Armchair Critic: Why we need to rethink what 'retirement' means

Most of our ideas about retirement need to be… retired, writes Brendan Llewellyn

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Most of our ideas about retirement need to be… retired, writes Brendan Llewellyn.

Our symbols for retirement – gold watches, deckchairs, secateurs and cruises – are based on the convention that you work, you save and then you stop work. Firstly, less people work consistently either through choice or circumstance. Secondly, they are very unlikely to have saved up enough to stop work at the point where we might expect them to retire. Thirdly, they may not wish to.  At a minimum, we need to rethink retirement but, going a little further, we need to consider whether the concept is just past its sell by date. So what's changed since we first picked our retirement icons?...

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