Living The Semi-Retired Life: Thinking And Planning So Retirement Doesn't Kill You
"My mind needs to stay engaged or loneliness threatens to consume me"
As I mentioned a few times recently, one of the beauties of writing this newsletter is the community we’re forming here. It often comes to light when we engage with one another.
The other day, I wrote a story about my Grandmother. It highlights one of the most pressing issues facing our nation today. A confluence of factors that—taken together—make retirement a precarious proposition for many people:
Our social networks are often tied to our employment.
We lack opportunities for informal social interaction due to our mostly private social life.
There’s nothing for us to do when we retire. Or at least nothing we consider as meaningful as what we were doing before.
This brings up a whole host of conundrums.
One, you could just keep working. However, if you keep working you run the risk of degrading your physical and mental states to the point where your work is no longer enjoyable or you simply can’t continue doing it. This alone can shorten your life.
Plus, there’s something exciting about looking at the second half of your life as a new adventure. This is one way my partner and I view our plans to move to Spain in the next few years. I look at my first 50 years as act one and my last 50 years—knock on wood—as a much wiser act two.
For the sake of trouble, let’s just call it my first 48 years and last 52-plus.
Two, our built environment across most of the nation just isn’t conducive to the type of public life that keeps informal and formal social networks thriving into and beyond relative old age. Not long ago
wrote about collision spaces and she got to the heart of what we’re discussing lately:My European friends always tell me they love living in cities because they are like “big small villages.” You are almost guaranteed to bump into people each time you walk down the street which makes you feel like you belong. That you have a community.
These mini-interactions often happen in what my city planning friend calls collision spaces (not an official term so they tell me, but I love it so I’m running with it).
I’ll write more about this in a future installment because it’s important.
Three, we don’t have a plan B for relative old age and beyond. Too many people spend too much time struggling with the decision on when to retire or giving all they got to get to the traditional retirement finish line. Once there, they’re spent. As the research in the last post indicates, the size and quality of their social networks and frequency of social contacts decreases. And they’re left trying to figure out how to make sense of—and enjoy—the last 20, 30, 40 or 50 years of their lives whether they’re in good or ill health.
Which leads to the feature presentation of today’s installment of the Living The Semi-Retired Life newsletter.
A woman named Patti subscribes to this newsletter. She just launched one of her own.
The comment she made in response to the post about my Grandmother resonates with me. I think it will resonate with you as well. It’s real and personal.
Here’s my plan—
Behind the paywall, I will post Patti’s comment.
In response, I’d love to know if you have started brainstorming, crafting, working towards and, if so, executing a plan B for relative old age and beyond.
If so, tell us about it. Just as my Grandma’s story helped Patti, yours could as well.
If not, where are you in the process? You pick the details and context you’d like to share.
Then, I will take all of our thoughts and ideas and turn them into a Medium article, followed by a subsequent, more in-depth and personal newsletter post.
Not long ago, we did something similar where I asked you to help me with a Medium article. As I love the synergy between the two platforms, let’s give this variation a spin.