Retirement: Is It Really Necessary?

An eldery couple sit on chairs by the beach with a sunset

A Daily Dose of Reason reader asked me to comment on the following Ayn Rand quote in connection with the psychological issues involved in retirement:

A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life. It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge.

He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing.

He spends his life searching for some value which he will never find . . . .

It’s important to remember that “retirement” is more of a government and social concept, rather than one that actually arose in reality. People began to talk about “retirement” for two reasons. One, in the United States – the trendsetter for Western civilization – Social Security laws were passed in the 1930s to “take care” of people in retirement. This created an incentive (although not a mandate) for people to retire at a certain age determined by the government. Over time, retirement became something like a fact of nature, something that the government wanted and, therefore, we all must want to do.

Secondly, people began to live longer. This came about less from medical practice (which was gradually overtaken by government through the decades), and more because of advances of private sector technology and for-profit pharmaceuticals. As a result, you have people routinely living into their 80s and 90s today. While they’re often reasonably or somewhat healthy until their deaths, in their final decades they’re not as energetic or physically/mentally capable of doing all that they did in their 30s.

My starting point for any discussion of “retirement” is inviting a person to ask (and answer) the question, “What is retirement, at least to me? And what are the pros and cons of doing it?”

Ronald Riggio, writing at PsychologyToday.com [4/1/11] notes, “Our grandparents grew up in the era after the introduction of social security and when retirement programs and pensions were becoming the norm in many jobs. This set the expectation that our grandparents were “working toward” retirement. The goal was to amass as much money as possible to live well during retirement. The “expected” age of retirement was 65, and the stories that got people’s attention were those where people “beat the system” and retired at 60, 55, even 50. My brother, the dentist, “retired” in his 40s – but he works harder in his post-retirement career than ever before. It turns out that he was not an early retiree, but an unhappy dentist. He’s now a very contented manager of health care systems, with no immediate plan of retiring.”

To people with the kind of central purpose that Ayn Rand is talking about, retirement – at least in the full sense of the term – will never come. When physical and intellectual conditions permit it, and when the nature of one’s career choice permits it (e.g., being a writer or intellectual as opposed to a corporate employee who’s required to retire, or an athlete who cannot perform past middle age), one does not necessarily have to retire at all. It depends upon objective circumstances, physical factors, as well as personal preferences.

What does not appear optional is to have some kind of central purpose right up to the very end. This does not necessarily mean a money-making career. A person, in older years, can sometimes organize and arrange one’s life around a wide array of meaningful and purposeful activities that differ from those of a career.

Examples? A passion for golf or other age-appropriate sports; meaningful involvement in a charity or personal cause of high value to the person; pets, travel, and even the maintenance of one’s health and the most valued aspects of one’s younger lifestyle.

From talking to older people, I have learned that the use of one’s mind is a key factor in coping with retirement. It makes sense. Use of one’s mind is a requirement of self-esteem and self-fulfillment in younger years; so why not in later life, as well?

Self-esteem involves a confidence that one’s mind is capable of coping with and sustaining one’s life for as much as one can and for as long as one can.

Where a lot of people go wrong with retirement is their failure to think about what retirement will mean for them. In other words, what will the abstraction of “retirement” look like, and feel like, in daily life?

People sometimes carefully plan an exit strategy for their job or career, including savings and financial concerns. These are necessary and important steps; but they’re not enough. These steps tell you how to financially survive in retirement, but not how to fully live. As Dr. Riggio advises, “Many people have unrealistic expectations about their retired lives.

They imagine that they will take up golfing or tennis, begin hobbies, learn to play the guitar, travel, etc. A good test is to evaluate that part of your life currently. Are you involved in sports, hobbies, or music and passionate about it? If not, it may be unreasonable to expect that you will suddenly develop that passion the day after you retire.

The most successful retirees plan out their post-working lives. The kind of retired person I often meet in emotional crisis is the one who planned everything out except for his personal and emotional needs.

A lot of retired women I counsel complain to me about their husbands. These husbands, I’m told (and have also observed), are grumpy, they rarely smile, and they irrationally try to control matters they previously left to their wives who happily performed these tasks for many decades with little or no intervention from the husband.

Suddenly, in retirement, all that changes. Why? Most likely, because the retired husband is looking for a sense of visibility, importance and control over his destiny. He has the right motives, but his methods are not appreciated by his spouse. He drives his spouse away at a time when, emotionally, he could use her the most.

The same goes for retired women who will sometimes interfere in their grown children’s and grandchildren’s lives in unappreciated and even destructive ways. Once again: Right motive, wrong method.

Counseling and therapy with people troubled by retirement consists of helping them identify what’s really going on with them emotionally, and finding better ways to act upon their perfectly reasonable motives of wishing to use their minds and have some kind of purpose in retirement.

Such emotional and behavioral problems stem from a lack of central purpose. Why? Because a central purpose does not simply consist of having a reliable place to live, and a reliable savings account; it also involves the use of your mind, in the sense that Rand was talking about for people of all ages, not just retired people.

A purpose is optional. The purpose one chooses is based on one’s abilities and needs at a given time. One older person may, for whatever reasons, have little or no savings. For this person, economic retirement is not an option. Life revolves around the central purpose of trying to make a living and survive, something that does not come as easily in older age. People are less willing to hire an older person for various reasons, and the older person finds it increasingly harder to do physical or even some forms of mental labor.

Ironically, for a retired person who’s reasonably or very well off, the need for a central purpose can be more difficult. The person seeking to make a living has his or her central purpose front and center. While it’s overall much harder, it’s easier psychologically. For the retired person whose economic needs are already covered, the challenge becomes: “How do I use my mind today?”

The problem is that many people are not introspective or otherwise philosophically and psychologically aware enough to realize the needs of their minds. Most of us are trained and programmed to think, “Not working is the ideal. When I am retired and no longer have to work, I will have arrived.” If left unchallenged, this premise will clash with the objective requirement of people to have some kind of purpose, psychologically speaking, in their later years.

In fact, it is appealing not to have to work any longer. The pressure to make a living in your 70s or 80s is obviously much more difficult than it was in your 30s or 40s. To have that pressure go away is a good thing, and it’s entirely rational for people to plan for their retirements in this way.

At the same time, the needs of your mind will not go away. Leaving aside the tragedy of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, our minds, wants and objective needs for self-esteem and self-fulfillment will be with us, absent any significant medical illness or symptoms, to the very end.

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