Across nations and cultures, the word for “not working” reveals major differences about identity, purpose and happiness.

When Stanford University linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto taught a course on growing up and aging in Japan about a decade ago, she says her American students described retirement as people “just sitting around watching TV.” It was a striking vision — purposeless, slightly pitiful, emptied of meaning. That image is encoded in the word itself: retirement, from the Old French retirer, to withdraw. In English, to retire is to pull back, fall away, remove oneself from the field.

American English tends to use just one word for retirement. Whereas, Matsumoto notes, Japanese has an extensive lexicon — among them: nidome no jinsei  (second life), yutai (courageous withdrawal for high-level professionals), inkyo (respected elder) and yuyu jiteki (life of leisure) — reflecting not just a tradition of using euphemisms to avoid negative framing but a nuanced understanding of post-career life. Even the Japanese word for longevity, choju, suggests “happiness” of “a long life.” According to Matsumoto, it’s a positive cultural concept focused on honoring older individuals and celebrating post-retirement milestones.

The idea of “retirement” is far from universal. While many countries share the basic notion of stopping full-time paid work in later life, language reveals cultural codes about identity, purpose, obligation and what a life well-lived looks like. Most of these words lean toward retreat. The literal translation of the German word Ruhestand is “state of rest,” a bureaucratically dignified stillness befitting a country that introduced the world’s first public pension system in 1889. The French retraite is a military metaphor — a withdrawal from active duty. The Chinese tuìxiū pairs characters meaning “to retreat” and “to rest.” For Kenyans who speak Swahili, the word is kustaafu, meaning resignation. In Italian, the main word is il pensionamento, reflecting financial subsidization. These words originate in the rise of the nation-state, when governments formalized the life stage, largely to manage national economies, reduce unemployment and foster citizen loyalty, often through pension systems. 

And then there is the Spanish word la jubilación. 

The word derives from the Latin jubilare — to shout for joy — and carries the same root as jubilee and jubilation. In a linguistic landscape dominated by withdrawal, jubilación stands nearly alone: a word for the cessation of work that begins with joy. Why does Spain — among all wealthy nations — designate the end of working life as a celebration? 

Adela Balderas Cejudo, a professor at Spain’s Duesto Business School and research fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, laughed when she heard la jubilación described as uniquely joyful. “Can I be honest? I never thought about that, never, ever in my life,” she says. “No, it doesn’t sound positive in Spanish.” 

Cejudo concedes that although the Latin root indicates joy, many contemporary Spanish speakers no longer perceive la jubilación positively. As in the U.S., post-work life is often considered one of irrelevance and contracting horizons; and due to Spain’s escalating housing crisis, anxieties about pension sustainability, and intergenerational financial pressures — the word’s original jubilance has eroded. “People are very worried about retirement,” Cejudo says, “There’s a lot of stress through the generations about how people are going to thrive.” 

I was surprised (and frankly disappointed) by this view and decided to seek out another source: Agustín Ferraro, professor of political science at the University of Salamanca, who happens to be my brother-in-law. Ferraro arrived at our Zoom meeting with stats. A 2015 study of Spanish retirees by the country’s largest insurance company, Mapfre, he notes, found that 66 percent associated jubilación with freedom, while only 12 percent associated it with uncertainty. A more recent 2025 survey by the Dutch insurance group Nationale-Nederlanden found similar optimism: 66 percent of Spaniards surveyed described a positive outlook on their retirement, and 86 percent expressed confidence in their capacity to shape their own aging process. Spain’s public pension system replaces an average of 83 percent of prior salary — one of the highest rates in the European Union — which provides material grounding for what might otherwise seem like mere cultural cheerfulness.

Theology also plays a part. “As Max Weber explains in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, professional success is a sign of God’s grace,” Ferraro says. “But in Catholic countries, there is none of that.” For nations formed out of the Protestant tradition, stopping work marks not merely an economic event but a kind of spiritual failure — a withdrawal of salvation’s proof. Whereas for Catholic cultures, grace is not withheld pending your quarterly results. In fact, adds Ferraro, work itself in Catholic theology carries a darker valence: having to earn a living is not a blessing but a punishment, the price for man’s expulsion from Eden. “For people in Spain,” Ferraro quips, “retiring is not a deprivation of anything. Quite the opposite.”

Meanwhile, Americans are coming to terms with the paucity of words to describe this later period of life, if not its Protestant influence. In my conversations with leaders in the longevity field, I have heard such terms as refinement, renewment, rewirement, unretirement — although none seem to be sticking. “I think it’s okay to rebrand or reframe the words for the concept of retirement,” says Matsumoto. “It shows that people are trying to have a more positive life rather than associate retirement with some sort of dark, boring image.”