One of my more serious / advice type blogs. 
It refers to many of the topics I’ve written about before and regard as important to a happy retirement including this very aspect, hence the title. Read on. There may be other times in a person’s life when the possibility of making a new start presents itself, as it does when we retire, but not many. As with most life changes, even those we choose to have happen, there is usually both an upside and a downside to the process. Retirement is much the same. There are, as the title suggests, both problems and possibilities to the period in our lives some people call retirement. Other people prefer descriptors that reflect, not least to the person in question, a more positive message. Those of you who have read other blogs of mine will know I rather like the phrase – The Third Age coined by writer Charles Handy. Already, in our choice of terms to describe our next age, we begin to indicate whether we see it as a protracted period of possibilities rather than problems. I want to end this blog on a positive note so let me begin by taking a look at some of the problems I’ve mentioned before in this blog associated with retirement and see if we can at least get them into perspective. I will refer to some of my earlier blogs to illustrate my thoughts on this retirement business.
I want to keep this simple and also to give you a heads up about what the blog will describe, so let me say, in my experience, the main problem in retirement for many of us is a significant lessening of self-esteem. The main possibility of retirement is the chance to develop a new identity, a new you. Of course retirement isn’t always quite so polarised or so simple, it’s often made up of many other bits and pieces but the scenario presented in this blog, will illustrate the main theme that retirement comprises both problems and possibilities and it is primarily up to us to reduce the former and maximise the latter.
It has to be said, right up front, that how you view your retirement and hence, (quite likely) how it turns out- a topic for another blog – will be, to a large part, determined or at least influenced, by how you have regarded your working life. If you have had a job or a career that you found stressful or at least unrewarding then you are likely to have a different view from a person who loved their work and was either forced, or felt in some way compelled, to give it up. In the case of the latter the first big ‘problem’ / challenge of retirement comes into view. In my writings as an ex-psychologist it’s a term you will hear a great deal – self-esteem, sometimes also referred to as self-image or self-worth. In this context many of us, when we were working, and I include myself in this, defined ourselves to a large degree by our jobs. It’s that old cliché, you meet somebody at a party and, after telling each other your names, the question – what do you do? – usually comes next. For many of us we are what we ‘do’ in work terms. If we ‘do’ that work well then we think well of ourselves. It has to be said that people in this group probably find retirement the most fraught with problems. Where will my feeling of well-being come from when I am retired? How will I get a feeling of self-worth? Just to skip ahead a little let me suggest that the trick for us is to find another identity that fills the gap – but more of this later.
Unfortunately the ‘work effect’ is not all we have to contend with. One of my first blogs, self-esteem-and-retirement, was about the comparison between how children come to regard themselves (to get their self-esteem) and how people, in later stages of life, do the same. The research on children suggested 17 different areas that affected this area of their development and of these 17, 13, I suggested in my blog, were relevant to people who had just or were about to retire. Areas like – not being listened to, not being taken seriously, feeling forced to do things we don’t like to maintain companionship, or being unfavourably compared to others. Take a look at the blog for the rest of the list of 13.
In each of these areas we can begin to see the possible pitfalls of our retirement period. We feel we have nothing to say or that we’re not learning anything new, in fact our skills are dropping away either through lack of use or mental or physical shortcomings.
These in addition to all the more obvious possible retirement downsides – poor health, less money, reducing friendships, children having developed their own lives and so on. Before we all get too depressed by the prospect of retiring let’s take a look at the positive side of the deal. We all know about the potential downsides and of course they often cannot be changed only tolerated. If they can be changed, well, then change them. But perhaps a better way is to take the view that, while they cannot be changed, they can be compensated for. In a nutshell we can have something different but just as good and, whisper it, perhaps even better.
Let’s take a look now at some of the possibilities of retirement, the upside. There are the well-known areas like – less stress, more time to relax, catch up on those books we never seemed to have time for when we were working, less pressure to achieve in our career, more flexibility with how we use our time – we could, in theory, do absolutely nothing if we chose – more life choices and so on. I do not suggest this is a comprehensive summary but it will give an idea of the possible positives of retirement. The big one though, as far as I am concerned is, in simplest terms, as I have suggested, that retirement offers us a chance to start again. A chance for a new identity, a chance to reinvent ourselves or at least to add some new areas while keeping the ones we liked all along. The bits we like about ourselves and the new bits, this is what I am defining as ‘better’. Better = the best of the old + the new. So when you introduce yourself at parties, or wherever, you can, with a straight face, say, Hello, I’m Peter, I’m a writer / wine maker / engine driver and so on. The new you – if you wish. If you don’t want a new you, you’re quite happy with the ‘old’ one, then that’s absolutely fine, genuine good luck to you.
Back to the concept of a new you. I have written elsewhere – the perfect-retirement about achieving a perfect(ish) retirement, indeed it is the sub-heading of my own blog, The Summerhouse Years. The key concept in this early blog is the one of balance. Take a look at the blog and you will see what I mean by this. I suggest that this offers a good framework for analysing the potential success of your own retirement. Just take a quick glance at my chosen options. Ask yourself what are your key constructs? Which are the important ones for you? These will become the corner stones of your new identity.
In the following weeks on this blog I hope to write about some of my ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ of retirement and more about developing a new identity, to enable you to begin to fill in some of the detail of what I’ve written about in this blog. But for now this will do, carry on retirement. Name for a film?