A few puzzles of planning for retirement
The goal of retirement directs so many lives. It feels like the ultimate sensible thing to do. Yet for almost as many, it’s more than a bit mad.
Financial planning – and by extension the life that the planning is serving – is all about retirement.
Most planners build their businesses around it. Most people direct their lives towards it.
Few question why, or could even tell you what ‘retirement’ even means.
Really means.
Not ‘means’ in the silly ‘what would your perfect day look like?’ sense. ‘Means’ in the ‘how do you want to live, and how would “retirement” help?’ sense.
Who would you become that not-retired you is prevented from becoming?
Retirement is just so obviously sensible. What’s there to challenge?
There are of course oodles of arguments about how best to go about it. Sometimes these even extend beyond fiddling with the historical investment returns and the cash-flow models suggesting whether it’s financially viable or not.
Occasionally one encounters a recognition of the need to psychologically as well as financially prepare for it. But the basic premise that it remains a very sensible thing rarely if ever gets challenged.
And yet the common notion of retirement is very puzzling in very many ways.
It’s odd to dedicate a life to doing something, primarily or largely in order to stop doing it.
It’s odd that stopping doing that something so often leads to stopping doing anything beyond passively pottering about, even though it is activity, not passivity, that stirs the human soul.
It’s odd to spend more or less your whole ‘life’ waiting to retire, and then waiting to die, never doing very much of what we’d call ‘living’ along the way, and seeing this not as wasteful, but sensible.
It’s odd that retirement is so commonly pursued, but beyond ‘not working’ or (god forbid) ‘making working optional’, no one can tell you what retirement really is, especially when ‘not working’ is not even what most people want (‘not working’ and ‘not working in one’s current job’ being different things of course).
It’s odd (especially given this lack of clarity around what it means) that retirement is such a ‘clear’ (or at least clearly pursued) goal that so many sacrifice so much to it – not only one’s time, but also one’s mental, physical, and relational health, and even the contemplative time needed to challenge if one’s really being all that sensible with their life choices after all.
It’s odd that so much more energy is dedicated towards ‘retiring’ than to whatever sort of ‘living’ is the grounds for wanting to retire.
It’s odd that so many are so clear not only on wanting to retire, but also when they intend to do so… and that that ‘when’ is usually ‘65’… even though this is likely because State Pension Age was set at 65… about 100 years ago… when life expectancy was 59.
It’s odd (not to mention depressing) that while retirement is very new, leisure is not, and we knew how to ‘leisure’ for thousands of years, until we made the aim of life to lump all the ‘leisure time’ into one big heap, and then forgot entirely how to do it at all meaningfully.
It’s odd (especially so since retirement is so new) that we share the myth that ‘retirement’ is when we finally get to live how we would like to, as if that weren’t possible beforehand.
It’s odd that ‘living how I would like to live’ became detached from doing good things with good people in the present, and associated instead with a future in which you didn’t have to do anything (or, bizarrely, could say ‘f-you’ to a ‘boss’). If ‘retirement’ were such a good proxy for ‘living how I would like to live’ then why doesn’t it look more like it? Why are so many that have got there so red in the face, weak in the hips, and lonely in their hearts?
It’s odd that we’ve exchanged actually living in the present for motivational posters reminding us to do so, while we busy ourselves with thinking about (often worrying about) the future.
It’s odd that once upon a time we never worried about the future, and then the idea of ‘financial security’ became a ‘thing’ and worrying about it became all we do.
It’s odd that being one of the very richest people to ever have existed does not (as any financial planner will confirm) reliably immunise you from that worry, and can even increase it.
It’s odd that someone can recognise all of this, and can see how retirement doesn’t often seem to work out wonderfully well, especially not relative to the sacrifices made to get there, and still keep making those sacrifices themselves.
To one way of looking, this is all very puzzling.
To another, these puzzles are less odd quirks of an otherwise unchallengeable, sensible way to live, and more connected symptoms that arise from a particular type of foolishness.
Retirement may be new, but the roots of the foolish way in which it’s typically pursued – the philosophical shortcomings that shape it so strangely – have been known about for centuries. We’ve even known what to do about them for just as long, but rare is the lens that looks at itself.
You can throw some psychological spaghetti at these puzzles and something will stick in a way that looks like an ‘answer’ or an ‘explanation’, but to do so would be to miss the point.
The point isn’t to answer or explain, but to live in a way that these puzzles simply dissolve into irrelevance.
Telling someone how to do this isn’t easy. Not least because the craving to be told what to do, to be given a list of CTAs, or vision-improving exercises, or whatever, is a symptom of the very thing that needs to be tackled, and you don’t tend to get too far suggesting a symptom as a cure for the cause.
But just as retirement is a better prompt than it is a goal (and as all worthwhile change is ultimately brain change, and is therefore helped by understanding how brain change happens), you can use these puzzles as prompts… little symbols of strangeness that help you catch yourself when you’re acting as if they were true, and prompt you to question if they had to be.