When you step away from your job, you don't just lose the business card and the paycheck. The daily schedule built around your title, your colleagues and your commute disappears, too. Faced with that sudden break, plenty of middle-aged people aren't sure where or how to put decades of hard-earned experience and career know-how to use. Now, a group of them is looking beyond landing another job or planning for retirement. They have teamed up to find new roles at the margins of society, the places it tends to overlook.

Middle-aged Network Come Together (Come Together) said on November 10 that it will hold its founding general meeting and commemorative forum at 2 p.m. (KST) on November 11 at the Gangbuk Workers' Welfare Center in Mapo-gu, Seoul. About 200 people from across the country will take part as founding participants. They are coming from the Seoul metropolitan area, Inje in Gangwon province, Jecheon in North Chungcheong province, Ulsan, Goryeong in North Gyeongsang province, Busan, Jeju, and Namwon and Jeonju in North Jeolla province.

Come Together grew out of more than a decade of efforts to explore new ways of living and taking part in society in midlife and beyond. For example, the Seoul 50 Plus Foundation's 50+ Life School has worked through life transitions with more than 870 middle-aged people across 25 cohorts since 2016. Pathfinder, a prospective social enterprise, has spent the time since 2018 connecting middle-aged city dwellers with regions at risk of disappearing.

The catch is that few of these post-retirement efforts last. When a program ends, participants scatter, and the experience they've built up has been hard to carry into other activities. Come Together aims to be a test bed that links those scattered experiences and relationships and tries out new approaches.

Park Tae-seo, a former publishing bureau chief at the Dong-A Ilbo who serves on the founding preparatory committee, explained the thinking behind the group. “After retiring, I realized that while finding another job is important, I also wanted to put the experience I gained in society to use somewhere else,” he said. “The idea is for people and organizations doing this kind of work to pool their know-how and experiment together.”

Along with 50+ Life School and Pathfinder, a range of organizations and on-the-ground activists are joining Come Together, including Opeul Coop, Encore Bravono, Senior Bridge Academy, Aging Together, Dudu Cooperative and 60+ Climate Action. Rather than merging with or absorbing existing groups, Come Together will run as a network. Each group keeps doing its own work, while the network links up the people and experience that are needed.

Some of the cooperation the groups envision is already being tested. One example is the Baby Boomer In-Turn Camp, which Pathfinder has run in Gyeonggi province since last year, combining it with Life School's transition education. Kim Man-hee, head of Pathfinder, stressed that “a shared network is urgently needed to connect experiences and activities that individual organizations find difficult to handle alone.”

What Come Together is focused on is that change after retirement goes beyond a simple gap in employment. The group sees it as a “transition issue” that can upend not only income but also social roles and relationships, daily rhythms and even identity, all at once. Jung Kwang-pil, a former principal of Life School who joined the founding preparatory committee, said, “Income and jobs are of course urgent, but it's also important to think about who you'll build new relationships with and where you'll put your experience to use again.”

The group's guiding idea is “experience built in the places we have passed through, and experiments beginning at the margins.” It aims to find new roles in places society needs but that are hard to see from the center, such as vacant homes in local communities, gaps in caregiving and divides between generations. After its founding, it plans to launch pilot projects in local community connections, housing and caregiving, and intergenerational cooperation.

A Come Together representative said, “Heading for the ‘margins’ doesn't mean being pushed out of the center of society. It means putting middle-aged people's rich experience and careers to use at the ‘margins of society,’ where support systems are lacking.” The representative added, “We will turn it into a fun test bed where people can put the experience they've built to work in the places society has overlooked.”

When you step away from your job, you don't just lose the business card and the paycheck. …

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