Life – Terror. Ecstasy. Fight. Denial. Flight. Failure. PAIN. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. Hope. Love. Peace – Death.
Retirement is the withdrawal from one’s position or occupation or from one’s active working life. A person may also semi-retire by reducing work hours or workload.
Retirement is ranked 10th on the list of life’s 43 most stressful events. Some people smoothly make the transition into a successful retirement. Others don’t.
Post my incurable cancer diagnosis, 2016 I semi-retired In 2018. My wife, Gail and I decided to adjust our work patterns to part-time. We wanted to try to live the rest of our lives together, to the fullest whilst we still could. I made a difficult choice to reduce my teaching to 3 days. In 2018 we had 7 holidays including, Russia, India & Australia, we were living life to the full.
31st July 2023, I fully ‘retired’ from teaching. I became ‘a person non gratis’ at LIPA, my employment was [mutually] terminated. My 23-year love affair with LIPA had ended. My LIPA email and security accesses were terminated, I was prohibited from entering LIPA premises, prohibited from contacting anybody at LIPA, including all staff & students.
I was [cancelled], retired.
A strange feeling, more so as it did not feel like I was fully in control. Certainly not the way I expected my 22-year teaching career to end. A hugely disappointing and distressing end to an amazing 24-year mutually beneficial LIPA liaison.
LIPA has been an essential part of my life for what seems forever. Teaching, my second career has been incredibly rewarding for me. Getting to play even a tiny part in assisting the creatives of the future has been priceless. I cannot explain how good it is seeing my students succeed, often to an unbelievable level within the various creative industries. LIPA has created so many successful creatives and facilitators of creatives [managers, technicians] since Sir Paul McCartney and Mark Featherstone Whitty founded the Institute back in 1996.
Since my incurable cancer diagnosis, 2016 The hardest thing has been for me is to justify my existence to remain worthwhile [to myself]. I have struggled in maintaining my identity. It is so easy to simply be defined by such a catastrophic diagnosis. To become defined by an illness, to be ‘John with cancer’ to friends, colleagues, even to family. Since 2016 I have fought hard to remain, ‘John from LIPA’.
I am no longer John from LIPA so who am I now then? I have 2 years before I can be ‘State’ pensionable, retired. What will I do? What should I do, with myself and also, financially? What about putting bread on the table, what about that car I had my eyes on?
For many people, retirement is a key reward for decades of daily work—a time to relax, explore, and have fun unburdened by the daily grind. For others, though, retirement is a frustrating period marked by declining health and increasing limitations. Researchers have been trying to figure out whether the act of retiring, or retirement itself, is good for health, bad for it, or neutral.
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have looked at rates of heart attack and stroke among men and women in the ongoing U.S. Health and Retirement Study. Among 5,422 individuals in the study, those who had retired were 40% more likely to have had a heart attack or stroke than those who were still working. The increase was more pronounced during the first year after retirement, and levelled off after that.
My dad, John Reynolds (1918-1987) was made redundant. His world was turned upside down. I worked for the same company and I was let go at the same time. That fucked him up even more than himself being made redundant, worrying about my future. He had a stroke very soon after being made redundant that he never recovered from and eventually he died from complications arising from his stroke. He wasn’t old, 69 when he died. Being retired killed him he just could not cope being cast aside. Granted if it had been his choice, maybe it would have been different?
The results, reported in the journal Social Science & Medicine, are in line with earlier studies that have shown that retirement is associated with a decline in health. But others have shown that retirement is associated with improvements in health, while some have shown it has little effect on health, so which is it?
Retirement changes things
In their paper, Moon and her colleagues described retirement as a “life course transition involving environmental changes that reshape health behaviours, social interactions, and psychosocial stresses” that also brings shifts in identity and preferences. In other words, moving from work to no work comes with a shitload of changes. “Our results suggest we may need to look at retirement as a process rather than an event,” said lead study author J. Robin Moon, who is now a senior health policy advisor to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
For four decades, Dr. George E. Vaillant, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and numerous colleagues talked with hundreds of men and women taking part in the Study of Adult Development. Initially focused on early development, the study now encompasses issues of aging, like retirement.
When researchers asked study participants 80 and older what made retirements enjoyable, healthy, and rewarding, key elements emerged:
If possible, plan ahead. If you can, plan your retirement, be in control and stick to the plan. Clearly this cannot always be the case.
Forge a new social network. You don’t just retire from a job, you retire from daily contact with colleagues [and friends]. For some they might be your only or your dominant social circle and difficult to replace. Establishing a new social network is essential on retirement good for both mental and physical health.
Play. Activities such as sport [golf, ballroom dancing], traveling, and more can help while establishing new friendships and reinforcing old ones.
Be creative. Activating your creative side can help keep your brain healthy. Creativity can take many forms, from painting to gardening to teaching a child noun declensions in Latin. Tapping into creativity may also help you discover new parts of yourself. Often our work diminishes our creativity, we simply cannot afford the time to dedicate time to our less of a priority creative self?
Keep learning. Like being creative, ongoing learning keeps the mind active and the brain healthy. There are many ways to keep learning, from taking up a new language to starting—or returning to—an instrument you love, or exploring a subject that fascinates you.
Understanding how retirement affects a large group of people is interesting, but doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how it will affect you.
If you’ve had a stressful, unrewarding, or tiring job, retirement may come as a relief. For you, not working may be associated with better health. People who loved their work and structured their lives around it may see retirement in a different light, especially if they had to retire because of a company age policy or other negative circumstances, often beyond their control.
An individual who has a good relationship with his or her spouse or partner is more likely to do well in retirement than someone with an unhappy home life for whom work often offered an escape hatch. Gail can officially (state) retire June 2024. I already feel guilty, as in I am no longer bringing anything into the coffers, well certainly not a regular salary? Gail urged me to retire, yet despite her saying that she does not mind if I choose to do nothing [job wise], I sense a tad of resent when she is getting out of bed to go to work whilst I stay sound asleep.
People with hobbies, passions, volunteer opportunities, and the like generally have little trouble redistributing their “extra” time after they retire. Those who did little beside work may find filling time more of a challenge.
And then there’s health. People who retire because they don’t feel well, or have had a heart attack or stroke, or have been diagnosed with cancer, diabetes, or other chronic condition may not enjoy retirement as much as someone who enters it in the pink of health.
What do you think are the elements of a successful retirement?
Clearly finances and also health? I would do ‘more’ bigger and grander things within my retirement if money nor diminishing heath was not a consideration?
Early days I suppose?
Watch this space
Thanks for reading
Peace
Dying to Live 