will you do after you are no longer employed? Can you afford to retire? Do you want to retire? Have you properly prepared for retirement? Are you psychologically ready to change your life?
The best answers to these questions can be found in self-awareness, because ultimately the answer must come from the individual and how well he or she knows him or herself. How much is your life tied to your work? Do you have sufficient activities and hobbies to sustain your interests? Many people go through stages of their adult lifetime unaware of who they truly are. Bound up in obligations to others, they have consciously or unconsciously suppressed their own true desires in fulfilling their duties to occupation and family. They have become what they do and not who they are. The more you know yourself, the easier it will be to make retirement decisions.
If you have insufficient funds, find yourself unemployed and cannot sustain yourself on unemployment benefits, the answer is simple: you must try to get another job, even if it means retraining in a different industry or starting a business, no matter how humble. These are simplistic solutions to devastating situations and age or infirmity may make them impossible. In conditions such as these, retirement is not even a consideration. However, in this book we will address the positions, needs and desires of those individuals who do have a reasonable choice to make and the ability to do so. To continue working or not? To start a new venture or drift into a state of continual vacation?
There are many aspects involved in the assessment of one’s state of preparedness for retiring and we will explore them.
PRIDE
I shall never forget an experience I had many years ago while on vacation in Florida. While strolling through a marina, admiring the large boats docked there, I came upon an older man polishing the chrome rails running along the bow of a huge yacht and crying. I asked him what was wrong. Could I be of any help? He told me he had made a terrible mistake. A year earlier, he said, he sat at the head of a large table in a New York City office as the chairman of the board of a company he had helped to create. He was a “somebody.” Now, a year later, after taking voluntary retirement and ceding his power to another, he considered himself a “nobody,” doing the work of a deckhand, polishing chrome. He had believed that devoting himself to the object of his vacation time, his yacht, would bring him the joy he sought, not understanding that his prime pleasure was in administering to his real “baby,” his business. This sense of loss of self-pride and the admiration of others brought this still-vital man to a point of depression. He was not ready to relinquish the reins of power that had been the source of his pride.
Despite being well educated and affluent, this gentleman had insufficient insight into who he really was and what his personality makeup required for contentment at that time of his life.
PERSONALITY TYPES
Personality can predetermine one’s relationship to work: the degree of motivation, the amount of enjoyment in accomplishment, the attachment to the work milieu, the camaraderie felt toward fellow workers and the ability to easily (or with difficulty) exit this existence.
Compulsive individuals who readily become regimented, adhere to the discipline of the workplace and are prone to over-evaluate the fact of accomplishment may find it more difficult to leave familiar surroundings, while those who are more easygoing and apt to consider work as a means to an end may find it easier to transition to retired status.
Dependent individuals may, for various reasons—a lack of a social existence outside of the workplace, a need to replace an unpleasant home environment or the creation of a surrogate familial existence—find it difficult to divorce themselves from the work atmosphere. Whereas those people who are more independent, perhaps more used to working by themselves, especially the ones who create their own tasks and are capable of setting their own boundaries, are usually more readily adaptable to retirement. No matter how involved with other matters, the retirement years are usually more isolated than the working ones and, the more an individual enjoys his or her own company, the more gratifying this can be. This is not to denigrate the joy of companionship offered in retirement homes and villages.
Workaholics, those who relish work beyond all other endeavors and indulge this craving to the detriment of familial and social attachments, naturally should not entertain retiring if at all possible. These people usually have few pursuits outside of work and many would find the retired state wasteful and unfulfilling.
Adaptability is a prerequisite character trait which can foretell how an individual will ease into retirement mode. People who have had different careers during their employment lifetimes, adjusting adequately to each change of venue, can usually be counted on to move on from one phase of life to another without great difficulty.
Hysteroid and depressive individuals, who tend to exhibit extreme emotional responses to life’s changes, no matter what they might be, usually find retirement challenging. However, on occasion, relief from the stress of the need to perform at an expected level might even prove therapeutic.
REGIMENTATION
One of the most difficult tasks of adaptation to a retired state is overcoming the years of adherence to a pattern of behavior. Whether we are aware of it or not, responses to the stress of environmental stimuli become routine, and coupled with the added pressures of the workplace can cause subliminal or overt anxiety reactions. This is why we look forward to weekends and vacations, to get away from the cause of this discomfort. Over time these responses become an integral part of our makeup. At the extreme, some people always seem edgy, easily riled, even argumentative with or without any obvious cause. Some continually feel under some sort of pressure, with the need to conquer an ever-existing challenge.
A successful retirement should serve as a perpetual vacation, a time to unwind from the regimentation of a former career and the anxieties of the past. It should be a time when the worries of younger years seem trivial and are put to rest, a time for healing the wounds of the spirit.
NEGATIVITY
Let’s explore two extremes in the workplace. The first is the outsider, who by personality or desire doesn’t fit in or shows no drive to progress in his job, perhaps getting little or no pleasure out of the work, one who feels cast out or even a victim of the bullying that unfortunately exists in many industries, the “office dupe” who is the butt of jokes. The other extreme is the attempted overachiever, the “lab rat” or “brown-noser,” who is often abused by pranks. For these individuals, no matter how motivated or dedicated they may be, work can be a living hell, because the negativity from fellow employees is felt as a daily punishment. To these men and women, absence from work can be seen as a blessing, a reprieve from the grind of employment.
CULTURE
Work has been glorified as a gratifying endeavor in the western world; however, in some other countries leisure has assumed much greater prominence. When one has been brought up to aspire to a certain goal, the attempt to achieve that goal is then accredited to be the highest aspiration. You work to live, but you live to luxuriate, to love, to enjoy, to pursue and experience happiness. Therefore, while you can achieve through useful endeavor, you can exhilarate and perhaps gain a greater sense of peace and serenity with a successful retirement. Under such circumstances, the retreat of a religious monk to pray and to meditate could be considered a form of
