Reinventing Yourself in Retirement? First Try Un-inventing Yourself
- alinamatas
- Mar 19
- 3 min read
A few days ago, I caught up with a friend who retired in his 50s from a career in finance, and asked him about his initial experiences of retirement. He mentioned that on the first Monday after retiring, he felt a significant rush of adrenaline that he needed to learn how to recalibrate.
He had worked intensely throughout his career and kept even longer hours during his last months, to leave everything in good shape for his employer. As a result, he had built a substantial surplus of performance energy, which exceeded what he needed for the retirement activities he had planned.
His remark lingered in my mind. Last week, I treated myself to a two-day beach retreat during the workweek. I liked it, but I couldn't fully unwind. I was restless, with my mind eager to focus on something productive. Without work duties, this pre-programmed energy had no outlet and morphed into a sense of guilt. It was that sensation of being in one place, doing or not doing something, while feeling like you should be elsewhere doing something else.
Certainly, I hadn't worked as intensely as my friend. I had managed to maintain a balanced routine of work, meals, exercise, and rest. Even so, retirement always involves a down shift, a recalibration of energy, and it doesn't happen immediately.
According to experts, retirement consists of various phases we go through. The experiences in the initial week differ from those in subsequent weeks. Some experts identify three phases, others four, some five, and recognized retirement expert Robert Atchley suggests six. Here are the most concise lists I found for each enumeration, three, four, five and six, respectively:
The first or second phase (depending on whether you include a pre-retirement phase) is the honeymoon phase. Indeed, this is a delightful phase, and it is flying by.
Afterward, one transitions from the honeymoon phase to an exploration and discovery phase, seeking new pursuits or interests in which to invest some energy.
I'm coming to understand that, unlike the various personas you may have adopted as your career progressed during your working years, you don't reinvent yourself in retirement. New pursuits, whether they involve a hobby, a sport, volunteering, or part-time work, typically relate to activities or interests you had before retiring.
In fact, I venture to say that the real process of retirement is un-inventing yourself.
I mean that we can let go of the work layers and roles we took on during our careers, often because we needed to. These layers and roles were ways of reinventing ourselves, to keep making a living or making a better living.
In retirement, you clear away those layers to make room for a version of yourself from before all that reinvention.
I entered the workforce as a research assistant, then became an analyst/programmer, then went to graduate school and reinvented myself as a newspaper reporter, then re-channeled those skills and became a real estate research director, and lastly, applied the new skills from the prior job to reinvent myself as a business plan consultant.
I'm proud of having learned all those different things, but these days, if you ask me for business advice, I want to reply with something I saw in a Facebook meme: "Don't ask me for advice, because we might end up in the forest looking for fairies." The meme amuses me and makes me smile, as I think of how fun it was to read fairy tales, how easy it was to get lost in those narratives, without doubting their plausibility.
The meme also reflects my present mindset, which admittedly is wandering in la-la-land, as I let go of those work-related identities and the particular use of skills and interactions they demanded.
It's liberating, even if disorienting at times.
So here's my current plan as I linger some more in the honeymoon (or la-la) phase: I'll focus on rediscovering interests that had been sidestepped while I made a living.
Looking ahead to exploration for a worthwhile activity in which to invest my time, I might volunteer for some literacy project. I think everyone should be able to read about fairies in the forest.
Speaking of those, there might also be dragons in the forest, so I'm seriously considering enrolling in a fencing class, in case I have to slay one. The movements seem so related to dancing exercise, which I've enjoyed for years.
Pen and sword...I'll give this recipe a shot for recalibrating my work energy.
This was an interesting article. I have not yet looked at the links posted, but plan to do that ( but I wonder if it will be after I complete my first piano performance when they invite me to La Scala to play when they perform La Boheme...). No seriously, after more than 40 years in technology, I find myself drawn to non-technical areas like piano, dancing, reading, spirituality, and singing (ok I won't promise results there.) So I wonder if we are naturally drawn away from what we've done well and almost automatically over the years into areas that seemed more distant? unattainable? Naturally drawn away because who we were made to be realizes the need for somethi…