The Psychology Of Retirement

Closing Time by Joy Lere PSY, found via Abnormal Returns, took a look at the psychology of retirement with a serious glass half empty perspective. The issues and challenges are real, I don't want to minimize the potential that Lere detailed in her article, but I do believe they can be overcome. 

She starts out questioning whether too much emphasis is placed on the milestone of retirement by maybe focusing too much on the destination (retirement) versus the journey (your entire working career). I've touched on this before in saying that if you're wishing away the week to get to the weekend you'll find yourself old one day having wished away much of your life and having done far less than you hoped you'd do. So I agree with her on this idea and would stress the need to live in the moment, find joy in what you do and make changes if you don't enjoy what you do. Don't confuse paying your dues when you're young though with not enjoying your career. I was a stock broker (cold called all day long) when I was young and I hated it but I view it as a necessary step to get to where I wanted to be. Similar with working at Fisher investments. I did not hate that, it would be more accurate to say it was not fun but was also necessary, it was crucial to my development as an investment advisor.  

Her next point is about the anger that can occur when you realize that you might soon be forgotten at your old job, that they will go on without you and do so quickly. This is something the Mark Baker (@guruanaerobic on Twitter) talks about frequently. If something happens to you, you'll be replaced very quickly, it's just the nature of business. If you can truly understand and accept that reality when you're younger then it should be less of a speed bump when you actually retire. Even if you are very well thought of, your employer, the institution, is bigger than you and has to go on. In fire department terms, I love the idea that we are part of an institution that is bigger than ourselves, I think of us as caretakers for the institution with the hope that during our stewardship we are making the institution better than when we came in. 

Lere has observed regret in retirees who lived one-dimensionally focused on their work. This is clearly a bad outcome. It is crucial to place a high priority on diverse interests. I've been writing about this since the beginning. It helps with overall quality of life, helps avoid burnout on your primary endeavor and I think creates an easier path for your life to evolve. If you retire from your primary endeavor, it frees up time for your hobbies (secondary endeavors) that you've already been doing. Staying curious to learn new things has a seat at this table too. 

The combination of fearing the unknown and getting older were mentioned and are of course real emotions. Not knowing what retirement looks like ties in with what is mentioned above and I think the answer is in how we live our lives. Doing different things, staying fit, staying curious to learn new things, living in the moment and starting these habits early on will again lead to retirement being an evolutionary step in life as opposed to a jarring, binary life event.

Her final point is legacy, how will we be remembered? I don't have a sense of how important this is to people. I like the idea that I have the opportunity to help people through the fire department and through my work (both my actual job and through this blog) but that is more about being in the moment and the psychic value I derive from what I do. Going back to the fire department, there's no one left to remember the chiefs before Chief Sumner (the chief when I joined who had a big impact on my life including the honor of eulogizing him a few years ago). There are only a couple of firefighters left who served under Chief Sumner, eventually they will move on for one reason or another. He clearly was a good steward who made the department better but at some point he will just be a name on a wall as far as the future crew is concerned. Same with my time as chief, and that doesn't bother me even a little. It's an institution bigger than any individual and having the chance to make it better while enjoying my time on the department is incredibly purposeful and fulfilling. Find something that is as purposeful and fulfilling to you as Walker Fire is to me. The benefits will be enormous. 

A quick note about confronting our own mortality which underlies all of these issues. In past posts I've connected being happy in life with making milestone birthdays easier to deal with. I've only had one tough birthday, when I turned 25. Even if all future milestones are difficult, I've been able to go a long time without a tough one. I realize I've been lucky to have the kind of adulthood I've always wanted but I did have to overcome some things when I was a kid. Those obstacles sucked but led to being able to figure out early on what matters to me and how to get to what mattered to me at an early age. Learn from your experiences and the mistakes of others and I did both. It is not too late for anyone to start this. The concept of death doesn't really scare me, obviously if I knew I was about to die in an accident I would be terrified but the concept that no one gets out alive doesn't bother me. Overcoming that makes all of the points Lere isolated easier to overcome or avoid. 

A couple of final ideas from me on the issues raised by Dr. Lere. Think about your long term and the things you can do now for your future self. This works for financial matters, how you spend your time and how you feel physically. If you think or act like you're "old" you're going to be old regardless of your chronological age. I think you stay young by being fit and learning new things. If you are fit and healthy you will have fewer aches and pains relative to your age than you'd otherwise have. Building muscle mass and staying active will obviously make you biologically younger. Learning new things that you're interested in makes life more exciting and fun.

So much of how we age and the outcomes we have circles back to the inputs we add, that is very empowering if you let it be.