This Isn't Going To Be Our Parent's Retirement

Retirement is one of those ‘everywhere’ conversations these days. So many of us ageing baby boomers are nearing that traditionally fateful age that we would have to be mentally dead to not be thinking of our long-term future.

And our ‘long term future’ is one of the reasons that retirement is a very different conversation for us boomers than it was for our parents and grandparents. They typically retired at 65 and considered themselves fortunate if they lived for 10 years after they quit working. They had worked at jobs that had a much larger manual component to them than we boomers have experienced; their bodies were tired and worn out in ways that ours aren’t. They were thankful to have a few years of physical ease before moving on to that great mystery that is death.

Our collective boomer future is significantly different. For a start, we are retiring younger, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Many of us have left the workforce a full decade before our parents did. And we are scheduled to live longer. A huge proportion of us boomers will have 20-30 years of living to deal with after we ‘retire’, whether we remain healthy or not. We are better educated, have fewer children, more possessions, (and paradoxically) more debt. We are also accustomed to living lives with much more privilege and reward than our parents did, regardless of whether we are working class, middle class or the wealthy elite.

Many of us have invested heavily in fretting and planning for the financial inevitability of retirement. Few of us have thought much about or developed plans that address the lifestyle issues and challenges associated with ‘retirement’ as we will experience it. I put quotations around the word ‘retirement’ because I believe that it is a word in rapid transition. It means something very different to us boomers than it did to previous generations. For one thing, it has become a catch-all phrase referring to that stage of life when we move into something after the long-term careers that have occupied most of us throughout our adult lives. ‘Retirement’ in the early stages of the 21st century can mean anything from outright being finished with paid employment forever to a ‘starting your own business’ phase of life, to a ‘keeping busy by volunteering’ phase of life or a ‘getting a part-time job to keep busy or earn some extra money’ period.

Now here’s the crazy-making thing about ‘retirement’: most of us boomers carry competing visions of ‘retirement’ around inside of us and use the term ‘retirement’ indiscriminately to reference those competing visions. We frequently have the deeply held vision of ‘retirement’ that aligns with the traditional view: we stop working and live the rest of our life as some sort of glorious long weekend …and we know somewhere else within us that that vision of retirement isn’t going to work for us as individuals. Our specific situation, our personal needs mean that we must create something different for ourselves. And yet …deep inside there is that inter-generational story of what ‘retirement’ should be!

I have discovered as a life transition coach and retirement specialist that there are many myths that we carry relative to our deeply held, traditional view of ‘retirement’. One of the most potentially damaging myths is that there’s nothing to talk about …we’ll simply quit working and get on with enjoying our lives. I wish it were that simple and that effortless. Personally, I’m tired of seeing people age prematurely, develop deep anxiety conditions or depression or die of heart attacks because they refused to believe that they needed to prepare for retirement!

If you are within 5 years of your anticipated retirement date, it is not too late for you to make the kind of lifestyle changes that will help ensure that you live a fulfilled and vital second half of life. However, if you choose to do nothing different, then consider this: how do you think your future will be anything different than your past has been if you change nothing?! I know you’re not crazy, but you know how they define insanity: doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results!!

Get into Actio

More and more resources are becoming available to those of us who are approaching our retirement years. Like so many other areas of life, we baby boomers are about to re-write the book about retirement.

But it won’t happen without an investment of time and effort on our part. At a minimum we need to start educating ourselves about the lifestyle issues that accompany retirement and ageing. You can do a search at Amazon or go to my website (www.ouicoach.com) for an annotated reading list of recommended books about retirement. Or search for a series of short articles I’ve posted on Selfgrowth.com about the 10 Top Retirement Myths.

We need to start actively communicating with our life partners, children and parents about the kind of second half of life we want for ourselves. We need to be prepared to renegotiate many of the major relationships in our lives …and we need to anticipate that we may need help in navigating this process successfully. Workshops, retreats, and seminars that deal with the lifestyle issues of retirement are becoming more plentiful; I strongly suggest you invest in your future by participating in some of them. Once again, an Internet search will open up a whole world of offerings. My own website contains a listing of the workshops and retreats I offer.

We need to shift our focus from obsessing about being financially prepared for retirement to ensuring that we are emotionally and spiritually prepared for it. We need to ensure that our lives continue to have meaning and that we have social wealth as well as financial wealth as we move into this potentially exciting, dynamic and vital time of our lives. It matters not one whit what kind of life you’ve had to date. You might have been massively successful and blessed …and that doesn’t mean that you’ll deal well with impending retirement. You might have had a terrible life to date, full of dissatisfaction and disappointment. That doesn’t need to follow you into ‘retirement’. For all of us this can be a whole new beginning, an opportunity to start again for the first time. At this stage of our lives we all carry decades of life experience that we didn’t have when we started out.

Ultimately the question becomes: are you committed to having your future be different from your past? Are you willing to invest in yourself to create a future that might just astonish you and those around you with its richness?

That’s certainly the kind of ‘retirement’ I’m committed to for myself!