A review of Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America by Joel S. Savishinsky

What does it mean to retire? More importantly, how do we find meaning in retirement?  

In Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, retirees in Shelby trust their stories to Joel S. Savishinsky, a professor in the social sciences, department of anthropology and the Gerontology Institute at Ithaca College. If you like reading Studs Terkel or Margaret Mead, you’ll probably love this book. It blends ethnography and storytelling as it poses the question, “Is there life after work?” 

This book really asks what it means to live. In the words of one of the residents, “What does it mean when the undertaker zips up that black bag?”

Embedded in Shelby, a community whose name has been altered as have those of its residents, Savishinsky follows 13 men and 13 women through the process of retirement.  He employs the anthropologist techniques of participant-observation, interviewing and eliciting life stories. Over the course of several years, he attends retirement dinners and meets with residents in coffee shops and the comfort of their own homes. He studies formal rituals and informal rites of passage associated with retirement in American society. The author invokes the American archetypes of the cowboy and the settler, and examines the concept of retirement in the context of culture, character and history.