The Wall Street Journal had a pretty rough piece about retirees losing a sense of purpose in retirement. The article specifically used the word mattering. Retirees can find it difficult to matter anymore which a big negative of course contributing to depression and in some instances, negative health outcomes.
I read a ton of articles about retirement and the comments when available, always read the comments, and invariably there are plenty of comments from people sharing their retirement successes, they have enough money and they never looked back after going out middle fingers a blazin'. I embellished that last bit some some.
For anyone who really does ease into retirement that smoothly, great, but part of planning to have a successful retirement requires forethought and introspection. A repeat idea from countless posts, waking up on day one of retirement and asking yourself "ok, now what am I going to do" is a personal crisis waiting to happen.
Some of the people profiled had ideas about what they would do which amounted to part time consulting in their primary career or some sort of organized volunteering related to their primary careers. A couple of weeks ago I made a passing reference to situations where consulting actually works out but was skeptical that a lot of people can actually create that situation for themselves. The article seems to say that there's something to this idea of it being hard to pull off.
One path to figuring this out is starting long before retirement. I use the phrase "long runway" to describe building a plan for mattering in retirement to use the WSJ's term. The fire department sort of found me when my neighbor with a backhoe, for those who've been reading me for a very long time, recruited me into the department when we moved here full time in late 2002. Then my involvement with Del E Webb Foundation sort of found me from something I did quite a few years ago that was fire department related. It doesn't seem like working on large incidents in the way I talked about for many years and started to actually do on a couple of incidents is going to happen. My day job proliferated in a way I never expected and I am less comfortable with the idea of being gone during our fire season.
This started as a car fire in the middle of last June. This could have been catastrophic based on the time of year but I was home. I live a mile from the firehouse and this incident was in between our house and the firehouse. We got there crazy fast and had it knocked down very quickly.
This will always create a sense of mattering to me. I've got 20+ years in and hopefully can do this another 20 even if not as chief for too much longer. That's a long runway. The Del E Webb work is very purposeful to me, doesn't matter what anyone else thinks which is probably important to figuring out how to matter, don't worry about what anyone else thinks. We have one board member north of 80, the board member I am replacing is 82 or 83, one of the volunteers is 87 and is the sharpest guy we have, essentially a forensic accountant. One of the fire board members is 83, been on the board since 2010, is also actively involved with the Kiwanis Club, some sort of shooting competition series and takes the occasional private investigation gig (retired customs agent).
I like to share these examples from people in my life. There are some very interesting people around here and I feel like I've learned from them and been inspired. Thirty year old me never thought about anything related to the fire service yet six years later I was all in and the impact has been enormous.
It's obviously important to get retirement finances dialed in but that's only part of the story. Not worrying about money is certainly nice but that won't prevent someone from losing their purpose or sense of self.
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