Here is the digest of my learnings about having a successful retirement. It boils down to the need to be intentional about having resources that enable desirable activity, agency and affiliation. This is the primary and overriding principle for people who are shifting into their final years, especially in America: there is a new level of choosing that needs practice and preparation in each of these areas.
Around the world, whatever the culture, there was a primal understanding that successful retirement did not mean just sitting on the couch and doing nothing. Whether the activity is travel, or caring for grandkids, or getting involved in community service, or joining a gym, folks understood that those who didn’t do anything ended up unhappy or dead or both. For some, this means, paradoxically, that the retirement from working may not be complete or at all.
A key to happy activity in retirement may combine with other factors that make staying at work to some extent a smart move that isn’t a move, but a shift. So much of our activity in life is determined by external factors: by family, by employment, by location, that we are unaccustomed to choosing our own activities. Life may have been so strenuous that we may have even forgotten how to play or what we really enjoy in life. Choosing what we want to do may bring on a basic existential confusion if we have no idea of what our basic needs, principles, or pleasures are.
For instance, for many people who are busy types, the very idea of a hobby that is not necessarily as productive as other parts of their life may seem peculiar, lazy, or even sinful. For instance, I get great pleasure out of my spork collection and even consider keeping my eye out for sporky things to be a bit of a hobby. Yet I understand the people who hear about this and are aghast at the frivolous nature of it.
While ‘activity’ may imply physical activity, I mean it to be broader. Of course for a number of reasons, physical activity is desirable in retirement and those who take that seriously prosper. But there is a more comprehensive definition that would include mental or social activities that aren’t necessarily so muscular. Like crossword puzzles, which my father, for instance grew to cherish in his older years. Dr. Walt Robb, of GE R&D fame, is a busy guy in his 90s and even in spare moments love that soduko thing with the squares within squares of numbers. He has books of them, does the one in the paper every day. He stays active
Agency
By agency, I do not mean that we should all become insurance agents in our dotage. Webster has this meaning as “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.” We all desire to be able to control, or exercise power over ourselves, our environment, or the future. When people talk about doing what they want to do in retirement, they are talking not only about freedom, but having the ability to do as they please. If you are free to travel all you want but can’t afford it, that freedom is not as relevant to your satisfaction. Frederick Neitze saw agency as the fundamental driving force in humans. He called it ‘will to power.” Retirement is widely seen as a time when there is more ability to be in charge of what is happening in our lives.
People in retirement report satisfaction when they can have an effect on the world and control over their lives. Not only is agency important for the feeling of freedom, but for the sense of purpose and accomplishment. Volunteering in retirement is a desire to give back or at least do something, however small, for the betterment of humanity. Who wants to live without any impact, without a trace, without anything to show for the breath we take?
All the concern about having enough money in retirement is really about agency. Will you have enough to live life as you please and to be productive in the way you choose? If you don’t have enough income, you may need to take a job you don’t really like just to get by. You will then be in someone else’s control. If you don’t have enough income, you may have to move in with your kids and we all know how that can cramp everyone’s style.
The issues of agency raise problems in retirement when we do not know how to exercise power in our lives. The idea that no one is telling us what to do anymore may bring on some dread or at least disorientation as we exercise existential muscles that are rarely used in the workaday world. Autonomy over time brings with it new possibilities of failure, whatever that might mean.
Affiliation
Whether we understand it this way or not, in our working years our identity is tied up in what we do for a living and who we hang out with when not at work. The places that give us interpersonal structure and satisfaction in addition to our workplace may include:
- Family
- Religious institutions
- Athletics, both participatory and observational
- Musical and theater groups, choirs, bands
- Fandom of some sort
- Mutual compulsions of gambling, drinking, drugs
- Political groups
- Social institutions i.e. Lodges, Posts, Clubs
- Educational groups, alumni, library groups
- Hobby or craft groups, i.e. knitting, trains, quilting, scrapbooking
These categories are by no means mutually exclusive but are examples of the many ways people choose to be sociable while doing something else. Most of the activities of the list could be practiced by an individual alone, but there is something about the human condition that calls us to do things together. In many cultures, this need is filled mostly by the extended family and the hundreds of social groups in America are seen as curiosities. It may be the case that some cultures have compensated for the demise of the extended family by institutionalizing many more forms of social contact.
The need for intentional affiliation is even more pronounced in retirement when people have more time to be sociable in the way they choose to be, rather than mostly at the workplace. This may suggest an intentional ‘shopping’ for groups and places that meet interpersonal, interest, and identity needs.
In addition to the formal affiliations, it is clear that successful retirement requires honing the interpersonal skills required to make and keep friends. We may have forgotten the rules of friendship that are less important with ‘longitudinal’ friends. Reciprocity, conflict management, intentional scheduling, and integration with other friends are skills that may need to be brushed off in a very intentional way when forging several new relationships in the new world of not working in the same way that retirement brings. We may underestimate the extent to which our work friends were meeting our social needs until they are gone.