Retirement Blues

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Part of a series.

On the day of one’s retirement, everyone smiles and says, “Congratulations!” Yet, it doesn’t necessarily feel so joyous for many. It can represent a period of emotional upheaval. Let’s look at how attending to our wellness throughout our working years can help soften the transition.

Loss of Meaning/Guilt

Deriving a sense of meaning from one’s work is a powerful promoter of wellness and resilience. Then, along comes retirement, and this wellspring of meaning is shut off. We suddenly feel that we’re no longer making the world a better place, making a contribution. Guilt comes pouring in. On my retirement, I was overwhelmed by a sense of guilt—for no longer helping patients, training residents, and leading a team of providers. Such feelings can become pervasive and corrosive, compromising our enjoyment and productivity in our retirement years.

Strategies: The more we remind ourselves of and take pride in our efforts throughout our working lives, the easier it becomes to step back in retirement and savor the contributions we made. There’s nothing wrong with resting on one’s laurels. And who says we can no longer contribute? We now have oodles of time to pursue all sorts of community-service activities. I do a ton of volunteer teaching. A friend builds homes with Habitat for Humanity. Another helps veterans with PTSD. The opportunities are boundless.

The Shock of Limited Warranty

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For most of our careers, we function in a relatively stable relationship with our bodies (including our brains). They do what we ask, becoming increasingly proficient at various tasks, in and out of work. But there comes a time when that smooth efficiency starts to degrade. Athletes and those who do bull work face it earlier, but it eventually happens to all of us. I can tell you a surgeon at 65 is not the same fine-tuned machine that he was at 50. Our warranty lapses and our physical and cognitive capabilities diminish. Retirement, to many, feels like a white flag that we hoist in admission of this reality, and it can sting.

Strategies: Acceptance of inherent decline in our bodies’ capacities might allow us to ease up on the demands we subject them to. Pushing our component parts to physically perform like they did in our youth subjects them to injury and early deterioration. I know I lifted far too many anesthetized patients over to the operating table with limited or no assistance through the years. And it proved quite the blessing when my rowing machine’s digital recorder shorted out—I could exercise for pleasure, not ever-improving achievement. So, slow and steady need to be the watchwords. Let’s celebrate the functionality that we have preserved and seek to subject it to less abuse. One happy caveat: it appears that contrary to our muscles and joints, heavy use of our brains may slow our cognitive decline. But even our brains need periodic breaks, rest, and recovery.

Financial Anxiety

Few, upon retirement, will maintain the same cash flow that they enjoyed while working. This can create a free-floating financial anxiety, a discomfort in not being as liquid as we once were. Purchases that pre-retirement would have been made casually are now weighed with perhaps exaggerated concern. We may find ourselves shying away from enriching experiences and necessary purchases out of financial uneasiness.

Strategies: I don’t want to downplay financial insecurity, but we may be able to ease some of its stress in retirement by being mindful of it in our working years. In our career days, we tend to live right up to or beyond our means. It’s worth reflecting from time to time on what we buy on impulse versus what we need for our contentment and emotional/intellectual enrichment. A certain level of frugality and saving during our working years may help lessen the financial voltage drop of our days of more limited liquidity.

Old Sweater/Time

A close friend notes that his work was like an old sweater: beat up, patched, threadbare, and far from perfect, yes, but comfortable nonetheless. On retirement, the sweater is put away, and we are left figuring out what will take its place and fill the many hours of each day.

Strategies: Retirement can and should be a time of great exploration, discovery, re-invention, growth, and flexibility. The old sweater was comfortable, but it had shrunk and was limiting. Many experiential opportunities were eschewed because of its restrictions. Ideally, we develop a pallet of interests throughout our lives, many of which we can more fully explore upon retirement. And filling our time seldom seems to be a challenge. Many people report that they’re more busy in retirement than they had been in their working years, as they pursue life-long interests and develop new ones.

Source: Marcos Paulo Prado/Unsplash

Regret

For many, retirement serves as a shocking reminder of all that they have failed to accomplish. Perhaps they had once envisioned a more stellar career arc or saw themselves as the ultimate family men/women but somehow settled for less. Regret, like guilt, can dominate their later years.

Strategies: As a colleague noted: “I’ve never met a dying man/woman who wished they had spent more days at the office.” The point is there is no top of the ladder. There is no ultimate accomplishment. I would argue that anyone who, during their working years, puts in a daily effort to keep their family safe and society running needs no self-reproach over not “doing enough.” The key is finding a level of balance in our lives where we attend to what is important to us at the time. In my article An Imbalanced Balance, I advocate periodically identifying five to eight components of our lives that bring us a sense of engagement, accomplishment, and fulfillment, and seek to engage in these components with intention and focus. The more we feel our priorities are in balance, the less regret we are apt to feel during major shifts in our lives.