Rethinking Boomers and the Dangerous Myth of Reinvention
A man is never too old … until his regrets take the place of his dreams.
- John Barrymore
Are you a baby-boomer? Have you decided what to do with yourself after your retirement? Before you answer that question, I’d like to refer you to a very interesting article by Marc Freemen: The Dangerous Myth of Reinvention .
Marc Freedman is founder and CEO of Encore.org, which annually gives out The Purpose Prize for social innovators in the second half of life, and author of The Big Shift: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life.
Like many of us, you may not have not heard of this organization. And that’s not because it has not been very successful.
For those not familiar with Encore, here’s how they describe themselves:
Encore.org is building a movement to make it easier for millions of people to pursue second acts for the greater good. We call them “encore careers” — jobs that combine personal meaning, continued income and social impact — in the second half of life. An awesome idea, isn’t it?
A lot of this article revolves around two keyword definitions. Here are the words and applicable definitions from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Reinvention — A complete remake or redo to bring into use again.
Reintegration- a restoration to a unified state.
We will come back to these definitions in a moment.
We will leave it to you to read Marc’s article in its entirety. In this blog I will capture components to give my views on the author’s points of view.
Point one
Gary Maxworthy spent three decades in business until a personal tragedy prompted him to reexamine his priorities. He left the corporate world behind, set off to find his true calling, and in the process discovered both a new identity and the path to accomplishing his most important work fighting hunger.
In this telling, Maxworthy is an archetypal example of the reinvention mythology that seems omnipresent today, especially when it comes to those in the second half of life. Self-help columns are packed with reinvention tips. …
Yet for all its can-do spirit, I’ve come to believe the reinvention fantasy — the whole romance with radical transformation unmoored from the past — is both unrealistic and misleading. I’ll even go further: I think it is pernicious, the enemy of actual midlife renewal.
For the vast majority of us, reinvention is not practical — or even desirable. On a very basic level, it’s too daunting. How many people have, Houdini-like, escaped the past, started from scratch and forged a whole new identity and life? Sure, it happens — but not often, at least outside of Hollywood.
My view:
Let’s start with the meaning of reinvention so we are all on the same page. Reinvention is a remake or redo. But in this context, I believe the remake or redo has to do with the end state of what you want to do.
For example, people have executed reinventions within their careers on many occasions. I started as an engineer, then went into marketing, and ended up as a business unit executive. The end state in each instance was different, but many of the skills required for success were the same.
One could refer to these changes as a reintegration or a reinvention. Not very different really? More like splitting hairs?
My conclusion then is that people in retirement have several choices; be totally retired and do hobbies, or pick a different end state of activity than the one that represented their last job. To achieve this new end state, they could reinvent or reintegrate. In case, many (or perhaps most) skills to be successful would already be there. It is not like they are starting over, in my opinion.
So I believe Marc is really splitting hairs here. His conclusion is far overstated.
Point two
More troublesome is the underlying assumption that the past — in other words, our accumulated life experience — is baggage to be disregarded and discarded. Isn’t there something to be said for racking up decades of know-how and lessons, from failures as well as triumphs? Shouldn’t we aspire to build on that wisdom and understanding?
My view:
I don’t understand how he got to this conclusion at all. Whose underlying assumption is this? Not a good one in my opinion. Everything new we decide to do whether a reinvention or reintegration is built on the old and often just ‘reconnecting the dots’ of past experience in a different way.
Point three
After years studying social innovators in the second half of life — individuals who have done their greatest work after 50 — I’m convinced the most powerful pattern that emerges from their stories can be described as reintegration, not reinvention. These successful late-blooming entrepreneurs weave together accumulated knowledge with creativity, while balancing continuity with change, in crafting a new idea that’s almost always deeply rooted in earlier chapters and activities.
My view:
Certainly agree with these points mostly in entirety, but they do seem in conflict with the earlier points, don’t they? Again I believe that much too much is being made of the differences in the meanings between reinvention and reintegration.
Point four
To me, that’s the most damaging part of the reinvention mythology: the preoccupation not only with rebirth but with youth itself, even as it is slipping away. Today 70 is upheld as the new 50, 60 the new 40 or even 30, and 50 practically adolescence.
My view:
My opinion is that there are many and assorted reasons why people want to continue to have meaning in their lives and try new things. It is about the age of continual learning and you could (and perhaps should) consider this to be age insensitive.
While I certainly have no real data to back it up, I believe new things and continuous learning has little to do with age in most instances (notice I did not use either of the terms reinvention or reintegration). In fact, I would conclude most baby boomers would like to totally ignore age … make it irrelevant.
