2 Life After Dentistry more to the symptoms rather than the cause of any problems. Because health professionals created the early programs, the traditional approach tended to address issues that related to aging rather than to retirement. So issues such as health and safety, nutrition, recreation, stress management, hobbies, travel, sex and aging, prepaid funerals, and so on, formed the basis of the traditional approach to retirement lifestyle planning. As a body of knowledge, retirement lifestyle planning is not grounded in solid research or theory. It is full of generalizations and value judgments, and it usually proposes a one-size-fits all or cookie-cutter solution. Most retirement lifestyle planning authors today add their own spin and recycle the original outdated approach because it has always been done that way. So why re-invent the wheel? The answer is simple. The wheel is broken. The Boomers are retiring, they are the architects of a new retirement as they re-create retirement in their own image, and their main concerns are not adequately addressed by the traditional approach. A New Approach I am not a financial planner and my interest in retirement planning evolved from an earlier interest in the Sociology of Occupations and Professions. During my Ph.D. graduate work in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, I was interested in the Sociology of Work and Leisure and carried out research on this topic by focusing on a single activity that some people pursued as work and that others pursued as leisure. My fieldwork involved participant observation research among professional and amateur soccer players to discern differences in the work and leisure experience surrounding the same activity. I spent four months participating in the day-to-day training and social activities of a professional soccer club (based in Edinburgh) as well as two amateur teams. I supplemented this with in-depth personal interviews among professional and amateur gardeners. When I obtained a University teaching position, I wanted to extend my interest in meanings of work and leisure to focus on people who were not working. I chose retirees. This research involved in-depth interviews with 352 retirees looking at work, leisure, friendships, and life satisfaction, and published the results in my book entitled Aging: Retirement, Leisure, and Work. (1) Several main findings emerged from my early research experiences. First, regarding perceptions of work and leisure, when people are working they tend to view leisure as time off work or free time. However, when they retire, because most of their time is free time, they tend to view leisure as being pleasurable or enjoyable activities. Therefore, retirement