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Getting Ready for Retirement – Web Column #4

The Loss Of Work In Retirement

Jim is scheduled to retire in six months. He is the sales manager for a plastics firm. He describes himself as "a workaholic." He just can't seem to nor does he really want to get away from his work.

He likes being in the office and on the road talking business, taking orders. At home, at night, he's usually on the computer, on the phone talking to someone about a new product, an order, a shipment. He's has been into "plastic" for over forty years.

Jim is not looking forward to retirement when he reaches 70 in six months. He'd really like to keep working but, even though the law says that he can stay on the job, he keeps getting "unofficial" signals that it's time for him to move into the next stage of his life. Jim says that when he thinks about retirement he gets depressed. He has no hobbies and he does not belong to any organizations.

Hilda, his wife, is tired of hearing about Jim's upcoming "boring" retirement. In fact, when she thinks about his retirement, she gets depressed. In fact, she's threatening to keep on working when Jim' retires so she won't have to put up with "this stuff" 24 hours a day.

An exaggerated situation? No. Jim is like a lot of people who like to work. Whether it comes at a planned moment or whether you get the news in a quick meeting on a Friday afternoon, that time will come. For some, they will happily express, "I won't ever have to work again." For those individuals, a pardon from the governor has arrived.

For others, they will unhappily express, "I won't ever have to work again." For those individuals, the door to the jail cell is closing.

In the March-April, 1988 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Thomas H. Fitzgerald, the director of organizational planning and development at General Motors, describes his feelings in his article "The Loss of Work: Notes From Retirement."

His retirement was quick. "The news came suddenly one afternoon." "It was like a traffic accident, I've come to think: one minute you're driving along and the next you're looking up from the pavement. One day I had a wide office, a big desk and management-level chair, my own secretary, even a walnut credenza to hide junk in. The next day I was sitting home in a sweater and corduroys watching the snow fall outside."

In the next couple of months Tom experienced what many retirees go through. He didn't hear from the people he worked with, laughed with, argued with, traveled with, had lunch with. He thought that was odd until he realized, "I had done exactly the same to those who had retired before me." Tom felt "curiously disabled."

Tom, like Jim, was a workaholic. "For years, work ate up the center of my life, leaving only the crusts. In spite of this--perhaps because of it--I bound myself even tighter to the organization."

Tom discovered the paradox of retirement: "the more work taxed you, the more you'll miss it."

The question he faced, and the one that Jim and perhaps you will have to face is this: "Do we simply continue as a `former manager' or do we decide to go on and become something else?"

I could give you a lot of questions to answer and maybe some of the answers or point you in the right direction. That might be easy but maybe not exactly the right thing to do. Each of us will arrive at that point in our lives from a different direction, with a different frame of mind, a different reference point and each of us, I think, should really discover those questions and answers on our own.

However, I will make one suggestion. Don't put off thinking about retirement until that "quick meeting" on a Friday afternoon or until you "unofficially" discover that it's time to move into the next stage of your life.

Tom Fitzgerald describes this a lot better than I could. "Imagine this time as one of life's border crossings, one that brings you to a small clearing--an open space--between arrival and departure. It is a place for quiet conversation with a circle of attentive listeners. Is it too late to reawaken desire after it has been numbed? Is there still opportunity--and courage--to pursue a calling, a project of one's own?"

What will Jim be doing this fall? Who knows? Jim is like a lot of other individuals approaching retirement who see the glass as either being "half empty" or "half full." Maybe I should put him in touch with Tom Fitzgerald.

It doesn't have to be a "boring" retirement.