Retirement blogs : now do I need my own tribe?

It’s quite nerve-racking looking back at a retirement blog you wrote several years ago. But this is what I’ve been doing. I’ve been re-reading a blog I wrote in April, 2014. For the mathematically-minded that’s over 6 years ago, so a very early blog. The topic of this blog was retiring and losing my tribe. I wanted to read it to set the context for this blog about the same topic.

The blog read well I think although my paragraphs were much longer in those early days and my prose was perhaps even more rambling than it is now. A friend once suggested that I should ‘release’ some early blogs if I was ever short of a topic to write about. As I read this old blog I did wonder a bit about the idea

I’ve never done this but just imagine, with getting on for 800 blogs ‘in the bank’, I could post a retirement blog every day for two years.  Now that would surely put me on the first page of Google and keep me there. But that is not the topic of this retirement blog.

So back to the real topic, the idea of losing my tribe when I first retired. I made the point at the time that, after the work environment, and all the socialising and friends that go with it, retirement can be a lonely place to be. So one question re-reading the first blog is, has my opinion changed? Has my desire / need to have a tribe to belong to, changed over the intervening 6 years? Do I now feel that retired people like myself, need to belong to a tribe or a group by some other name? In our emotionally vulnerable state do we need the comfort / support of like-minded individuals? And if so, why should this be?

Well, until this virus came along (or has it always been with us?), I would have happily have said, no thanks, I’m quite happy with mostly my own company. Isolation? No problem. I may even be anti joining groups per se. But a strange thing happened last week. The source was unlikely, given my past history. It was in fact my neighbourhood group. The topic was the travellers who had located themselves in our local park.   They’re unfortunately a huge nuisance for a variety of reasons which I won’t go into now.

So the point is that we all had emails (the number of emails can get a bit over-whelming but there’s always a price to pay for something ‘good’) advising us the local residents to stay away for a while. So for some strange reason this gave me a very rare sense of togetherness. Who’d have thought travellers occupying our local park would have such a positive side effect. Anyway, it did. I felt a part of our neighbourhood group.

So this did bring me back to the question I posed before, why did this feel ‘right’? Why should the question of being part of a tribe even be raised as an issue by me? Do retired people have the need for group support in a way that other age groups might not?

I suppose the answer might be something to do with a feeling of being a bit exposed or a little uncertain of our role in the world now we’re retired. And also it’s to do with a need to belong. Back in the day, as a psychologist, you had to choose which aspects of psychology you wanted to underpin your day to day practice. We weren’t compelled to abide by a certain approach, which I liked. There was a lot on offer and you couldn’t use it all not to mention that some paradigms were diametrically opposed to each other.

So one of my choices was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This is a list of the needs that we need to have met in order to feel good about ourselves. As in the picture above. You might say it’s a bit long in the tooth, it was then, so more so now I guess. But it always made sense to me and often helped to explain to the involved adults (teacher / parent) why a child behaved as they did. In their case, how their inappropriate behaviour met a need they had (for attention or control were probably the two classics).

All this perhaps explains why the issue of belonging to your own tribe as a retired person should come up again in these blogs about retirement. In a five stage hierarchy, a need for ‘love and belonging’ came in at level 3 above a need to feel safe and below a need to have good self-esteem (your own and from others, also known as respect).

So my tribes have been sparse and fragile over the last six years. No longer do I play cricket as a member of a ‘village’ team. While we’re on sport after the implosion of Forest now out of the championship play-offs and while I might have taken comfort from this if I could have discussed it with other disappointed (such a mild word under the circumstances) fans might have helped, we live in Leeds (who did get promoted to the Premiership) so no help from other tribe members there.

There’s been the music groups over most of the last six years. The jazz and even more recently the folk fiddle group have given me some sense of identity but nothing you could call tribal. So in answer to my own question, no I haven’t changed my mind about the need to belong to a tribe in retirement.

There we have it. Did I say my blogs these days are less rambling? Well, not this one. This one is just a long-winded way of saying for the most part I am tribe-less and it doesn’t bother me one little bit. So why didn’t I just say that right up front? That wouldn’t have made a retirement blog, would it?