5 What Surprises Does Retirement Hold?
Kara felt that her retirement had gone nothing like what she had expected. Kara had high expectations for her retirement, and in some ways her retirement met those expectations. Kara had more time, for instance, and greater liberty in how to use it. What surprised Kara, though, was that time didn’t seem so valuable as when she had been working. When she was working, her free time felt precious. In retirement, time instead felt more like one big drag. Indeed, without the structure of work, Kara often lost track of time, not only as to what day of the week it was but even when to get up, eat meals, and go to bed. But the biggest surprise was that Kara didn’t seem to know who she was anymore.
Surprises
Planning and preparing for absolutely everything in retirement isn’t possible. Retirement can bring surprises, both good and bad. Maybe you like surprises. Many of us don’t. Retirement surprises can be especially unsettling because they can be harder from which to recover. A surprise earlier in life, even an unpleasant or disastrous surprise, just means that you put your head back down and get to work. Enough of life is ahead of you to catch up and recover. Not so with retirement. Retirement surprises can instead mean that things have changed for good. You don’t have the time or means to catch and recover. Retirement’s surprises, though, can involve not just your circumstances or conditions but also your feelings, the unexpected things with which you must deal. This chapter addresses a few of those potential surprises, to help you anticipate and perhaps adjust. They may not sound all that surprising to you as you read them now. But how you experience them when you retire may still catch you off guard. Take the surprises in stride. You’ll find blessings even in the surprises.
Structure
Individuals anticipating their retirement generally look forward to and welcome the less-structured nature of retirement. Work demands a schedule. When you’re working, you know not only the time of day but also the day of the week because you’re looking forward to getting off work and enjoying the weekend. What can surprise a retiree is just how the lack of structure can unsettle you more so than please you. Work life makes time off from work feel valuable. Remove work in retirement, and you promptly lose that sense of valuing your free time. In retirement, everything is free time, or at least you have so much free time that you’re no longer counting it as precious. Losing that sense of relishing your free time can be a surprising loss. The absence of a work schedule can even make you lose track of days and the hour of the day, leaving you with a feeling of being lost in time. Time is no longer a steady march. Time instead sort of disappears, leaving the retiree with a surprising and unnerving sense of loss. To relieve that sense, give some structure to your days and weeks, even if that structure is with your own activities that you choose. Exercise, eat, and walk the dog at regular times, and shop, dine out, socialize, or volunteer on specific days at specific times during the week. Give your retirement days some structure. For a time at least, you may need it.
Money
Individuals anticipating their retirement generally expect that their earned income will end and that they’ll henceforward rely on their retirement savings and Social Security. That’s not the surprising part about retirement finances. The surprise can instead come with how your attitude and feelings may change toward spending money. When you’re working and earning income, spending money can feel healthy, secure, and necessary or desirable. You are earning the money that you’re spending, and you’ll be earning more to replace what you spend. Yet when you retire and aren’t earning an income any longer, spending money can feel unhealthy, insecure, and inappropriate, even when you’ve accumulated the retirement savings to spend. Spending money that is dwindling, even if only at a reasonable rate, can feel different than spending money that you’re replacing. You may feel anxious and insecure every time that you spend any significant amount of your retirement savings, even when your retirement savings are for that purpose. Whenever you have that insecure sense, confirm from your budget and retirement projections that you have planned the expenditure. Rely on your budget and planning, and you should soon feel relief from that gnawing feeling of financial insecurity.
Identity
When you plan your retirement, you know that you won’t be working full time any longer. That part is no surprise. Yet many retirees find surprise in how much of their identity they lose when retired. That feeling of loss is never more acute than when someone asks you what you do, as in what you do for a living, and you don’t know how to answer. Answering I’m retired can feel awkward, as if you have no background, experience, worth, or other public identity. Answering that you are retired can also get you all kinds of different responses, including responses that make you uncomfortable, especially if you don’t look retirement age yet. You may find yourself trying to justify your retirement or simply feeling like you have less worth and standing, as if no one needs to take you seriously or value your experience and opinions. To address that unease, test out answers that disclose what you used to do, why you don’t do it anymore, and what you’re doing now in retirement. You may not recapture all of your working identity and standing, but you’ll retain some. If that doesn’t work, keep rehearsing answers until you find one that sufficiently justifies the question, satisfies you and the questioner, and resonates with something deeper inside of you than your past vocation.
Psyche
That last point about retirement casting you back on your deeper self, beneath your work identity, can be another surprising thing about retirement. When you plan and prepare for retirement while you are still working, you generally project your work persona into retirement. You imagine what your work persona will feel when you retire, including things like relief, rest, and freedom from work, as if those things were somehow you. But once you are retired, you no longer live through your work persona. You no longer need to think about your days and weeks around the schedule and demands of work. With your work persona evaporated, you have a rare opportunity to rediscover who you are. Yet that rediscovery process can be highly unsettling. You may have carried and refined your work persona over decades, weaving it not only into your habits and practices but also into your perspective on the world and on yourself. Expect confusion and a sense of not knowing who you are. But don’t despair. Instead, take the time to listen, not so much to your thoughts, which may still be struggling in their work perspective, but more so to your yearnings and intuitions. And let your soul and psyche adjust gently, while you rediscover who you are.
