Retire Without Regrets

For anyone who has established a meaningful professional identity over a decades-long career, retirement represents a huge—and potentially wrenching—transition. While some people navigate it well, many struggle. Consider, for example, the contrasting experiences of Irene and Lawrence, two knowledge workers at different companies, whom we interviewed as they prepared for and embarked on their postcareer lives. (Both names are pseudonyms.) The lessons that emerged from their stories, and from those of the many other people we studied, can help ease this major life change. 

When Irene left her job as a senior technical writer at age 64, she shifted to living full-time with her husband at their Cape Cod vacation home while he continued working remotely. She started taking regular beach walks with her brother, who lived nearby; enrolled in art classes; and settled very easily into being a retiree. “I wish I had done it earlier,” she told us. “Even the humdrum stuff can be satisfying.”

When Lawrence retired from his senior project manager job at a manufacturing firm at age 60, he too anticipated an enjoyable few decades spending time with family. He and his wife relocated to be near their son, daughter-in-law, and beloved toddler grandson, and he embraced a new life that revolved around them. But months later, he couldn’t escape the uncomfortable feeling that everything was “still in a state of flux.” Other than the time he spent with his grandson, he had very few activities or responsibilities to fill his time. And he soon found his casual drinking spiraling into heavy dependence—a problem he eventually had to address by checking into a residential rehab program.

Although Lawrence’s story is an extreme one, it highlights the risks—and the potentially traumatic consequences—of entering retirement without a clear sense of self and of what day-to-day retirement life might look like. To better understand the factors that affect people’s experience in retirement, we conducted a 10-year longitudinal study of 14 Americans (including Irene and Lawrence) going through the transition. We also interviewed 106 pre- and postretirement knowledge workers from three U.S. industries and geographies. We uncovered positive tales like Irene’s and cautionary ones like Lawrence’s. One clear lesson emerged: It takes work to stop working. Leaving a career and crafting a fulfilling retirement takes thought, time, and effort. The process can be enjoyable, but it cannot be avoided.

Retirement is a transition that involves several key phases: making the decision to stop working; detaching from work; experimenting with new relationships, activities, and social groups; and establishing a new, reasonably stable life structure. In our research, we found that satisfied retirees demonstrate four key behaviors throughout the phases: alignment between what psychologists refer to as “the self” and “the life structure”; awareness of the interplay between the two; agency in making changes in the self or life structure or both; and adaptability in the face of events or circumstances out of their control. We call these behaviors “the four A’s.” As record numbers of workers in developed nations retire this decade, it’s important for all of us to understand what makes for a satisfying retirement.

Alignment

Your self consists of the key aspects of who you are at any given point in your life: your central identities, needs, values, preferences, motivations, personality dispositions, and even health. Your life structure consists of the contexts that are important to you: your main activities and relationships, the groups and organizations you belong to, and the places you spend your time. Alignment is the degree of fit between the two—specifically, how suitable your life structure is for your current sense of self and how viable it is for the foreseeable future. We discovered an ongoing interplay between self and life structure throughout the retirement transition.

In the last four years of Irene’s career, she felt increasingly out of alignment. She had begun to find work less enjoyable and was frustrated that her strong commitment to her organization, job, and team prevented her from living full-time on the Cape and pursuing her interests in art and writing. But she struggled with making the decision to retire—in large part because she saw her long career as a marker of success. “People do respect you while you’re still working,” she told us. “After…maybe not so much.”

Eventually, however, she recognized that she was ready and began to adapt accordingly. Detaching from work was much easier than she’d expected (“I walked away and never looked back”). She threw herself into new relationships, activities, and groups and soon created a new life structure aligned with Irene-as-retiree. She no longer saw herself as a driven career person striving for achievement but instead explored new identities as a supervisor of her vacation home renovation (while her husband was still employed), as a sister reconnecting with her brother, as an amateur artist taking local classes and meeting fellow creatives, and as an “ocean person” who’d joined a conservation group and loved feeling at home on the coast. “The ocean is at the center of where we are,” she said of herself and her husband, “and part of who we are.” Within a year of retiring, Irene had found a comfortable alignment between self and life structure.

Lawrence had long managed his family finances to enable himself and his wife to retire around age 60, which made deciding when to leave his job and disconnecting from work a breeze. But building a retirement life was another matter altogether. Although they had found a home in a new state, close to their son and his family, and although Lawrence had talked about potential new pursuits like volunteering, growing herbs, and developing and teaching a college course on project management, he didn’t follow through. His only planned activity was caring for their grandson with his wife a couple of days a week. He joined no groups, started no other activities, and developed no new relationships—not even with neighbors. “We planned everything well except what to do with our time not working anymore,” Lawrence told us. Instead of evolving into a different, multifaceted self with a well-fitting, diverse life structure, he was primarily a grandpa who babysat the child who was “the center of our world.” Soon his son’s unexpected divorce and the ensuing conflicts over childcare destroyed even that bit of alignment. Lawrence had lost the one activity providing clear structure and deep meaning to his retirement life.

It took three years, a long stretch in a rehab facility (which his wife also entered), ongoing meetings with his newfound sober community, sponsorship of other recovering addicts, and the befriending of elderly neighbors for whom he did yard work before Lawrence finally achieved the kind of satisfying retirement he’d envisioned.

The Tools

How does a person facing a massive transition like retirement find alignment between self and life structure? Through the three other A’s.

Awareness. To properly assess alignment, you need a clear-eyed view of both your self and your life structure. Honest, accurate self-reflection and evaluation of your life are always difficult but can be especially tough during periods of transition because of the inevitable stress and ambiguity. It can be helpful to enlist support from a psychotherapist, family member, or trusted friend. In addition, three simple exercises can make the process easier.

First, create a current life map. Start by listing all the activities, relationships, groups, organizations, physical settings, and other contexts that are key to your life now. Then draw a map that includes everything you listed, using shapes, sizes, placement, or colors to indicate the relative importance of each aspect of your life. Use arrows, lines, or other symbols to show overlaps or connections among them and the extent to which they conflict or complement one another. Annotate the map with text documenting your feelings about the various elements and anything else you’d like to capture. (See “Mapping Two Postcareer Lives” for Irene’s map, which depicts her life one year into retirement.)