For Gen X, expected to both live longer than ever and be the first Australian generation to fund our own retirements, an increasing number of us are facing the reality of our careers running out of road a long way short of being ready, or financially able, to finish working.
The official term for this is “soft” retirement, but there’s nothing soft about it.
With more and more of us struggling with long-term unemployment, and the breaking dawn of AI delivering further disruption to the workforce, this is a paradox with the potential to have a major impact on the quality of life in retirement for Gen X’ers.
And it’s sure as shit not what we signed up for.
Way back in what my children would call the “olden days” (or the early 90’s to those of us who were there), I somehow fumbled my way off the back of a promising-but-failed education into a media career.
Having negotiated that hurdle, I had the reasonable expectation to be able to work my way up and keep going until I retired, an inconceivably distant way off into the future. And I’ve done OK.
But the truth is, 30 years later, I’m not so certain that I will be able to see out my career in my chosen profession. And I know I’m not the only one.
Recently, while scrolling through my LinkedIn feed, I saw a post from a long-time colleague, Jacquie Riddell, referring to her “accidental retirement”. It stuck out as a moment of rare candour in that highly curated environment, and I reached out to talk to her about her experience.

Every time I’ve ended a job, I’ve probably had a bit of time where I didn’t have a job where I’m thinking, uh-oh, what happens now? And usually, a great job has come along. But now? That great job hasn’t come along.
– Jacquie Riddell

Jacquie is a woman who has made a significant contribution to Australian media, popular culture and the arts over the course of her working life. She helped launch radio station Triple J and its iconic “Hottest 100” in the ‘90’s, oversaw the rollout of music channels on Aussie pay TV in the ‘00’s, and was instrumental in the design and development of the “Sydney Modern” art museum.
She is, in short, a “weapon”.
And yet, at a time when she could be considered at the height of her powers, she has been unable to land the next big role. It’s a challenge she has been very open about, and one familiar to many of her contemporaries.
In our first “Unfinished People” mini-doc, we join Jacquie for a conversation about the factors influencing this new reality, how it feels to be living it, and what might need to change for others of our generation to avoid it.
In my own observation of the media and marketing industry, agism plays a major part. Put simply, we are often devalued for being middle-aged, rather than being valued for the accumulated knowledge, skills and experience we bring to the table.
But there are other reasons, according to HR expert Ryan Atkins, including offshoring of technical and manufacturing jobs and the fact that, “In corporate life, restructuring is a permanent feature of organisational life” that “disproportionately removes people in the middle of the organisation, which is where Generation X is typically found.”
Major events such as the GFC and Covid-19 have also “impacted mid-career workers through redundancies, and unlike junior workers, it’s taken them longer to get back into employment.”
We are also the most indebted generation in history, many still with mortgages, families and, for some, parents to support, so the financial pressure can be huge.
And that goes beyond paying bills. A loss of income, according to Atkins, “isn’t just around the money, it surrounds social connection, it’s around purpose… We’re seeing rates of depression, anxiety, and isolation significantly elevated in this group.”

“A loss of income isn’t just around the money, it surrounds social connection, it’s around purpose… We’re seeing rates of depression, anxiety, and isolation significantly elevated in this group.”
– Ryan Atkins

In my lifetime, so many technological and social changes have occurred that have impacted working life. As Gen X’ers, we tend to just get on with things, and so we’ve adapted and adopted, or so we tell ourselves. In reality, we’ve just let these things happen to us.
But if we just let “accidental retirement” happen to us, the impacts on our (longer) lives, the economy, and future generations for whom it will become “just the way it is” could be very serious.
Ryan Atkins sums it up well – “What we need to do is speak up and say experienced, capable, willing workers are being pushed out of the workforce before their time. It’s economically stupid. Personally, financially devastating and, ultimately, socially corrosive. We can as a society choose to do better.”
Yes we can. Because we haven’t worked our arses off for decades for it all to just go… pffft… in the last ten years.
We’ve bloody-well earnt the right to launch ourselves off the cliff when we’ve got nothing left to give, Thelma and Louise style, into a retirement that we’ve properly planned and prepared for.
And it should definitely be no accident.