Radical retirement: the reinvention of self after work

Radical Retirement: The Reinvention of Self After Work brings together the voices and experiences of those who have reinvented their professional selves in response to the looming challenges of retirement. The collection offers different stories and reflections that open a variety of perspectives on the topic of retirement. Some of the chapters take the form of a dialogue that asks pertinent questions about leadership roles and invites productive conversation: contributors are not afraid to critique their professions and a society characterized by rapid change. The aim of Radical Retirement is to address the challenges and demands that face professionals as we approach retirement. This study does not approach the topic of retirement in the vein of other multi-authored books or edited collections of essays on a specific topic. Therefore, it does not consist of a series of case studies and accompanying analysis in which professionals showcase the impact of retirement on their working lives. As a collection of stories, this book approaches the topic of retirement in a range of ways. Each chapter challenges outmoded and stale ideas on retirement and promotes visionary ways of reinventing one’s identity in professional life. The stories within the chapters should be treated as a source of inspiration for those who are struggling to imagine life after retirement. Each contributor provides alternatives to the expected next steps and offers ideas for reinvention. Radical Retirement seeks to build on a growing area of research on identity and retirement. Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career and Jan Hall and Jon Stokes’ Changing Gear: Creating the Life You Want After a Full-on Career are compelling examples of recent advances in the study of workplace identity and the pressures at critical junctures of a working life. Radical Retirement builds on the scholarship on identity and retirement by challenging the conventional wisdom that a career is a cumulative trajectory of milestones culminating in self-fulfillment. It acknowledges the dark and unspoken in our working trajectories through its recognition of work, not as separate from the private, but as a vital part of our identity. Unlike earlier studies on the topic of retirement, the lessons and stories in this book come directly from the contributors themselves, lending a wide diversity of experiences to the theme of reinvention and retirement. The stories contained in this collection reveal not just the superficial mechanics of abandoning an old path and finding a new one; instead, they go beneath the surface to reveal the emotions fired up by radical life change. They narrate precisely what the encounter of leaping into the unknown felt like.