As personal finance bloggers sell dreams of retiring early, Mitch Anthony is asking professional advisors to rethink the value of retiring at all.

Anthony, an advisor coach, speaker and author focused on financial life planning, argued that the modern concept of retirement is flawed during a Thursday presentation at Financial Advisor’s 9th Annual Inside Retirement Conference in Las Vegas.

“Retirement is a social construct that no longer fits the age we live in,” said Anthony. “It is an artificial finish line imposed upon our lives and based on age, and I can document this: The chief cornerstone of all retirement policy is nothing less than ageism.”

Ageism, meaning that as workers reach 62, 65 or 67 years of age modern society expects them to retire to a life of leisure and lower productivity, said Anthony.

Retirement at a certain age has become compulsory, said Anthony, which has led to a narrow focus on financial fitness across clients’ lifecycles.

“This industry has had a tunnel vision around retirement for years, mono-maniacally focused on numbers,” said Anthony. “Consequently, we see a lot of people struggle with this thing we call retirement.”

When Chancellor Otto von Bismarck signed a law implementing compulsory retirement in Germany in 1885, it was the first example of modern retirement combined with a social security system, he said. At the time, the mandatory retirement age was 70 years old, but the average life expectancy was 46.

The law made sense at the time because Germany was an industrialized society where workers traded their physical output for a paycheck. As they aged, it was no longer possible for them to be as productive.

“Now, come to where we live today, 133 years later, how many of you feel like you’re living an industrial age life? Is your clientele living an industrial age life? The correct answer is that most of us are not,” said Anthony. “What is it we’re trading for a paycheck today? The first thing we have to acknowledge is that we’re trading intellectual knowledge for a paycheck. It’s between our ears. “

Workers also provide relational capital, noted Anthony, in their ability to forge and strengthen networks of other people. Neither intellectual nor relational capital decline at age 65, said Anthony. “Intellectual and relational capital all adds up to something we call experience, and I believe we’re living in something called the experience age,” he said.

Yet an entire industry has grown around the idea of compulsory retirement. Del Webb, former co-owner of the Yankees, made a fortune in real estate building Sun City retirement communities. Anthony credits Webb for inventing the terms “golden years” and “golden age.”

“It was from that that we invented the idea of retirement entitlement—that you’ve worked long enough, you’ve toiled hard enough that you’ve earned your day in the sun,” said Anthony. “Financial services globbed right onto that idea because we needed a way to get people to save more money, and there’s a good one right there.”

But advisors may now be doing clients more harm than good, he said.

In today’s world, mandatory or compulsory retirement make little sense, said Anthony, and may actually be harmful to individuals. He referred to British studies that showed workers suffer a 30 percent short-term memory loss within the fist year of retirement. Another study, from Yale, showed that working an extra year instead of retiring may increase life expectancy by as much as 11 percent.

One reason is that people spend time and resources funding their retirement without spending much time thinking about what they’re going to do while they’re retired, said Anthony, noting that most people spend more time on average planning for a two-week vacation than they do for a 30-year retirement. Today, successful, healthy retirement means that people must remain engaged with others, have purpose in their lives, integrate work with leisure and continue to face challenges.

Anthony laid out this blueprint for what he describes as an  “EPIC” retirement:

Engagement

“The ‘E’ in EPIC retirement is to engage at any age,” said Anthony. “Age is absolute, but old is an attitudinal marker. One does not get old until they decide to get old.”

Older people should be treated as assets, said Anthony, but Western society venerates youth rather than age.

That also means that retirement and financial life planning should be available to people at all ages, as the meanings of work, leisure and retirement change with the lengthening lifecycle, said Anthony.

Purpose

Anthony cited studies from areas where populations shared unusually high lifespans or a higher incidence of centenarians, said Anthony. One such area was in Idaho, where there was a strong correlation with religious affiliation. As members of the group matured, they became more important, not less. Researchers concluded that connectivity to a caring group of people might be a factor in enhancing longevity and quality of life.

Retirement, then, shouldn’t be the goal for all clients, and advisors should be more open to discussing and planning for alternatives to formal retirements.

“What do we get people to save for instead of retirement? How about freedom, age-irrespective freedom,” said Anthony. “These are emancipation funds, not retirement funds. Get to the place financially where you can do what you want, with whom you choose, at the pace that’s comfortable to you—that’s a whole lot better than retiring.”

Integration

“Leisure has no meaning outside of work,” said Anthony. “It’s the leisure lie. We’ve been told that you go from a life of all work to a life of all play and you get happy, but that’s not finding a balance in your life, that’s switching your binge. There’s a law of returns around leisure: less is more.”

Anthony noted that retirees planning to enter a life of leisure often lapse into depression. First, the retiree becomes bored with repetitive, leisurely activities. Then they become pessimistic and enter a spiral of depression.

The solution for most clients is to find a balance between work and leisure, said Anthony. Part-time jobs, seasonal work, encore careers and volunteerism can help fill the gap in their lives that their primary career once occupied.

Challenge

“One of the leading lifestyle factors impacting the progressing of both Alzheimer’s and dementia is maintaining intellectual challenge in your lives,” said Anthony.

Physical challenges are also important, said Anthony, because challenging one’s body helps to stimulate the brain.

Clients with intellectual careers should be encouraged to continue pursuing their lines of research, if interested.

“The fountain of youth is nothing more than curiosity,” said Anthony. “It’s the scientist who has studied fruit flies for 43 years and says he’s barely scratched the surface. When you wake up with curiosity, it’s impossible to be old.”

How To Engage

Advisors should help clients find their purpose in retirement, said Anthony, by asking simple, open-ended questions.

“If I were to come up with the simplest retirement conversation possible, it would be something like this: “Mr. and Mrs. Client, how are we going to spend your time, and how are we going to pay for that,’” said Anthony. “Which question needs to be answered first? The answer is ‘how are you going to spend your time?’ Spending money is a reflection of how one spends their time.”

Anthony also encouraged advisors to help clients chart out their time in retirement with a weekly schedule so that they had some idea of what they would be doing with all their free time.

Advisors may also want to ask their clients about what they’ve witnessed from peers and other acquaintances and friends who have retired, encouraging them to share the good stories and the bad stories, to gain perspective on the possibilities of a life after work and the drawbacks of a poorly planned retirement.

Most importantly, advisors should feel comfortable telling clients that they don’t have to retire at 65, 67 or any time in the near future.

“There are a lot of people about to make the wrong decision, and you can help them,” said Anthony. “They’re looking to you for permission. Give it. Broaden the dialogue. ...

“Today we retire in the September, maybe even the August of our lives,” said Anthony. “It’s a beautiful season, but there’s maybe a full season and a half, even two, ahead of us. It’s a life proposition, maybe, and not just an economic proposition.”