Ball and chain: the human cost of raising the retirement age

75 is not 65

While experience differs from individual to individual, many people fail to realize just how significantly the five years from 65 to 70 can differ from the periods thereafter, said Dr. Colleen Christmas, an assistant professor of geriatric medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and a primary care physician in geriatrics.

The differences can be both physical and emotional. Compared to those 65 to 74 years old, three times as many elderly people between 75 and 84 report that physical aches and pains limit their ability to see to their daily needs, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Deteriorating eyesight serious enough to limit activity more than doubles among the elderly every decade after the age of 65.

Conditions that tend to be fatal, like lung disease and diabetes, increase only slightly with age, largely because many of the victims die off, vanishing from population rolls. But among those who survive, heart disease increases by 40 percent among people aged 75 to 84, in comparison to those aged 65 to 74. After age 65, the incidence of dementia doubles every five years. “If you push retirement even later, all those things you plan to do in your golden years are going to be less likely to occur,” Christmas said.

For the vast majority of employees who may have struggled for decades to perform jobs that are low on fulfillment and independence but high in stress and enforced indignities, having to work longer to collect retirement benefits can become acutely difficult, said Margaret Barbee, a human resources consultant and specialist in organizational psychology. Persisting in an unhappy job for the sake of salary or benefits alone can become a kind of sentence — organizational psychologists call the phenomenon “job lock.”

According to Barbee, its pre-retirement form can strike particularly hard, leading to feelings of depression and emotional paralysis. As people remain trapped in jobs they wish they could quit, Barbee said, they increasingly come to feel overwhelmed by their lack of options.

Employees in such jobs, Christmas said, are “really, really looking forward to those retirement days.” One reason is to achieve “relaxation and lack of structure,” but, Christmas adds, there is another crucial factor: workers long for retirement because “they want to be out” of jobs they find emotionally or intellectually unsatisfying.

“I don’t want to be under the stick, under the gun, when I’m old.”

Darrin Smith, who is 42 years old, has largely ignored the debate over Social Security’s fate. A graphic and media designer, Smith struck out on his own in hopes of earning more as an entrepreneur than he would on salary. But Smith still owes money on his student loans, and has a ways to go before paying them off.

Smith’s hope for retirement is simple: a stable, safe home that is paid for, that will allow him to finally relax. “To read what I want, to do what I want, and to take each day as it comes,” he said. Single and without children, Smith wants to retire by 65, even earlier if possible, and maybe do a bit of traveling. For clothes, a few pair of Levi 501 jeans and a matching stack of tee shirts would suffice. Mostly, he wants to be his own master. “I don’t want to be under the stick, under the gun, when I’m old. I don’t want to be running around chasing the dollar.”

But what if his efforts did not bring financial independence, and he needed to rely on Social Security to keep him in retirement? And what if he would have to continue chasing that dollar until he was, say, 69 to receive his full retirement income from Social Security?

“It would be a devastating thing,” he said. “Past devastation. You don’t want to go home one day and drop dead after work and die. It’s almost like you live to work, instead of working to live.”

Smith thought of his own parents, from whom he was estranged. Last time he saw them, two years ago, they were in their 60s, and seemed healthy. But he could not imagine scrambling for work as hard as he does now into his late 60s.

“I don’t want to still be in the rat race, chasing behind another rat at that age,” he said finally. “I’d rather be dead.”

For now, Smith feels the only way to build the future he hopes for — financially solvent, with his own home — is to aim high, to leave aside the whole question of Social Security at all, and the “demoralizing” prospect of having to work another 27 years before he could retire.

“Your will could be crushed by looking at things straight on as they are,” Smith said.

“I thought I paid my dues”

Kristen Barrett would like to retire around 65 — even younger if possible — and sees herself winding down her hours and days of work gradually, rather than definitively quitting the workforce in a single day.

“I’m kind of thinking it’s going to be 65,” Barrett said. “I’m hoping that it won’t be past that.” However, on Social Security’s current trajectory, with no further changes, Barrett and everyone else born after 1960 can only collect full retirement benefits at age 67. If she retires earlier, at say, 62, she will only collect 70 percent of her full benefits each month.

But what if she had no choice but to continue working until 69 or 70 to collect full benefits, or had to work until 64 to even collect partial benefits, as the Bowles-Simpson plan proposes? What would it be like to have to report to work every day, when her mind and body might be saying, “Enough already”?

“That’s a good point,” she said, and paused. She had known that elderly people might be more prone to depression. Barrett thought about pushing herself to keep on working, past the moment she was ready to stop. “Is this ever going to be over?” she imagined feeling. “I thought I paid my dues.”