A Way to Rebuild Life After Retirement
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time. - Malcolm Muggeridge
Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey, in their book Build the Life You Want, identify three primary sources of happiness: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. For the majority of individuals working in the civil service, external factors like status, power, fame, and the perks associated with various postings provide enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Happiness largely comes from outside or what is called external referencing.
After retirement, happiness can no longer be obtained from symbols of power and their perception by the external world. Retirees have to work on things inside, as opposed to how things look to others. In other words, they have to shift to internal referencing. This does not mean that no external referencing is required - one has to care about how one comes across to other people and be capable of the necessary adaptations one needs to be accepted.
However, the changeover to internal referencing is challenging for most civil servants. The rich storehouse of experiences they carry from long careers becomes an obstacle to happiness. During service, the repertoire of experiences is crucial for effective performance of civil servants. They draw upon experiences to constantly re-run past events and pre-run future scenarios to learn maximally and make decisions.
However, after retirement, these experiences take on a new role - romanticizing/regretting the past or anticipating an uncertain future. In other words, the overthinking spawned by the rich repertoire of experiences impedes their pursuit of happiness.
Recreating a new way of life and daily routine centred around leisure is one way of getting over the overwhelming influence of overthinking spawned by a rich experience set. Some broad principles of creating a leisure routine are given below:
While in service titles and work activities shape not only how civil servants spend their time, but also how they are regarded by others. During retirement one has to start with the development an overarching purpose of retired life connected to leisure activities, otherwise, it will not be long before one starts to miss the workplace structure and routine that previously felt so confining and boring.
The standard daily timetable of civil servants typically consists of meetings, file work, meeting people, and so on. The void after retirement has to be filled up with a different set of leisure activities. Importantly, these leisure activities should come easily and naturally to the retiree in the way described by violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin: “Anything that one wants to do really, and one loves doing, one must do every day. It should be as easy to the artist and as natural as flying is to a bird. And you can’t imagine a bird saying, ‘Well, I’m tired today, I’m not going to fly.’
After retirement, the remaining years of active life are in short supply. Retirees have to make the most of every day by learning to live more in the present moment, rather than in what has already happened or is yet to happen. In the beginning, this may seem unnerving to the majority of civil servants as they have gotten into the habit of always planning and worrying about the future, instead of seeing and enjoying the ‘Now’.
Growing older and more frail allows us to see what brings us joy and fulfillment, and generally, it tends to be our relationships. Retirees have to stop being consumed by the past symbols of power and reach out to develop relationships with family and friends, with neighbours and shopkeepers, as well as with old books, paintings, possessions, and ideas.
The quality of retired life depends on learning to internally reference more, which means working out how things feel, instead of how things look to others. For this, retirees have to learn to schedule leisure in a way that they are no longer prisoners of the memories of their work experiences.
