Attitude toward retirement

When you retire your attitude toward your future is essential. You can believe that retirement is about, creating a new self-awareness and self-identification, gaining new friends, living on a smaller income, finding new social supports, creating a new role for yourself, finding things to do to fill the time, and developing new skills.

Or you can believe that retirement is adjusting to a lower income, losing friends and other social support, finding out you are no longer an important person, filling time until you die, and feeling blue because you are not using your old skills.

Retirement is not about being taken care of or being put into care.

According to the school of Mental Health in Ontario exploring self-awareness and a sense of identity is a chance for courageous and supportive conversations about strengths, difficulties, preferences, values, lived experiences, and ambitions.

To do this you need a safe environment where you can learn, affirm cultural heritages and practise advocating for yourself. Having a sense of who you are, in the context of culture and community, may help you see how you matter and can contribute to the world.

Retirement is a formal departure from paid work that occurs on a given day, a status with new rules to learn and a process that begins the day an employee acknowledges that their worker role will end. For example, there may be losses of social and recreational activities with other workers, a shared history with other workers, pride in and respect expressed for a worker’s competence, the stimulation and challenge of the job, and perks that were part of the job.

For many of us, the job has defined us for all of our working years, Our lifestyle is tied to our work because work/career occupies so much of our existence. Our career/work defines our Involvement with family, friends, recreation, hobbies, etc. However, social interaction in the workplace is also part of our social life. These important aspects of the workplace can be missed following retirement.

In retirement, the roles and behaviour patterns will or should be abandoned or modified, and many face the difficult task of finding new sources of identity to replace those lost. A small but growing part of planning for retirement is to develop a diversified portfolio of “self” so that despite losing your work self to retirement, other selves will be available to fill the gap. Some alternate selves (e.g., family roles, club involvements) will continue into retirement and grow.