Planning for retirement
Voices of the bored retirees.
- “I’m trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life.”
- “I’m a frustrated fish out of water since retiring two years ago.”
- “I’m desperate to find something to fill my time!”
- Woman in her 80’s: “What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? I feel helpless and hopeless without worthwhile connections.”
I attended a class four and a half years ago comprised of people in their 50’s through their 80’s. This class was designed to make our Senior years count. I just now stumbled on notes that I took in that class wherein each class member was asked to make a comment about their current state in life. The above four comments are just some of those statements.
Desperation and sadness all around me. I recall now that the mood of this class was one of desperation and sadness as those who yearned for retirement their whole working life found themselves frantically trying to fill their days. Their feelings were summed up in these words:
- depressed
- lack of purpose
- short-sightedness
- emptiness
- loss of self
Gerontologist, S. Barkin puts it this way regarding our responsibility to be actively walking through our senior years, and I paraphrase,
What do we want to do for the time remaining in our life? We all should be mining our experiences and the wisdom therein to help with our present and future paths.
As I mentioned in my article, Retirement planning: it’s not what you think, all of us have a history of life skills that should not be put up on a shelf and never used again. Instead we should be retooling those skills into something that is meaningful and enjoyable to us and beneficial to others. The students in my class had many thoughts – mostly unfocused and therefore not very productive – but those thoughts had yet to turn into action.
The first step is to decide what is significant to you and act on it.
Aging well starts with the mind but it’s in the doing that makes it count. We all have a choice when we find ourselves at a loss of purpose: we can stay stuck, or we can actively make a difference in the local community around us. Baby Boomers are the first generation of peoples to have such a long life span. We’re living longer so we have more time to pass our knowledge down to others and use our skills in a valuable way. As the sports company Nike says in one of their ad campaigns: JUST DO IT!
Retirement planning – it’s not what you think.
How do you define using your time in a meaningful way? If you’re getting ready for retirement – or are already retired – how are you going to spend those 40+ hours you previously filled at your job? “That’s easy!”, you say. “I’m gonna do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it: sleep in, read, play golf, travel; I’ll have no problem filling in the time!”
Now fast forward a year or two: you’re bored; your spouse is sick of you just hanging around the house; you’re feeling like there’s something more you could be doing; and even with doing whatever you’ve wanted to do, something’s missing. You wish there was more to this long sought after retirement phase of your life.
You’re not alone. The founding Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, Laura L. Carstensen, correctly states in a recent AARP article, that “people are happiest when they feel embedded in something larger than themselves.” As we all know, we are living longer. In order to make good use of these added years, we need to ask ourselves what we can offer others in these bonus years of our lives. Should we continue in what might be our restricted scope of the past: getting by, doing what we can for ourselves and our family, but rarely reaching out beyond that confined scope? If you feel as I do, that’s not nearly satisfying enough.
What should our lives look like now that most people spend as many years as “old people” as they do rearing children?
How should societies function when more people are over 60 than under 15?
Ms. Carstensen is certain that today’s generations of older people will set the course for decades to come and that “change will happen, one person at a time.” I personally think that too often we think that any “doing” that we do must be grandiose in scale; or remarkable and newsworthy in order to be worthwhile. If I felt that way, I don’t think I’d even make an effort to give of my skills, my time and my passion to my community. Why bother? It won’t do any good, right? WRONG!
“If every person over 50 makes a single contribution, the world could be improved immeasurably.”
Think about it: us Baby Boomers have a history of life skills that can benefit so many! How sad it would be if the engineer, the lawyer, the CPA, the household family manager, the medical professional, and other highly skilled people put those skills on the shelf, never to be used again? What a waste! I’m not saying you continue to be that engineer, lawyer, and the like in your retirement. What I am saying, however, is that your past experience, regardless of its nature, can be used for the good of others but perhaps reshaped into a different form.
The bulk of my employment experience has been in the legal field and the senior housing industry, but at this stage of my life I’m not specifically involved in being a paralegal, or a senior housing manager. What I am doing, however, is combining those skills and directing them towards areas for which I am very compassionate, e.g. advocacy for older adults, and counsel for those taking care of a loved one with dementia. You too can contribute to your local community by applying your skills in ways that benefit others and are meaningful to you. I would be of no use to anyone if I didn’t believe my personal Baby Boomer motto: Committed to strengthening my community one person at a time – not one society at a time; not one State at a time, and certainly not the world. But I can motivate myself to strengthen my community one person at a time.
At what do you excel and what do you like to do? As an older adult, perhaps retired, you now have the luxury of doing what you LIKE and WANT to do, not just what brings home steady income and puts food on the table. Whoo hoo! What a luxury!!!
LET’S TALK ABOUT THIS SOME MORE:
What are you doing now to plan for a satisfactory remainder of your life?
How are others currently benefiting from your knowledge-base and how did you find the new venue in which to share your knowledge?
If you’re retired: How satisfied are you in this stage of your life? If you’re satisfied: why? If you’re not satisfied: why not?
Living: the ultimate team sport 