As far as I know, the wheel of life gets a single turn between birth and death, and after completing that one cycle, it self-destructs.
In doing so, the wheel goes through the innocent years of childhood, the learning years of youth followed by the years of building a career, and finally, if all goes well, then hopes of living many years enjoying a contemplative retirement.
For retirement years we nurse a dream that we would sit back, relax, and live a life on our own terms.
Perhaps we will, but only if we do spend time and effort in preparing for the outcome we dream for, thereby increasing the probability of its being realized.
It is important to recognize that the dream of spending years in retirement sitting on the porch in a rocking chair watching orange and purple sunsets is not a natural outcome of evolution that brought us here. Retirement is a modern construct and does not have any teleological reasoning to exist.
The notion of retirement is a consequence of the accelerated pace at which human evolution has progressed. By doing that, we have disassociated ourselves from the much slower pace of the process of natural selection that molds the development of our skills necessary to propagate the genes in response to the environment we live in.
Within a time span of the last 200-years or so, improvements in the basic hygiene practices, advances in medicine and vaccination, have resulted in us living much longer than our DNA and genes really require us to do.
200 years ago, the concept of retirement did not exist. How to best deal with a longer life span is something that the evolutionary process did not prepare us for. In developing skills required to have a successful retirement, we are entirely at our own wits.
A fundamental requirement that comes with living longer is a continual need for resources to keep us functioning. These resources are the calories we need to keep our cells humming. In the past this need was met by hunting and gathering. But not anymore.
In earlier days, as we got older and our limbs began to get weaker and we were no longer agile enough to surprise an impala or walk miles to forage fruit and berries at the other end of the forest, it was a call for our inevitable demise.
But now as we have evolved, the rules by which we find calories have changed. We no longer go to the forest to hunt and gather to meet our incessant need for resources. Hunting and gathering has been replaced by bartering our skills with money being the intermediary unit that facilitates the task.
Now, to meet the energy requirements for cells we need money. The rows of trees in the forest have now been replaced by the aisles in the supermarket, and instead of hunting with a bow and arrow the choice weapon is a credit card.
We now need to have money and have plenty of it to be able to realize the dreams of sitting in the rocking chair on the porch.
There is no free lunch. With an increasing life span living could be an expensive endeavor requiring lots of money.
Longevity is a double-edged sword. It is an opportunity to enjoy time, expand our horizons, re-engage in activities that may have fallen by the wayside, but doing so is going to require money to barter for calories.
Long winded story, but the bottom line is that in retirement years, to be able to meet our tangible and intangible energy requirements, we better plan to have money before we get there.
To drive the message home there is plenty of advice out there. We are told to:
● Start saving for retirement early.
● Make regular contributions from the monthly income and make that the highest priority.
● Live within the means and do not get saddled by debt.
● Invest money to make it grow and not fall behind and let it get blighted by inflation.
● When investing, aim for the long term, diversify, and periodically, rebalance.
● As you get older, adjust the risk profile of the portfolio.
● Be agile and adjust as needed.
● And do not trust your gut feelings when investing. Investing is a game where not reacting to visceral feelings is a virtue.
I wonder if squirrels are given similar advice when they hoard nuts to get through the winter. Even if they are not, the advantage for them, however, is that they live through winters many times and have a chance to get it right. We do not have the same luxury of living through many cycles of the wheel of life and learn from our mistakes.
Naturally being wise individuals, we read the books and implemented all the good financial strategies, bought a rocking chair and are all set to sit in it, blast off and enjoy the ride but…
Whenever there is a “but” at the end of a sentence, there is a possibility for a different perspective that follows.
…but then the engines sputter. It turns out that there is more to realizing the dream retirement than just money to meet our energy (physical) requirements.
Here are how the events play out for lots of people who retire.
We may not think about it but psychologically after a long career entering the last phase of life could be a seismic and a discombobulating event.
Over the years, our work and career morph into a temple of sorts. As for offerings, we give our own heart and soul on the altar. In return, the temple bestows upon us important blessings — a sense of meaning and purpose; an identity; a sense of recognition; a place to compete and be the leader of a pack; a place to belong to a tribe; a structure to our life. The list of blessings the temple of work offers is long and becomes an important religion that we follow conscientiously.
The moment of retirement is when all these blessings get taken away. The day we walk out of the temple for the last time, along with handing over the badge and the laptop, we also relinquish everything that the temple blessed us.
Paradoxically, entering retirement and in the last phase of our life, we become newborns again. Being a newborn, psychologically we are ill prepared for life ahead and find that financial preparedness is not the only thing we are going to need for a happy retirement.
We do not know how we are going to fill the discretionary time that we had looked forward to. The time affluence, suddenly, does not look so romantic anymore.
There we stand looking quite baffled, needing to build another temple with our own hands, and in there, build and install our new identity, a new purpose etc. If not prepared, building such an edifice is a daunting task.
To make matters worse, this is probably the first time in our life that we have to build a temple with our hands. It does not take too long to realize that we do not have a bricklayer’s hand. We either never had the required tools, or if did, the skills were lost somewhere in the attics of the past.
Similar to advice we are given to secure the financial side of the retirement life, would it not be good if we were also told of strategies to follow and also develop the soft side of retirement — building an identity, finding a purpose, establishing social connections, feeling needed, having some temporal structure to our days?
The good news is that there is plenty of advice out there for this also. Fortunately, the process parallels that for putting together a secure financial nest egg, sprinkled with some added condiments.
● Start early and invest regular time and effort in pondering what the post-retirement life could be like. What would we do with the sudden luxury of time affluence?
● Regularly Visualize and ponder over the psychological side if you were to the retire, for example, if suddenly work was taken away would you be able to manage?
● Before retiring, put together a portfolio of engagements and activities that you could easily slide into.
● Keep a long perspective when investing in the psychological aspects of retirement.
● As you and your attitudes change, rebalance the portfolio of engagements.
● Take some weeks off and occasionally give a test drive to the portfolio of engagements and see how they feel? Be agile and make tweaks as necessary. Live in your personal temple and see if you can breathe as easily as you are breathing now.
● And first and foremost, do not trust your gut feelings and tell yourself, nah, when time comes, you have the wherewithal to figure out what your new temple would be.
If you do, there could be a nasty surprise waiting for you. One of the rockers in the rocking chair would come with a misalignment and the chair would wobble.
Ciao.
No comments:
Post a Comment