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Key points
- In terms of happiness, it’s important to think ahead to retirement.
- Satisfying work during your career doesn’t insure a content retirement. You have to orient yourself and work at it.
- Take on retirement as a kind of career move—plan, organize, and speak with others who have taken that step.
- Retirement, like other stages of life, can be opportunity for learning and self-betterment.
About ten years ago, my patient Gene retired as a professor of dramaturgy at a local university. That most people don’t know what dramaturgy is, or what dramaturges do, was part of why he left. “I was the intellectual in the theater department,” he told me. “But that made me obsolete.”
The dramaturge provides learned critiques of dramatic literature. What’s the play’s themes, its context, its characters’ psychological dilemmas? Is it well-structured? Is it important? He also has to understand the business of theater. Could a play be produced within budget? Would it appeal to an audience? Who’d be good in the leading role?
In their quiet way, dramaturges have immense power over what gets produced. When they draft a play’s liner notes, they can determine how it’s received. The only problem was that nobody wanted to become a dramaturge anymore. Gene’s cadre of students was dwindling.
“You know,” he told me, “everyone in theater studies acting, or sound design, lighting, directing, playwriting—stuff that’s heavy on technique.” He conveyed a sense of tremendous loss, as if the soul of what it meant to be in The Theater had fled forever, leaving behind a semi-mechanized simulacrum (that students seemed to adore).
So, Gene retired. For a while, it seemed just fine.
The problems started when he turned 70. “My wife threw a party for me,” he said, “and when I blew out the candles, it was like all the lights went out.” What Gene meant, was that he had no idea how he was going to fill his days. The people at the party—some playwrights, a few theater critics, a producer—were still in the game, and their presence made him feel like a has-been, an outsider longing to get back in. “Everyone else talked about their latest projects, and what I had to say seemed trivial.” By the time he came to see me, which was a couple of years later, Gene had tried various ways to keep his hand in, but they didn’t amount to much.
What Gene lacked at this point was a sense of purpose. When he was at the university, he was busy putting on plays, even though the ranks of his students were thinning. There was enough going on that he never lacked for projects.
But then all that stopped. “What was I thinking?” he mused during one of our sessions. “Okay, so I didn’t have my pick of students anymore, but I had a life there—I was somebody.” The idea of not being “somebody” anymore had significant consequences for Gene. First of all, he was lonely. When the thrill of having free time gradually wore off, he realized that he had only make-work that he made himself do.
Gene became depressed. The less he did, the less he thought he could do. When he did stuff that felt trivial and unsatisfying, he felt that such stuff was all he could do. He wanted real work . . . and he didn’t. He missed what he had done, and thought that he’d kissed his life away forever.
What is the lesson that I draw from Gene’s journey through retirement? In leaving his position, he thought he was pursuing happiness. But he didn’t look around. He didn’t take into account how much his work, however diminished, still meant to his sense of well-being. He thought he’d always have a purpose and discovered that he wouldn’t. He knew he’d notice the transition but thought he’d just trade the bad parts of his professional life for some new incarnation that he’d like better. It was, in fact, pollyannaish.
Gene certainly didn’t contemplate that once you leave a well-respected position in the theater, you don’t just become a Grand Old Man. You’re more likely an old man, period. Gene also hadn’t contemplated how his friends, who were still working, just wouldn’t be available for weekday lunches or a walk in the park.
Sometimes, of course, we have to retire. We’re too old for the work, or it’s simply started to get to us in ways we cannot abide. But Gene hadn’t been there. He was annoyed at the students’ shifting interests, but he’d dramatized that shift into an ideological crisis—a total disenchantment with academic theater. He had allowed himself to become a purist in the worst sense; He became self-defeating. He gave up the still-okay for an uncertainty.
As a catharsis (which Gene observes, correctly, is a term from Greek tragedy), he is thinking of writing a play of his own, where he is the protagonist. It’s a start. He knows that he can’t go back to where he was, but he sees a certain drama in how he arrived at where he is.
The moral of his story is that before we voluntarily leave a profession that underwrites our identity— which most professions do, one way or another—we should think about how we can support our identity once we’ve left. We should talk to people who’ve made similar moves. We should investigate opportunities and actually try to line them up. Retirement is a serious phase of our life, and we need to prepare for it honestly, competently.
Think of retirement as another “career move.” In its way, retirement is a career, since it takes up at least as much time. If we are going to organize and make plans for our professional lives, we should take the same approach to retirement. We have to sort out what we know we can do once we have left off working from what we think/imagine/hope we can do. We have to assess our support network—the last thing we should do is to take it for granted, since people are still getting on with their own lives. What, in other words, will sustain us so that we do not fall into a sense of feeling useless?
Sometime, at work, we have to accept diminished circumstances. But if things are changing around us, we need to ask ourselves, candidly, “How much of this can I live with? What are the trade-offs of not living with it at all?” Gene could have found other activities that would have allowed him to continue on—i.e., to feel good about himself and his place in the world of theater. There are still opportunities for doing so.
