They're going to want to.
They're going to have to. And America is going to need them to.
So expect many baby boomers to keep working past "retirement age," a milestone that the generation's oldest members reach this year.
The nation's finances will demand this, as will personal pocketbooks. So will a labor market starved for skills.
As this huge cohort has done every time it entered a new phase of life, the boomers are going to rearrange the furniture.
It's surprising, then, that employers, government and Madison Avenue have done little to prepare for a world where the working septuagenarian will be the norm, not the oddball.
The notion of a leisurely "golden age" full of golf carts, Greek isles, and golden retrievers romping beside you on the beach was itself a Madison Avenue concoction. It was sold hard to "greatest generation" Americans on behalf of Sun Belt developers, financial firms, and employers eager to make room for the cheap, plentiful boomers.
Now, no surprise, boomers look to dismantle the retirement ideal they helped usher in. In a 2003 AARP survey, 68 percent of workers older than 50 said they intended to work in "retirement."
Make way for the encore career. The phrase, according to the man who coined it, Marc Freedman, describes "a new phase of life that's emerging between the end of midlife career and real old age."
The phrase just got a lot of play as the richest boomer, Bill Gates, moved from his first career - fiddling with ones and zeroes to change the world - to his encore career of battling poverty. His shift, from building wealth to sharing it, also is happening in lower income brackets.
The emblem for this new trend might well be a boomer in crisp Dockers standing on a corner and holding a sign: "Will work for meaning."
Freedman, a Philly kid who runs a California nonprofit called Civic Ventures, says boomers are flocking to jobs where the income helps, but where the real payoff is feeling you are making your corner of the world a better place.
Freedman penned his phrase after disliking others he had heard: "Like working retired. That's kind of like walking dead. Nothing aspirational about it. Encore career is a radically optimistic notion. You won't make more money or become more famous, but you might be doing the most essential work of your life, with heart and soul."
To be sure, financial need does fuel this yen to keep working into one's 70s.
