Retirement is not in my personal vocabulary. For me, it conjures up a withdrawal from the world. A life of slippers, feet up, hobbies, a consignment to the gentle, unthreatening slopes of go-slow.

But I will never retire. I would find it profoundly depressing. I love being engaged with the world, and earning money is part of that. For me, it is part of the vitality of living as an older person.

My friends and family will roar with laughter at my anti-retiree stance because they’ve been calling me “retired” for years and I’m 73 now. I’ve always prioritised freedom over wage-slavery, so I’ve hardly been employed in traditional terms. They see that as “going slow”.

To me, not retiring means focusing on creative projects that I can get grants for. (I would be tempted to cut anyone off who referred to them as hobbies.) Over the last ten years, I have made a dance film and performance with non-professional over-60s dancers called , where we leant into death and dying and performed it in Kensal Green Cemetery. I also formed a poetry group called The Willesden Junction Poets with a grant from Brent2020, and we made a book of our poems about the station. My next project is a Crone Poet Collective.

It hasn’t been easy to carry on working into my seventies; I’ve had to reinvent myself along the way. There have been crises over the years. After twenty-five years of earning my income from freelance journalism, by the early 2000s, there was much less work to be had, and I am tenacious. A combination of the internet and a falling number of pages in newspapers had taken most of the work away. I was heartbroken. But I battened down my hatches and became a PR.

Then, ten years ago, a group of older women who were local female writers and becoming friends – from 46 to 63 – gathered in a hot tub in North London and declared ourselves thoroughly fed up with the way we were being depicted in the media as these sagging, sexless, tired creatures that we could not identify with. We all had creative projects on the go.

From then on, I decided to co-found the social enterprise, Advantages of Age, with my newish friend and serial entrepreneur Suzanne Noble. We wanted to challenge the media narrative around ageing through our Facebook group, which I curate, and through our Substack magazine; we hear from writers who are planning retirement based on their passion for parkrun, or who have become a circus performance director in their 70s. We want to show the world that ageing can take many different forms and to inspire them into action.

Ageism is rife out there. From the job market, where over 50s – almost a million according to the Centre for Ageing Better – are finding it incredibly hard to find jobs, to the way we frame older people as far as language is concerned. We are not working; we working. We are not great for our age. We are great. I could go on. We are far from “past it”. I can’t retire even if I wanted to – because my voice is needed in a rapidly ageing society where older people so often feel invisible and powerless.

Money, of course, is another factor. I also can’t retire because I don’t have enough of it to do so. According to recent ONS data, more than one in five over-65s live in a household worth over £1 million, whereas the others struggle with bills, food costs and more. I know some rich retirees swan about on cruises, but that’s not me. And it’s not a lot of us.

But I also don’t want to give up on earning. For me, having an income beyond the state pension is very important. My journalistic career has come back in my 70s, and I still have one PR job – it’s a way for me to feel fully alive. 

I also want to provide support for all those other non-retirees who are out there setting up small businesses – yesterday I invited Advantages of Age members to share details of theirs and there was a welcome tidal wave of innovative jewellery, publishing, wellness for oldsters, creative writing, DJing, death celebrant training – being offered.

Retirement – you can stay out there on the horizon. I’m not moving towards you. I’m not giving up on us old people being lively working beings of this world if we want to. And I am determined to stay one of them.

Rose Rouse is the co-founder of Advantages of Age, a social enterprise which challenges the media narrative around ageing. They have a FB group – Advantages of Age, Baby Boomers and Beyond plus a Substack magazine