Your Life after Retirement

Wait a minute, you say to yourself, when will I really have to think about retiring? Surely not yet! I can’t afford to retire anytime soon and when I do I’m just going to travel and have a bunch of fun, and then worry about problems when they arise. Sounds like a realistic plan, right? Sure, but commonsense tells you that if you had at least a general idea of what most people experience during this stage life it could help you out.

 In fact, the average person is best served when they review the available information about post retirement years before they retire, and make some plans based on what they have learned. Oh, I know you’re not average, and that likely you will live independently for a very long time, just like your Uncle Harry who died at 98 while sawing wood. But just in case you aren’t, and you don’t, perhaps you should gather a bit of information about what happens to most folks. At least you could then be knowledge about what others will have to experience. And wouldn't it be better, and more fair to the people you care about, to do so before you’re faced with problems created by not thinking ahead?

Okay,okay, you're thinking, what does everybody need to know already? What's the formula here? And oops, right off there's some not such good news:  It seems our culture has not formulated a generally agreed upon picture of the purpose of living beyond retirement age, or just how to do it. This is probably because previously not nearly as many people were living very long beyond retirement age at all!  However, life expectancy has expanded a great deal during the last century.and many people can now expect to live into their 80s and 90s. Some will even make it to 100 and a bit beyond. Chances are fairly good that you too will reach old age, and it is worth thinking about before you get there, even though you kind of have to figure it out by gathering up information for yourself.

Not to fear, we are going to work on this together:  Let us begin our thinking about life after retirement by examining the beliefs that we carry around with us, either consciously or unconsciously, about what it means to be old. Yes, probably old age will be different now than when your ideas about it formed, but you need to consciously acknowledge this and look at your beliefs as they are right now.

When you start thinking about it, your closest examples of aging and what it means, may be your own parents or parents-in-law. You need to take a careful look at these folks because how the people you are closest to do in this stage of life, and what they have believed about being old, has had an impact on you. Your beliefs about old age, even though you don't think a lot about it, very likely will contribute to the experiences you have in this stage of your life. So take a good look at the things your parents believed about getting old, and ask yourself if you agree with them or see things differently? And then think about all the older people you’ve met and what they taught you about the aging process. If you look at the current representations of old people on television ask yourself what they are conveying about aging? Do you think those images have impacted you on some level?

Perhaps you could make a list of the things you now think are good or bad about aging, or being old. Keep it and go back to it now and then to update it. You may eventually be surprised  about some of the things on your list after you have more experience in being older.