The Atlantic

Semi-Retirees Know the Key to Work-Life Balance

More and more older adults are working—in large part because they want to.
Source: Illustration by Ben Hickey

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The same day that Gayle and Mark Arrowood retired from their jobs at a Department of Energy lab, they drove to Sun Valley, Idaho, to start their next chapter: ski-resort bartending. Mark had a shift that very night.

Their previous roles had been intense: Over multi-decade careers, Mark had worked his way up from a janitor to a manager, and Gayle had gone to night school and become a scheduler for the lab’s projects. Because of how far away they’d lived from the lab, they had needed to wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. to make it in on time. They’d enjoyed

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