Retiring Retirement

I’m not against the concept of retirement, but I don’t understand its popularity either.  It strikes me as being something that millions (perhaps billions) of people look forward to, but most have no clear idea why.  Once you’re looking forward to retiring, you can’t possibly be focused any more on what you are still capable of achieving.  Isn’t that a waste?  Especially if you just assume that “retirement” will be such a big improvement.

The biggest problem with retirement as it’s popularly defined is that there’s a presumption you’ll now have a much better life.  But think about that for a moment.  For most of us, the value in our life comes from the impact we have on other people’s lives and, for the vast majority of us, that impact is felt most strongly by the people we affect in our families and in our work.  And what do so many do when they retire?  They stop working and they move, generally, away from their families and closer to a lot of other retired strangers.  Where’s the attraction in that?

I believe that most people do not plan to retire well.  The retirement industry and all of its related propaganda build the ideal retirement lifestyle as being almost exclusively linked to your ability to “save” enough money while you’re working to retire “well.”  All our life, of course, we’re told that money does not buy happiness – except in retirement apparently.  What the propaganda does not address is how you will continue to make a valuable contribution in retirement.  It wants you to take yourself out of the game.  And there’s the catch.  To make a valuable contribution, an energizing contribution, an energetic and sustaining contribution, you have to stay in the game.

So your planning for “retirement” can’t be solely focused on savings (although this surely can’t be ignored).  It must also be focused on your individual sustainability.  Planning for your individual sustainability, in my view, has three components:  money, health and worth, with worth, personal worth, being the most important.  If you focus on worth, money and health will be there ready to support you.  If you focus on either one of the others, alone or together, and disregard worth, you’re rolling the dice and, like at any casino, house odds are better than yours.

I meet, in general, two kinds of people in the world:  The first kind is working with a goal on retiring.  These are the people who can tell you exactly how long it will be until they “can” retire.  They’ll tell you the date, in fact.  Consider what that does to your thinking and to your individual worth.  Can you be effective in your work?  Sure, to a point.  But, more than likely, you’re no longer focused on what you can accomplish rather than what you need to do.  And need without can is not very challenging.  The second kind is usually a business owner or someone who is well paid, but unhappy with what they’re doing.  The only way they can define themselves between now and retirement is by what they do.  They mistakenly feel like where they are is who they are.  If I sold my business now, what would I do?  I’m too young to retire.  Or, if I quit my job, what would I do?  The ambition seems to die with these people, their individual sustainability is used up day by day, rather than banked and grown with daily deposits.

Some might argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about.  “You’re only 41; I’m 60.  I’ve got 20 years of work on you.  Talk to me when you’re 60.”  Fair enough.  But the “work” you may have on me is more than likely time you’ve put in, not time you’ve planned for your individual sustainability.  You’re in the retirement trap, you’ve got a picture of retirement nirvana and retirement fairies dancing in your head.  But I’m pretty sure that you’ll soon wonder why you let it happen to you.  Imagine how prepared you would be to retire with not just a bank full of money, but with the additional worth of your individual sustainability account overflowing as well.  Wouldn’t be any need to retire, would there?  And that’s the point.  Too many of us fall into the trap that retirement is the end.  But retirement should be the reward, not the end.  If it were the reward, we would want to make sure that every day we were retired would be the opportunity to do what we love and what has the biggest impact on others.  Not a day to wonder what to do.