In line with my policy of reading about retirement so that I can pass on any words of wisdom to my readers I bought (again as it turns out) a copy of BF Skinner and Margaret Vaughan’s book (one of my psychologist heroes you might remember) and entitled, How to enjoy Your Old Age, a promising title from an eminent psychologist, so should be good I reasoned.
The above book was published in 1983. Interesting to see how it compared with a recent publication (2020) I’ve been reading entitled The Changing Mind by Daniel Levitin. I’m still reading this one so a proper comparison might have to wait. But at a simple level while Skinner and Vaughan write about how to make the best of a bad job, Levitin writes that we don’t need to because getting old isn’t as bad as we might have been told and uses the science to support this theory. Anyway back to Skinner and Vaughan, more of Letivin in a later retirement blog
There’s plenty of ‘good advice’ from Skinner and Vaughan about how to grow old well, which admittedly is not necessarily about retirement but there are of course areas of overlap. This advice they put together under the heading ‘take all possible steps to make sure you enjoy your retirement’.
One recommendation being keep in touch with the world. Inevitably they write about the importance to our mental health of keeping in touch with other people. Joining groups and quite bizarrely making sure you’re the kind of person other people want to socialise with. Being a nice person. Blimey that’s taking things a bit far for me but I know what they mean.
Another aspect of ‘keeping in touch’ is the more pragmatic side of things. They write about the importance of hearing aids (so you can hear what’s going on), glasses so you can see what’s happening, walking stick/s to aid balance. Given this was before the days of iphones and laptops they write about the use of notepads and voice recorders. These so you can make a note of what you need to remember to do and as a method of collecting your thoughts.
Skinner (I’m just going to use his name from now on) writes about supporting any memory loss by using mnemonics. He also writes about forgetting what we were going to say. I can increasingly identify with this characteristic of old age. My best strategy is to say I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to say but it will come back to me, and 9 times out of 10, it does. Making lists of what you have to do or which tablets to take, also figures. Personally I like doing this because I find ticking off the achieved tasks very pleasurable and reinforcing of my retirement lifestyle.
He’s a big fan of keeping active as you might expect of a man who’s still working at the age of 80 plus. Maybe that’s why his book is called ‘How to enjoy old age’ rather than how to enjoy retirement. The fact that he co-wrote this book in his 80s somewhat reinforces my view that to enjoy retirement you need to keep working. I haven’t quite come to terms with this paradox yet.
Keeping active they also equate with joining groups / organisations or even setting up them up. Examples being charity work, political groups or any group that represents your area of interest / passion. And generally getting out and about. But alongside this they write about the need for novelty in one’s life or doing things differently. This comes under the heading of ‘make staying at home more pleasant’.
The ways of doing this are interesting in that they are probably the direct opposite of what Mrs Summerhouse and I do. They write that at least rearrange your home environment (down-sizing being a drastic version of this or even moving to a different neighbourhood / part of the country or even a different country altogether – being American in an era when America seemed like quite the place to be, Skinner doesn’t mention this option, just the sunshine belt as they call it over there).
A more modest version is moving your furniture round, changing your pictures on the wall. We do do this occasionally. Or specifically buy a new mattress, chair or lighting arrangement. The advice that made me go cold all over was to ‘get rid of everything you don’t want’. As a verging-on-inveterate-hoarder, this would be like removing a limb (a left arm perhaps on the grounds I don’t use it as much). Having so much ‘stuff’ also explains why I’m reluctant to move / down-size. What a job that would be.
Where they and I do coincide is with their advice to ‘be creative’. They see this as keeping one’s thinking skills in good shape. I’ve written a few blogs about this aspect of retirement and its importance to the retired person so I won’t repeat it here other than to say I agree. This relates again to the idea of the virtues of ‘encouraging novelty’ in our lives. They’re big on this as an antidote to getting old and boring or bored.
Perhaps as a counter-balance (they don’t use this word) to all this novelty stuff, they write, ‘there is much to be said for a fairly strict daily routine. With a good routine you will not need to make decisions about what is to be done and when’. They suggest having ‘appointed hours’ for meditation, reading, letter writing, household matters, exercising, etc.
And finally and perhaps predictably, and admittedly selectively, Skinner and Vaughan write about the importance, to our mental health, of keeping busy (or active as I wrote earlier). But they do have a word of caution when they write ‘keeping busy does not mean never resting. To rest is not to be bored. It is rather one of the most enjoyable things we can do – provided we need it.’
And again on a cautionary note, ‘to keep busy just because you feel you should (or because you have read a book telling you that you should) is not likely to be of much help (my insert – to having a good retirement or old age). You must get more out of what you do than an escape from feeling guilty because you are idle’.
It’s fitting I finish this, necessarily selective synopsis, with the area of retirement related to keeping busy for the simple reason that it is probably my biggest Achilles Heel (if such a thing is possible, can you actually have a big Achilles Heel?). As a person who finds it difficult to relax, to just do nothing, any advice in this area should be taken seriously – by me that is. Maybe this is the major point I take away from How to Enjoy Your Old age.