Is Retirement The Right Call?

Today we’re going to look at an important ingredient for a better, brighter, and happier life deciding if retirement is for you.

Hint: It probably isn’t!

And we’ll help you to realize if it is, with both practical information and a solid dose of inspiration.

Now, retirement is an integral part of today’s standard social narrative in the developed and developing world. You’re born, you grow up, you work, and then you retire. You also start a family, get a mortgage, buy a house, and probably get a pet or something, but this narrative isn’t a fit for everybody. The consequences of each step needs to be assessed carefully before making the right decision for you and your life. And look, the fact is that if you’re a driven, passionate, and self-actualizing person, retirement from your job may simply be a very bad decision for you.

Now, before we get into the reasons, let’s just take a moment to consider the history of retirement planning.

So, retirement planning only started to pick up steam in the Industrial Age. Many people in that period were working long hours in factories doing hard work, with only a bit of aid from the rudimentary technology available in the first part of the Industrial Age. Those who did not work in factories were usually doing backbreaking work in rural areas, raising cattle and plowing fields again with rudimentary equipment. By the time they were in their 50s, many of these unfortunate people were so damaged physically by all the hard work, they simply couldn’t keep on with the labor. And at this point, in the best-case scenario, they would be taken care of by their considerate children, but in the worst-case scenario, they would end up begging on the street.

So, the idea of retirement planning, either supervised by the government or by insurance companies, came in to save these people from a wretched old age ensuring they would have the income to support themselves after they stopped working.

Well, today we are no longer in the Industrial Age, we are in the Digital Age, and this means that most of the work and developed and developing countries is mental, not physical. It involves thinking, creating, planning, decision-making, and problem-solving, which is actually good for keeping our brains fit and healthy, but when we retire, our brains lose a lot of the cognitive stimulation they usually got, which is one of the reasons cognitive decline is so common in old age.

So, interestingly enough, keeping your job in old age maybe one of the best ways to keep your mind active and avoid cognitive decline, and that’s already an important reason to consider not retiring, especially if your job is particularly engaging mentally, it keeps your brain healthy and fit well into old age.

And here’s something else to consider readers, although most people these days do cognitive labor instead of backbreaking physical labor, many people still look forward to retiring. Our analysis suggests that, unfortunately, this is because they don’t like their jobs. Seeking retirement is a symptom of not enjoying what you do. And of course, it’s understandable why one may be looking forward to retirement in such a case, but let’s think about it —

“Is working 40 years in a job you don’t like hoping one day you’ll get to retire, really the best approach to life?”

We’d like to suggest what we deem to be a better approach, looking for a job you’re passionate about because then your work doesn’t feel like such a burden all the time. It might not be enjoyable every day, but it’s still engaging your physical, psychological, and mental energy, but it’s not a burden. You feel engaged and rarely see a good reason to retire completely.

Now, of course, finding a job you love and are passionate about is far easier said than done, we realize this. It takes experimenting with various jobs, getting to know yourself better, having courage, having persistence, and having patience. Nevertheless, we believe it is still the better option than working a job you don’t like, and after decades of work, finally going into retirement. And something else to take into account is that a job is also a source of meaning of life. It’s part of our human nature to want to feel competent at something, to be productive, and to have some sort of impact in the world that we live in. And while family can provide some of that, it can rarely do it as effectively as a job, even a job you’re not that fond of.

It’s no surprise that shortly after retirement, many people are encompassed by a sense of meaninglessness in life, and sometimes they fall into depression. An important range of their psychological needs are no longer being met, and the paradox is that many of the people eagerly waiting for retirement, thinking how happy they will be then only to actually retire and feel their lives are emptier and less satisfying.

Now, of course, this is not to say that as you enter your 50s, 60s, and 70s that you should keep working with the intensity you did in your 20s and 30s. It’s definitely true that some of our priorities shift in life as the years pass, and we need to change our lifestyles accordingly if we want to be happy. You may want to spend more time with your family as you get older or travel more, or have more time for rest and relaxation, but the solution to better meeting these needs is not retirement.

Rather it’s something called “downshifting”.

Downshifting, as the name itself, suggests means shifting into a lower gear with work. It means working fewer hours, even if your earnings may be affected as well, focusing less on success and power and instead spending more time with friends and family, more time playing, more time traveling, more time doing leisure activities, more time doing things you enjoy or find meaningful besides work. And this is a combination that tends to work really well because you get to keep a large degree of the benefits of work from money to cognitive stimulation to feeling competent and having an impact while also still enjoying the health and psychological benefits of other activities and rest outside of work.

In the developed world, we see more and more people resorting to downshifting as the middle road in old age, especially those who understand their needs well and carefully contemplated how to live their lives.

Meanwhile, people who abandoned work entirely at some age eagerly jumping into retirement as well as people who never stop working at full throttle, even in their 80s, tend to be less satisfied with their lives. And this is only a general trend. Bear in mind that each person is unique, so what may work for one person won’t work for another. Ultimately, it’s up to you to understand your needs and values, consider and notice how they change over time, and make the decision regarding retirement that you believe works best for you. Chances are, though, it’ll be the decision to drop the idea of retirement altogether and replace it with the idea of downshifting at some point later in life.

We trust the information and insights you gained here will help you to make a wise decision about retirement and what that would look like for you, but this will only happen if you take it and apply it to your decision-making process.

Remember that knowledge is nothing without consistent implementation, so we encourage you to take this session and use what you’ve learned from it. Think about your career and how you want your old age to look like. No matter where you are in your life right now, start thinking seriously about the issue of retirement today.

There’s no better time than the present day!

P.S. Thank you for reading. You can consider following Entrepreneuria for more content like this.