Proximity
Another thing that can surprise retirees is just how intense living full time with your spouse in the same household can be, including how disruptive doing so can be to the homemaker’s routines. Everyone has their own way of doing things. The beauty of a work life is that it lends balance to the home life. The homemaker can spend the work day alone, arranging the home and the homemaker’s schedule and activities as the homemaker alone discerns. When the spouse working outside the home retires, though, and begins to spend every waking hour at home, both the retiree spouse and homemaker spouse have adjustments to make not to step on one another’s toes. A new division of labor may be appropriate but may also involve negotiation and compromise as to the standards and terms. And that sort of negotiation and compromise can be difficult for spouses who have taken decades to establish their relative responsibilities and patterns. If you are the working spouse who retires, don’t bring your working mindset home, ready to take over the household’s management. Instead, respect your homemaker spouse. Indeed, plan regular hours outside of the home, even if only at a coffee shop or library, so that your spouse retains reasonable times of solitude.
Friends
Another thing that can surprise newly retired individuals is the change that they may find in their friendships, especially work-related friendships. When you retire, your work friends will naturally reassure you of their intentions to stay in touch. But intentions are easily expressed and not so easily carried out. Your work friends may still respect, admire, and value you, but if so, they won’t have so many natural opportunities to display it. You may not find your old work friends to be so friendly anymore. Friendships can find their basis in reciprocal exchanges of various favors, which is fine until you’re not making those exchanges anymore. Then, the attitude of old friends may feel more like what have you done for me lately, even if that’s not what they mean to express. Rather than test and burden those old friends with more-insistent requests, consider the possibility that you may need to make new friends. Activities like volunteering at church or a social-service agency, coaching or refereeing sports, or joining a sailing club or golf league may bring you into contact with new friends.
Usefulness
Another surprising aspect of retirement can be that you lose the sense of usefulness, worth, and value, as if you are no longer contributing to the welfare of your community. You may begin to feel that way when you realize that your phone no longer rings and you no longer get texts and emails with requests for help, advice, or information. You may feel as if no one needs you anymore, when during your work years you felt as if you were significant if not even indispensable. Losing that sense of value or worth tied to your work skills and productivity can leave you down and depressed. It can also leave you searching for something, not always healthy or balanced, to replace that loss. You may find yourself pouring your need for significance into competitions that should instead be recreations, like being overcompetitive in a social golf or softball league, with running, weightlifting, or your golf handicap, or in buying collectibles at estate sales, auctions, and on the internet. You may even find yourself excessively gambling, drinking, or engaging in other risk-taking behavior to compensate for the absence of challenge, demand, value, and risk. You may just learn to adjust. But you may benefit from finding an alternative activity to work that supplies some of the same sense of value or worth. Try volunteering using your work skills, mentoring, coaching, or substituting in your work field, or participating on charitable boards and committees.
Decline
Another thing that can surprise retirees is how swiftly they may decline in their strength, health, energy, and general vigor during retirement. You may rightly hope for a decade or more of good retirement years with your full health and vigor. Yet later in life, every year can bring an additional bit of decline in strength and energy. And late in life is naturally a time when chronic health issues can emerge and accelerate. Do what you can in the way of exercise, diet, nutrition, and medical care to prevent disease and slow decline. Your effort will likely pay good dividends. But when the inevitable decline occurs, don’t condemn yourself or despair in your situation. Instead, take whatever decline that you cannot prevent as a reason to refocus on other valuable things that you can still do without your prior health, strength, and energy. You may hunt, fish, shop, run, or walk less than you once did, but you may spend more time with grandchildren, friends, studies, worship, arts, and crafts.
Dreams
Another thing that surprises some retirees is that the dreams that they had for retirement while they were still working are not necessarily the things that they want to pursue when retired. Your dreams can change as your circumstances change. What looks, when you’re working, like the greatest possible retirement pleasure may, when you’re retired, instead look too risky, adventurous, extravagant, wasteful, or distracting. You may have had a dream of sailing across the ocean, taking a cruise around the world, or taking a motor home around the country. But when you retire, you may instead just want to enjoy your spouse, pets, and grandchildren at home. Or the opposite may be true, that your dream while working was to simply stay home, when your dream once retired is instead to hit the high seas or highway, leaving home far behind. Some dreams come from deep within you, while other dreams are simply projections of your working persona. Abandon any dream that is no longer a dream once you retire. Discern and pursue your new dreams, as retirement reveals them to you.
Reflection
Which of the above surprises didn’t you expect? Which of the above surprises do you think that you’ll experience? Which of the above surprises are you sure that you will not experience? What other surprises do you think that retirement may hold for you? What are you so firmly expecting retirement to be for you that it would surprise and disappoint you if it were not? Can you do anything now to ensure that retirement is as you expect and wish? What structure and schedule do you hope to keep in retirement? Are your retirement finances and budget clear enough to you that you will be able to spend money as necessary, without anxiety and insecurity? How important to you is your work identity? What would you say about yourself in retirement, if a stranger asks what you do or did? Do you know who you are, apart from your work accomplishments, role, and persona? Will your spouse at home find your constant presence disruptive or annoying? Can you discuss that issue with your spouse now to ease your transition into your own home full time? Do you have some activity planned for retirement that may give you a sense of worth or community engagement? What dreams do you have for retirement that you now realize might change once you retire?
Key Points
Retirement can surprise you, experiencing it, requiring adjustment.
Retirement can bring a challenging loss of schedule and structure.
Spending money in retirement can trigger anxiety and insecurity.
Losing your work identity can challenge you in social settings.
Losing your work persona can confuse you in your soul and psyche.
Spending all your time with your spouse can disrupt personal routines.
Retirement may cause you to lose work friends and need new friends.
You may lose your sense of worth in retirement and need a substitute.
The rate of your decline in retirement may surprise and challenge.
You may find that your dreams change from work to retirement.