Even if you love your job, there are likely parts of it you dislike. Meetings, maybe 🤚 . Or simply just the lack of free time to do other things you want to do in your life. Knowing what you don’t like is usually easy.
But what if you just tolerate your job, or dislike it, or actively hate it? There are probably still parts of it that you like besides the paycheck. Seeing colleagues every day, perhaps. Feeling needed. Having structure in your week. That may be more difficult to realize while you’re in the midst of being overwhelmed by work pressures and dreaming of the time you can say goodbye to it all.
This all came to mind recently after two very different conversations with neighbors about their retirements. One, a man in his 70s, has been retired for well over a decade and loves it. “Every day’s a Saturday!” he exclaimed, adding that he can’t understand it when people say they don’t have enough to do in retirement. He’s very active volunteering in his community, is interested in local politics, and has other hobbies.
The other was a brief encounter with a man helping staff his wife’s booth at a crafts fair. He “busted his [butt]” working so he could retire in his 50s, he told me. Now, he’s ready to go back to work.
It was sad to think of someone working hard for so many years for a dream of early retirement – only to achieve it and be disappointed.
The question, then, that so many of us ponder at this stage of life: What makes a (reasonably) happy retirement? Good (or at least decent) health and enough financial resources to cover basic needs are obvious. But what else?
I have a couple of thoughts on this, a year and half removed from full-time work:
It helps to go through the mental exercise of what you like about working. This can be hard if you’re unhappy in your job. However, I think this is one of the most useful things you can do to prepare for retirement.
This isn’t meant to scare you into deciding you need to keep working. You can like parts of your job and still be ready to move on! And, you don’t have to figure out substitutes for all the things you like about working before you retire, or even at the very start of retirement. I don’t know if that’s even possible. We can’t anticipate what we might discover in the next phase of our lives! Instead, the goal is not to be unpleasantly surprised if you start missing something about work after leaving the workforce.
There’s a risk of idealizing retirement as an easy way to get rid of all the things you dislike about working, without acknowledging that it can take some time and effort to find the right balance of activities and down time in your next chapter.
Think about whether you value something like “free time” chiefly because it’s scarce. What happens when a scarce thing becomes abundant? Do we still appreciate it?
At least here in America, many of us live in a culture that trains us to always crave more/different/new things instead of being happy with what we have. Try to earn more money, even if you have enough to meet your needs. Buy a new car, even if the one you have works fine. This beer will help you surround yourself with friends. Chase after more social media likes instead of enjoying the experiences of your life. We can’t even have Thanksgiving, a day designed to be grateful for the blessings of our lives, without “Black Friday” ads urging us to want to buy more.
It’s not always easy to separate what we truly want from what we think we should want, and to still value something after we’ve gone from desiring it to actually having it.
Such as free time. Retirement is different from vacation. A few weeks of unscheduled time when you know you’re returning to work is not the same as the rest of your life stretching before you. There are retirees who feel busy and fulfilled, and retirees who don’t.
Like every other major change in our lives, it’s hard to know exactly how retirement will play out no matter how much we prepare. Still, understanding potential pitfalls can make the change easier to navigate.
I’ve been lucky to have a variety of successful retirement role models in my life: both of my parents, my husband, and a number of my friends and former co-workers. Their retirements differ in many ways, but all those satisfied retirees have typically been doing some if not all of:
- Work-adjacent volunteering
- Volunteering that has nothing to do with their former profession
- Part-time consulting or other paid freelancing
- Learning – auditing college classes, taking other in-person classes, taking online classes, etc.
- Spending more time on passions and hobbies
- Traveling
- Enjoying more relaxation and down time (many of us don’t like to admit it, but we often need more recovery time between activities as we get older)
And . . .
All those successful retirements feature social connections with family and/or friends, whether person-to-person or through community organizations.
Some of the best advice I’ve seen about planning for retirement: Make sure you have a life outside of work. Especially a social life. It’s not always easy for those of us who lean towards being introverts. But it’s critical.
It’ll be disappointing post-retirement if you confuse “work friends” with friendships that flourish outside of work. Some people you meet on the job do become lasting friends! I still have dear friends that I met at my first job, which I left in 1989. But a lot of other ties fade away. Tend to the relationships that will last, and try to cultivate new ones.
I still have more work to do on that, but I’m trying.
“Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the [Harvard Study of Adult Development] revealed,” the Harvard Gazette reported. That’s certainly true in retirement.
Wishing you all a healthy, happy, and friendship-filled New Year.
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