Retirement is not redundancy

A friend told me recently that he is feeling increasingly redundant. He has worked in a hospital for 50 years, from junior doctor to senior consultant and, although he has reduced his hours to minimal part-time, is struggling with the whole concept of retirement. Equating being out of work with redundancy raises connotations of being useless: such pejorative terminology must affect self-esteem and raise visions of being thrown on the scrap-heap...