How do you know it’s time to say, “I am retiring”? Most people don’t get to choose, but for those who do, it may be one of the most consequential decisions we ever make.
Being able to say goodbye means two rare things come together like in a Venn diagram. You need to have enough money to retire (about 38% of people approaching their mid-60s) and a job you like and that likes you back, without age discrimination or physical and mental limitations. The intersection is only about 11% of people in their mid-60s have enough money to retire and still work. Deciding to retire in a culture that praises work and makes you ashamed for wanting leisure is hard.
As a retirement researcher I was sympathetic to President Joe Biden’s initial resistance to quit his candidacy and I admire him deeply for overcoming powerful psychological and social factors to retire. Older workers with enough money to retire, like the president, are generally highly skilled, and have high levels of job satisfaction, authority, status and control over their work. All these constitute big losses when you quit.
But we all fear the creepy retirement party where people whisper things like, “Should have happened years ago.” Better is, “Wow, she’s retiring already!” Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill worked while in steep cognitive decline, but George Washington and Pope Benedict’s retirements were viewed as too early in their biographies. For-profit companies avoid the long-in-the-tooth syndrome. Many CEOs in the private sector are subject to mandatory retirements, a 2020 Academy of Management Review study explains, and there is no social stigma. No stigma in retiring is a sweet side of mandatory retirement.
To succeed at retirement, you need to address five emotional tasks to replace and mitigate the losses from working.
Do P.R.I.M.E. For A Successful Retirement
Figuring out the financial side of retirement is hard enough, but so is the emotional side. I’ve created a handy list of required tasks for a successful retirement. The mnemonic device for the list is P.R.I.M.E., where each letter stands for a loss that must be addressed before someone is ready for retirement.
P – Protect Your Time:
The first thing you lose from retirement is protection from others’ needs because you always have the excuse of work. Therapist Kate Schroeder is concerned that people protect themselves from their real selves by saying things like, “Nope, can’t do it, I’m working.” Not having the work excuse means the hard task of creating boundaries. When I took a friend to lunch to celebrate his retirement, I asked which loss troubled him most. By the time our meal arrived, he had confessed his main loss was protection. Work saved him from many family chores. He spent the first week of his retirement taking a relative to four medical appointments. He later told that relative a trivial lie that he went back to part-time work. That’s protection.
R – Routine Replacement:
The second thing you lose is routine. Ever since first grade, our days have been very structured. Your job in retirement is to give yourself some structure. The research names the task. Maintaining continuity in identity and lifestyle is critical for retirees to keep their psychological well-being.
I – Identity Creation:
The third thing you lose in retirement is identity. Many professionals are reluctant to say they are retired. Just the other day, in my daily feed on retirement-related articles, I came across one that literally said, “Don’t say the word retirement.” The euphemisms for retirement are things like “third act” or “partial retirement” or “consulting.” The best this article came up with is the Spanish word “jubilación,” which means, of course, jubilation.
But retirement — shame depends on context and culture. My new next-door neighbor introduced himself with glee, saying, “I’m retired. I was a sheriff in the nearby town, and now I’m retired. My wife here is still working.” He had no problem with the word retirement — he always expected to with a police pension and all of his buddies retired at age 50.
But for most of us supposedly working in the land and culture that outlaws age discrimination — that’s good — retiring can mean shame and loss. Role theorists argue that the role loss resulting from the retirement transition can cause people to feel anxious or depressed, leading to low levels of well-being in retirement. When these work roles are central to one’s core identity, losing them would mean stress.
M – Meaning Definition:
The next thing you might lose in retirement is meaning. For professionals, work provides meaning through tasks that were usually valued in society and often challenging. Whether it was solving a legal case, teaching a class, or working on a memo, the work built in meaning.
Biden stressed the meaning of his retirement in his resignation letter. “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
E – Emotional Connection And Regulation:
The last task of retirement is to replace what is lost in most good jobs: emotional regulation. In a good job, we can get daily or multiple daily doses of dopamine when someone says, “Good job.” Even with a lousy supervisor, your coworkers signal some appreciation. Even if your coworkers complain, you have an instant society at lunch break, helping each other think of good examples about how terrible your job is. The task for a retiree is to find that regulation and emotional connection on their own.
Avoiding Fear Is the Worst Way To Plan
Avoiding loss is an understandable motive and the reason many people with financial means keep working. Though only a few people have the privilege to decide to retire or not, retiring entails confronting the fear of the unknown.
Avoiding psychosocial losses by retiring is something to work through.
Paid work automatically, without conscious thought or intention, provides many psychosocial benefits: easy time boundaries, ritual use of time, self-identification, meaning, and emotional support. Thus many older workers choices may come down to this: avoid losses by working even longer or embrace personal growth by taking on the emotional tasks of retirement.
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