The Retirement Dilemma: Leaving Work Doesn’t Guarantee Happiness

Maybe it’s my age (I’m now over 60), or the company I keep, but so many of the conversations I have at parties, funerals and weddings these days focus on the best time and the right way to retire. As a scholar keenly aware of the protective factors that make us more or less resilient to stress, it has been fascinating how little attention is paid to maintaining mental health after we transition from full-time employment.

There is plenty to worry about, and I don’t just mean money. As a social scientist, one quickly sees that retirement is a hard stop on many of the factors that protect mental health. Daily routines end. Relationships with colleagues, customers, and the wider community can become seriously compressed. Having meaning in one’s life can also (but needn’t necessarily) decrease unless we can transition over to investing in activities that bring us new opportunities to share our talents. Even the feeling that we are in the generative phase of life (to borrow the concept from developmentalist Dan McAdams) can be difficult to sustain unless work hours are replaced with another way to excel. Add to this health scares and changing patterns of interaction with our spouse (if we are in a committed relationship), and one quickly sees the potential for the cumulative effect of multiple stressors to make retirement far from pleasant.

None of this, however, is inevitable if both long before, and soon after, the retirement party one considers what we know about successful life transitions later in life. Indeed, the science is getting more nuanced as we understand how one’s level of education, gender and income level affect what we can expect in terms of mental health after we leave full-time employment. For example, a study published recently in BMC Geriatrics reported results from a longitudinal study of Finnish municipal workers who had recently retired. Avoiding depression is easier for some than others. For example, women who have medium to high levels of education tend to report a strong relationship between their level of social support and their experience of depression and social isolation. For these more educated women, having a smaller social network can be a serious threat to mental health. This pattern, though, does not hold for men with the same medium to high levels of education. For men, social support networks are far less predictive of their state of mental health once retired.

Findings like this remind us that a protective, resilience-enabling factor like social support is not experienced by everyone in exactly the same way and that what we need for a great retirement can depend on many things. Money matters, but how much seems to depend on one’s ability to retire into a lifestyle at least as good as the one one had while working. Whether it is how we spend our time, or who we spend our time with, having a plan for retirement that reflects what one values is likely a hedge against depression or exacerbating other health problems.

All of these suggestions have at their root a basic premise: that having a positive attitude towards aging can have as much influence on our life expectancy as having never smoked. According to Dilip V. Jeste from the University of California, and his colleagues, successful aging is all about embracing our physical decline without languishing over the loss. In fact, studies of pain management, like that by Kelvin Jordan and his colleagues at the University of Keele in the United Kingdom suggest that illness and disability (and the discomfort that comes along with those conditions) needn’t negatively shape our perception of successful aging if we understand that success while aging means embracing change and accepting the signs of decline without judging one’s self as somehow ‘lesser than’ before. Aging should be celebrated, if only for the sense of perspective it brings and the opportunities that we have to contribute to our legacy.

Put it all together and a successful retirement seems to need an individually tailored plan that keeps us connected with at least a few other people, encourages us to feel useful, prevents us from thinking of ourselves as ‘worthless’ and doesn’t expose us to more financial hassles than we can handle. There are likely plenty of other things we can do to retire well, but for now, I’ll be sharing this bit of advice with friends and family next time we find ourselves at a social function and the conversation turns from what is everyone doing to build a career to what are we are doing to anticipate a good life when our careers end.