I hate to sound like a broken record, but I’m not happy with this chapter. (If you don’t understand that colloquialism, then you shouldn’t be thinking about retirement anyway!) One good thing about forcing myself to blog by noon every Monday is that I am forced to move forward. I will continue to improve this chapter, as I have the others, over the coming weeks and months. Worth noting, I have made numerous changes based on the feedback folks have given me so far. Thank you, again!
One issue I faced in writing this chapter is the overlap with the Introduction. I was trying hard to steer clear of that but finally decided that I was better off writing this chapter and then going back and changing the Introduction to have less of an overlap. I think some overlap is fine, but I’m not quite sure where the line is. It seems like with each chapter I write I must update one or two of the chapters I wrote previously. Hopefully, that will slow down as the chapters begin to fall better into place.
As always, let me know your thoughts and suggestions. If for this chapter or any of the previous ones you have an experience from a friend or yourself that helps illustrate things better, please share it with me. Most of my examples are from my life and it would be good to have other people’s experiences as well.
My fall semester at seminary has started back up. I’m taking Intro to Hermeneutics, Systematic Theology 3, and Old Testament 1. There will be a lot of writing for them, so I do not expect to have a chapter every other week. I’m hoping I can write one every fourth week, but we shall see. I am still planning a blog entry of some sort about the book each Monday morning, but some of them will necessarily be brief.
Chapter 1: Retirement basics
Most of us think we know what retirement is but probably aren’t as sure about what ours will be like. The Internet has more videos and articles about what to do or not do in retirement and preparing for it than any of us have the time to consume. At its simplest, retirement is what we do once we stop working, normally around 65 years of age. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines retirement as “withdrawal from one's position or occupation or from active working life.” Simple, right?
No, not so much. Will I be able to afford to stop working? What about early retirement? What if we only “semi-retire” and work part-time or in an easier job? What about if we become too sick to work and must retire? What about if our job “goes away” and we can no longer find work? If I am what I do, what am I when I no longer work? What do people do once they stop working? Does God care what we do? Do we have a plan for our retirement beyond our finances? The list of questions grows the more we think about retirement.
The number of people living out those questions as retirees is growing rapidly in the US. More than 10,000 people are expected to retire every day for at least the next few years. Over 50 million people are considered retired with an average age of starting retirement of 61 and a median age of 62.[i] The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System reports that 27% of adults consider themselves to be retired. The reasons for retiring vary widely, but health was a factor for 30% of retirees and caring for family members for 17%.[ii] Whatever retirement is, many of us will retire before we are ready.
A brief history of retirement
Before looking at retirement in 21st-Century America, it is helpful to understand its history. In ancient times the concept of retirement would have been incomprehensible. Basically, you worked until you died. Your children and community (hopefully) helped support you when you got old, injured, or sick. If you no longer could tend the sheep, you spun the wool. If you couldn’t plow the field, you shelled the peas. In agrarian societies, this way of living continued until fairly recently. Think about the 70s TV series, The Waltons, and the role of the grandparents. It took place during the 1930s when Grandpa and Grandma still had work on the farm doing things like repairing tools, canning fruit, and watching their grandchildren. They most certainly were not traveling the world or living a life of leisure in a retirement community. That was not necessarily a decision on their part, it was just the way things were.
For some people like soldiers, the concept of pensions did exist, as early as in the Roman Empire. This idea is alluded to in the 2000 movie, The Gladiator. The protagonist, Maximus, is a Roman general who dreams of being able to enjoy his pension on a farm with his wife and son. The Roman government awarded pensions to soldiers after 20 years of service. The pension could be either land or a sum of money. In either case, the pension was significant but would probably have necessitated working the land or augmenting the money. Maximus, of course, was a high-ranking soldier and would have been able to live quite comfortably. His dream was to work on his farm, though admittedly, it was a very nice farm. Other countries have had pensions for their military over the years. The United States started pensions for its soldiers during the Civil War.
Something like modern-day retirement began to develop in the mid- to late-1800s. In the 1880s, the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, implemented retirement for folks at 70 years of age which was lowered to 65 in 1916. In that day, life expectancy was not much different than the retirement age. As an aside, his reason for implementing retirement was probably to slow the rise of socialism. Around that time in the US, some people in especially strenuous and risky jobs such as the military, police, and fire fighters had also begun to receive pensions. By the early 1900s, the idea of retirement became more generally accepted with 65 as the most common age.[iii]
Social Security solidified the concept and age with general retirement benefits beginning near the end of the Great Depression. Unemployment was still at over 20% when the law was enacted. At least part of the reason for the implementation of Social Security payments for people 65 and older was to make jobs available for younger folks. Life expectancy at the time was only 58.
Since then, people have come to see retirement as a basic right, something that should be enjoyed at as young an age as possible even as life expectancy increases. The average age of retirement is falling and as of 2024 was down to 61. If someone in the US lives to be 65, then the average life expectancy is another twenty years. One in four 65-year-olds will live to be 90. Twenty to thirty years of retirement is a reasonable expectation and the percentage of years many people spend in retirement is approaching 50% of their adult lives.
