Is it an irony, a hint or an encouragement, that the traditional gift to a retiring employee is a watch?

It is an irony if retirement is the state in which time no longer matters and the days drift into each other.

It is a hint of mortality if retirement is regarded as the last chapter in life’s story, for then it will measure the counting down of one’s days.

But it is an encouragement if it suggests that the time has at last come to have freedom, fun, travel, new projects and new beginnings. All this is obvious.

So too is the fact that all but one of the things — namely, travel — need not cost much, a consideration when the reward for a lifetime of work is straitened circumstances.

Which of these three meanings the gold watch acquires will depend on the determination of its possessor; the third requires most of that tough substance.

The one thing better than retirement is not retiring. I had a friend, a pathologist, who found that people with vivid interests in life or work lived longer and defied illnesses better than people who had become muted and unfocused in their post-retirement years.

He was amazed at how some folk, who by textbook standards should have died long before, outlived people with relatively minor complaints: the classic case of the latter, he said, was the recently retired man, feeling useless and purposeless, giving in to an otherwise survivable heart attack.

If governments require us to work longer before retiring, they could be doing us a favour. Otherwise it is the third use of the retirement watch that we must choose: the one that requires much determination.

A. C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London

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