In many cases, older workers moving to another job late in their careers rather than retiring didn’t really have a choice. According to Ellen Galinsky, director of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research organization that addresses the changing nature of work and family life, there’s a term for this: “refirement.”

The Families and Work Institute conducts an ongoing, nationally representative study of employers and employees and how they interact on and off the job. In its research, the institute surveyed employees 50 and older and found that 80 percent have never retired, and 20 percent have fully retired and then gotten another job. “We asked them why they had retired, and we found 21 percent had been fired, laid off or offered a buyout,” Galinsky said. “Among those who had gone back to work, 53 percent wanted to earn more money so they could eventually retire more comfortably.”

The rest of the numbers here speak to changing requirements for retirement, none of which can be explained by simple economics. Thirty-one percent of respondents who went back to work said they would be bored in retirement, while 16 percent said they wanted to continue to feel productive and useful.

“With people living longer, there is a trend under way for people, regardless of financial circumstances, not to think about retiring in traditional ways,” Galinsky said. “We had an image of retirement in this country, this linear view of working where you climb a ladder up and up and up, and then you leap over this abyss to a whole other world called retirement. That’s not reality. That myth does not fit the way people want to live and work today.”