Beginning in our fifties and increasing as we age, we can feel social pressure to retire. Our grandchildren often ask my wife when she is going to retire. She still enjoys seeing patients in her medical practice, but the patients also regularly ask when she is going to retire. It has become a societal expectation that we will retire in our sixties, at the latest. People still working into their seventies are often thought of as either workaholics or people who cannot afford to retire.
Early retirement
Other people retire much earlier, in their fifties or even earlier. Sometimes people are blessed with through inheriting money, shrewd investing, or receiving a financial windfall like those earned in technology startups that go public. The FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement has gained real traction in recent years as a way to retire early, even as early as your 30s or 40s. The basic tenants of the movement are to maximize savings, reduce expenses, and invest to create passive income streams. Proponents contend that once you have done enough of those things, you can afford to retire.
Other people may be forced to retire early, possibly before they are ready, because of health problems or changes in employment. Health problems that result in the inability to work can happen at any age but increase as we age. My brother has had vision problems since he was in grade school that have made it difficult for him to work. I also have friends in the technology industry who were “retired” by their companies either through layoffs or early retirement “packages” that were not exactly optional. Their advancing ages made it difficult to find work and they ended up retiring.
As we shall see, the removal of work from people’s lives can be difficult, especially when it happens suddenly or before they had planned. In many cases the issues are financial, but for others the unexpected change in their lives was the biggest challenge. Financial wherewithal is good, but it does not in and of itself provide meaning or purpose for someone’s life.
Hopes and dreams
Regardless of how old we expect to be when we retire, we have a wide range of expectations, hopes, and dreams for what our retirement will be like. Many people ascribe to the prevalent view that you save up as much money as you can and then you kick back and enjoy the fruits of your labors by playing golf, traveling, gardening, reading, or whatever you like to do until you are no longer capable of so doing. Depending upon your perspective, that sounds either ideal or hollow.
A July 2024 study by Wakefield Research asked which things people most looked forward to doing in retirement. The majority of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers listed relaxing as much as possible, spending more time with family, and traveling. Other things many of them looked forward to doing included picking up new hobbies, volunteering, relocating, and working a part-time “passion job.” [iv] The Internet is full of lists of top activities in retirement. Some of the lists are based on surveys and some are just opinions. There are some very common ones across these lists including reading, exploring genealogies, playing games, volunteering, exercising, gardening, writing, learning languages, playing sports, birding, and doing creative hobbies like modeling, woodworking, painting, and sewing.
People I’ve spoken with have expressed similar hopes for retirement. They’ve described taking up a hobby they had long ago put aside. I looked forward to building scenery for an N-scale model train layout in my retirement. Others aspire to go back to school or finally have time to travel in Europe. Some want to have time to read without interruption. Many spoke about looking forward to spending more time with family and friends. Others want the freedom to move to where they’ve always wanted to live or to where their grandchildren live rather than where their job has been. The prevailing attitude many people share is that they’ve worked hard and now they’ve earned the right to do these things.
Not all of retirement is watching sunsets
In the back of our minds, however, we do have doubts. We’ve all heard stories of someone who retired and died of a heart attack not long afterwards. While this certainly happens, it is not as prevalent as such stories indicate. It is difficult to tease out from all of the statistics about mortality and retirement whether people who are sick choose to retire or people who retire get sick. The best answer is probably that we shouldn’t worry about these kinds of anecdotal stories we hear. That said, there are plenty of concerns we need to understand.
Numerous studies have chronicled negative aspects of retirement, such as a meta-analysis of eleven studies that showed a mean depression rate of 28% among retirees.[v] A 2013 study by Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs and the Age Endeavour Fellowship on economics, health, age, and government policy included disturbing findings for retired people in Great Britain. They include retirement
- decreases the likelihood of being in ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’ self-assessed health by 39%,
- increases the probability of suffering from clinical depression by 41%, and
- increases the probability of having at least one diagnosed physical condition by 63%.[vi]
The latest data from US Bureau of Labor Statistics show Americans of retirement age (65 and older) spend about seven hours per day on leisure and sports activities. The only category taking more time in their days was sleeping. The activities in this category of the survey include watching TV, playing games, socializing, reading, and exercising. My first thought was that socializing and exercise seem like good activities. Unfortunately, between them, they take less than an hour of that time. Watching TV takes the biggest chunk at over four hours a day.[vii] Other screens such as phones and tablets were not broken out in this data, but my feeling (and personal experience) is that they are increasing the amount of time spent on such activities.
A big area that many retired and soon to be retired people worry about is their finances. Money is something that most of us worry about long before we even think about retirement. Once we retire, however, the ability to make more money to assuage our worries is definitionally gone. My wife and I have been blessed in our careers and planned reasonably well for our retirement, but my wife continuing to work has reduced, but not eliminated, our remaining financial worries. Not everyone is so fortunate. So many things largely outside our control will determine our big worry that we may outlive our money. We worry if Social Security will still be around when we need it, if the stock market will crash and hurt our 401Ks, if we will face large medical bills, and if we will live longer than our financial plan expects.
