Retire Without Regrets

For anyone who has established a meaningful professional identity over a decades-long career, retirement represents a huge—and potentially wrenching—transition. While some people navigate it well, many struggle. 

To better understand the factors that affect people’s experience in retirement, the authors conducted a 10-year longitudinal study of 14 Americans going through the transition. They also interviewed 106 pre- and postretirement knowledge workers from three U.S. industries and geographies. They uncovered positive tales and cautionary ones. One clear lesson emerged: It takes work to stop working. Leaving a career and crafting a fulfilling retirement takes thought, time, and effort. The process can be enjoyable, but it cannot be avoided.

Retirement is a transition that involves several key phases: making the decision to stop working; detaching from work; experimenting with new relationships, activities, and social groups; and establishing a new, reasonably stable life structure. In their research, the authors found that satisfied retirees demonstrate four key behaviors throughout the phases: 

1. Alignment.  Your self consists of the key aspects of who you are at any given point in your life: your central identities, needs, values, preferences, motivations, personality dispositions, and even health. Your life structure consists of the contexts that are important to you: your main activities and relationships, the groups and organizations you belong to, and the places you spend your time. Alignment is the degree of fit between the two—specifically, how suitable your life structure is for your current sense of self and how viable it is for the foreseeable future. There’s an ongoing interplay between self and life structure throughout the retirement transition.
2. Awareness. To properly assess alignment, you need a clear-eyed view of both your self and your life structure. Honest, accurate self-reflection and evaluation of your life are always difficult but can be especially tough during periods of transition because of the inevitable stress and ambiguity. It can be helpful to enlist support from a psychotherapist, family member, or trusted friend. 
3. Agency. If you sense misalignment between your current (or ideal) self and current (or ideal) life structure, it’s important to exercise agency to improve the situation. To get started, ask yourself two main questions: “What minor tweaks—or major changes—can I make in my life structure to bring it into better alignment with the self I am now?” and “Is there anything I want to change about my current self to improve alignment?” Start small to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Ask yourself, “What incremental steps might I take to bring about some desired changes? Who or what could help me take them?”
4. Adaptability. Even if you’ve taken all the right steps to achieve alignment, life happens. We all face health crises, births or deaths in the family, or even external events, such as a global pandemic. When such situations crop up or your circumstances change throughout your retirement life, you’ll need to accept, adjust, and adapt.