lower lifetime payroll contributions. The book connects that gap to lower lifetime earnings and women’s greater likelihood of doing unpaid caregiving, as well as their longer average lives, which require limited resources to stretch further. Linda had raised two children and later lived with and helped care for her mother during her mother’s aggressive brain cancer.

Linda turned sixty-two in 2012 and began receiving Social Security the following month. She later regretted not waiting until sixty-five, but felt that her benefit was so small that postponing it would not make much difference. She wanted a durable way to live without working for the rest of her life or becoming a burden to her children. Her intended Earthship, with independent systems for food, electricity, climate control, and water, represented a hoped-for form of self-sufficiency; she also saw it as something lasting that she could leave to her children and grandchildren. It was a plan for security built outside the conventional retirement supports she did not trust to sustain her.

Family assistance offered immediate shelter but could not erase the household’s own insecurity. When Audra and Collin faced eviction after Collin lost short-term disability benefits, Linda gave them her stored twenty-eight-foot motorhome. It was to house two adults, three teenagers, and four dogs. Later, Linda heard that her grandchildren were staying in a tent beside the RV; a storm lifted its rainfly, water entered from below, and a granddaughter accidentally made tiny holes while vacuuming sand from the floor. The family patched the tent with duct tape. These details show how the shortfall in income and housing support moved through generations, with relatives providing space and help where secure alternatives were absent.

What the phrase diagnoses

“The end of retirement” does not mean that every older person works for the same reason, or that all work in later life is unwanted. The book’s examples instead reveal how often the choice is shaped by diminished pensions, inadequate benefits, lost assets, and physically taxing jobs. A culture that treats retirement as leisure can obscure the people who cannot afford to stop working; the stigma Ghilarducci identifies makes the problem harder to discuss by casting nonwork as unproductive dependence.

The phrase also marks a transfer of responsibility. When pensions and shared protections recede, older people must manage more risk through personal savings, continued labor, and family arrangements. Linda’s Earthship project imagines a different kind of support—one that could provide for its occupant rather than depend on a fragile paycheck—but it requires time, resources, and physical capacity to build. The gap between that long-term ambition and the immediate realities of work, rent, illness, and crowded shelter gives the phrase its force: retirement can remain a cultural expectation while security in old age becomes a private problem.