As we retire, we face new concerns. One of those, particularly for those who were forced to retire unexpectedly, is the loss of identity. Many of us in our careers formed our identities around our work. Whether that is taken away suddenly or with plenty of time to prepare, it is a major life change right up there with graduating from school, starting our first jobs, getting married, and having children. There are lots of academic reports chronicling this issue with titles like The Effects of Retirement on Sense of Purpose in Life, Identity Distress Surrounding Retirement, and How Retirement Changes Your Identity. Anecdotally, my father often said that retiring was the worst thing he ever did. I watched him dwindle away without meaningful work. We all worry, or at least wonder, who we are when we are no longer working.
One worry I had was that I would turn into a couch potato. Without deadlines and things that must be done, I tend to “fiddle” around. Reading fiction is one place this happens for me. I suffer from just-one-more-chapter syndrome. My fiction reading became a bad enough problem while I was working and raising a family that I allowed myself to only read non-fiction for well over ten years. Technology has only made things worse because I always have a book with me on my phone or tablet. Videos are another incredible time sink. I shudder to think how many hours of videos I’ve watched on how to create model railroad scenery, the current state of the war in Ukraine, and snippets of old favorite movies. It sure would be easy to watch YouTube videos all day! Part of my motivation for writing this book was my conviction that my natural inclinations to idleness was not how God wanted me to spend decades of life, especially while I have my health.
There are also plenty of good statistics about retirement. One of the most important is the famous U-shaped happiness curve. Simply, data shows that people start out in early adulthood happy, their happiness decreases during middle age while pursuing their careers and raising children, and then increases later in life to even higher levels as we age. Many academic papers have been published about this phenomenon examining the reasons for it, whether it is true around the world, and whether it is changing over time. Are our midlives just a rough period? Do we understand ourselves better in old age? Do we finally figure out how to have balance in our lives? The speculation is likely to continue for a long time, but for our purposes, the key is that we can expect our happiness to increase as we age.
What is a Christian to do?
Among all these hopes, dreams, and fears, we wonder what God wants us to do. You don’t see folks in the Bible saving up for their retirement homes on the golf course or near the Roman theater. The big questions driving this book are how Christians should understand retirement and, as a result, live out their retirements. Unfortunately, the traditional places we turn to do not have much to say on the topic of retirement. The most obvious place for us to look for answers is from the Bible itself. As we shall see in Chapter 3, the Bible only directly addresses retirement once, but does have a considerable amount to say about the issues that retirees face.
The natural place for retirees to expect guidance is from our churches, but they don’t talk about retirement very often. I have asked most folks I speak with on the topic of retirement whether they have heard a sermon on retirement and only a couple have. Some folks felt that pastors did not preach on the topic because the audience was too narrow. That seems like a weak excuse given that over one in four adults consider themselves retired and most unretired folks in their fifties and sixties are thinking about retirement. We hear sermons about fathers most years on Father’s Day when less than half of the congregation is men. Churches often have groups that target seniors, but they tend to be largely social. That is understandable but doesn’t help attendees to know what the Bible thinks about retirement. It is also not very likely that people preparing for retirement will attend.
Another place we may turn is to books written by theologians, pastors, or other Christians. In my own experience, I found few Christians books on the topic. The ones I found either try to show that retirement is not Biblical, how to prepare financially for retirement, or look people’s retirement experiences. Those types of books have their roles, but none of them address the situations most of us face—we are already retired, are trying to figure out what retirement should look like, or must retire for health or job reasons.
Professor and theologian Ben Witherington, III in his book on work thinks that Chistians have “…little or no understanding of what the Bible actually says about work, and it hardly informs their views on questions of work versus play, or career versus retirement, or other related subjects. And in one sense, they can hardly be blamed — Christian theologians have seldom addressed the topic of work...”[viii] His point is an excellent one. We cannot answer questions about what biblical retirement should look like until understand what the Bible has to say about work. The next chapter attempts to do exactly that.
[i] Vance Cariaga, “How Many People Are Retiring Every Year for the Next 4 Years?” GOBankingRates, April 2024, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/many-people-retiring-every-next-113857061.html.
[ii] “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2022 - May 2023,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, August 2023, https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2023-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2022-retirement-investments.htm.
[iii] Sarah Laskow, “How Retirement Was Invented,” The Atlantic, October 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/how-retirement-was-invented/381802/.
[iv] Kate Maier, “Retirement Survey: Are Americans Ready For Retirement,” Wealth Enhancement, January 2025, https://www.wealthenhancement.com/blog/retirement-survey-are-americans-ready-for-retirement-see-how-you-compare.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7551681/.
[vi] Gabriel H. Sahlgren, “Work longer, live healthier: The relationship between economic activity, health, and government policy,” Age Endeavor Foundation and Institute of Economic Affairs, February 2013, https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Work%20Longer,%20Live_Healthier.pdf.
[vii] “Time Spent in Leisure and Sports in 2024,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2025, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/time-spent-in-leisure-and-sports-in-2024.htm.
[viii] Ben Witherington, III, Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor. (Chicago: Eerdmans, 2011). Kindle edition, loc. 36.
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