The Retirement Transition Issue: Planning Your Days in Retirement

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Author

Kristen
December 19, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

Hello friends, and welcome to Notes from the Road! Each week, you'll get news, advice, tools, and inspiration to thrive in your 50s and beyond, whether you're traveling around the world or blazing a trail in your own backyard. In this issue:

  • Using this holiday period to reflect on your transition to post-work life.

  • A review of From Strength to Strength by David Brooks.

  • First year retirement expectations.

  • The four phases of retirement.

  • A poem by David Whyte.

☃️We’ll be taking a rest over the holidays and will be back in the new year. Wishing all of you a peaceful couple of weeks. In the meantime, let’s get started!☃️

‘Tis the Season for Thinking About Your Next Act

For many of us, this holiday season provides a rare extended time away from work. It also ushers in a fresh start, a shift in perspective, and the promise of a new year. It’s a good time for stocktaking and reflection.

If you have the time and space in the next few weeks, consider setting time aside to consider your post-work life. With physical and mental distance from work, it’s a great time to think about your next act. Moreover, it’s a great time to step into the role of being retired—just for a day—and try it on.

So, dear readers, in this first holiday issue of Notes from the Road, my gift to you is a plan for a Holiday Break Retirement Trial Run.

Take a day and cosplay being a retiree. It’s up to you to decide if you want to dress up. Download our plan (also available in Word), plan your perfect post-work day, live it, reflect on your experience, and identify your next steps.

Also, notice how you’re feeling along the way. Content? Unsettled? Excited? Bored? Confused? The objective is not to fix it but rather to notice it. Know that you’ll need to pay attention to it now or in the future.

To support you, this entire newsletter is devoted to the transition to post-work life. To get you started, here’s a deep dive into structuring your day.

Last point: there are different stages to retirement. It’s a transition. It’s a process. You’re not going to solve it all in this one day.

The key to this little game is to understand what might come up for you so you’re not surprised, alarmed, or overwhelmed if it happens again. And to give you time to figure out what you need to thrive.

Have fun! I’d love to hear your feedback, which you can leave after taking the poll at the bottom of this email.

A Great Holiday Read: From Strength to Strength

The title of Chapter 1 in From Strength to Strength delivers a sobering message: Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think. David Brooks spends a the next three chapters sharing how our “fluid intelligence”—our capacity to reason, think fluidly, and solve novel problems— begins to decline as early as in our thirties.

He also talks about our addiction to striving, of comparison, and of our fear of irrelevance. He says that many of us are hooked on work, and draws some comparisons between workaholism and other types of addiction.

But its not all bad: as our fluid intelligence declines, our “crystallized intelligence”—the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past—increases. The trick as we age is to jump from the “fluid intelligence” curve to the “crystallized intelligence” curve.

*As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Luckily, Brooks provides plenty of practical guidance for doing this, encouraging us to shift our attention to love, growth, and service. He suggests that we chip away at the identity that we formed in young adulthood and emerge anew.

For those of us who have been sensing the slight (or worse), imperceptible slowing of our “fluid intelligence,” it’s comforting to understand what’s happening. It’s also helpful to know there’s a way to navigate it and come out whole and happy on the other side. This book is a useful guide for doing just that.

Prepare for your transition to post-work life.

The Weekly Roundup

Worth your time to watch, read, and listen.

📰 The Emotional Shock of Retirement. Not a real upper, this one about the “Retirement Blues,” but a good overview of some of the emotional challenges that the retirement transition can bring. Just good to be prepared. (5.5 min. read)

📺 The Four Phases of Retirement. If you’re lucky, you’ll spend one-third of your life in retirement. That can represent quite a few years, so things are likely to evolve during that time. This video presents a framework for understanding the stages you’re likely to move through. (13.5 min. watch)

🐦 Everything is Waiting for You, Written and Spoken by David Whyte. How does one even explain this poem? It is beautiful, about belonging in the world, the passage of time, finding meaning and beauty in everything, loneliness and solitude, of being present for all of it. I hope you enjoy it. (2 min. listen)

💡💡We’d love to hear from you! Anything you’d like to see in the Weekly Roundup? Any burning topics you’d like us to write about? Comments, questions, feedback? Let us know. 💡💡

❝

Retirement is not the absence of purpose, it's the freedom to choose another.

Charles Schulz

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