What are your thoughts about retirement?
Are you longing for the freedom that retirement affords?
Or, are you concerned that you will be bored, craving for some structure to your days?
The decision to retire is intimately tied to one’s work role, organization, family status, market conditions, finances and individual characteristics, as health, wealth, values and dispositions.
You may choose to remain in the workforce if there is an opportunity to meet career goals, attain promotional advancement or to retain social relationships. Or you may opt for retirement in order to pursue goals and interests outside of work that cannot otherwise be pursued while working.
You may want to retire to a life free from external constraints and organizational structure, especially if you experience work as stressful or dissatisfying.
Clearly, the decision is complex and deeply personal, and your perspective and understanding of what retirement is may change over time.
People’s firsthand experience of retirement can alter the way they perceive this milestone event. While the majority enjoy retirement, in my experience, 40% struggle with this transition.
My research participants explain that they miss work related challenges and occasions to cultivate and demonstrate their competencies. While they enjoy the freedom that retirement affords, they simultaneously long for some form of structured activity, be it paid employment or volunteer work in order to feel that they are productive members of society.
Researchers speculate that a lack opportunity to engage in challenging tasks that maximize personal skill and ability can result in an imbalanced life that OVEREMPHASIZES leisure pursuits and passive activities.
For some of us, such a life can lead to depression and decline.
What very few people express or admit is that retirement is an ambivalent experience filled with many contradictions.
One of my favorite scholars, David Ekerdt, captures the very essence of this experience in the following quote:
“Whereas time is the great boon of, not working, a day without urgency can be a gain, but it can likewise be felt as a loss; one may leave the stress of work behind but with it the opportunity for achievement… Retirement, in this telling, in not one thing, but rather a mixed experience. Those living it are continually working out in their minds who they are now and to whom they matter.”
While most retirees regard retirement as a new beginning and enthusiastically embrace the freedom that retirement affords, not everyone is eager to leave behind the world of work for a life of leisure.
If you relish in cognitively challenging tasks and thrive on accomplishment and achievement, you will have to find a way to satisfy those needs, which are currently being met by work, in retirement. And it can be quite challenging to find such opportunities external to the workforce.
Do your homework and figure out what activities will satisfy your cognitive curiosities, engage your brain in intellectual pursuits or allow you to set and achieve goals that satisfy your need for accomplishment.
Not everyone feels as though they need to satisfy such needs. Some of us feel as though we have paid our dues, and this next chapter is about rest and relaxation.
But this is not about someone else. This experience is deeply personal, and your experience of retirement will be unique to you. So don’t use someone else’s barometer to measure your happiness in retirement and think beyond the next egg!
Struggling with what’s next? Join our one-day groundbreaking workshop February 28, 2015 on how to plan for this next stage of life.
