A different retirement journey
It’s all about choice
At my weekly beers last Thursday (more on this and the overcoming the “friendship recession” later), I sat down with a couple of guys in my beer group, and they were generous enough to share their thoughts on my Substack. The conversation motivated me to write my last post about being so open about my inner thoughts, but it also prompted me to reflect because they commented that my early retirement experience was filled with a lot more personal exploration than theirs. We hypothesized it could be because of where we started in terms of our personal readiness to retire versus societal expectations to retire.
Modeling individual and societal expectations
Consider the following 2x2 matrix of retirement experiences to help explain my own views of the differences in retirement:
On the vertical access is a person’s “readiness” to retire, and on the horizontal access is societal expectation of ongoing participation in the “working world.”
In the upper left (“Full retirement!”), the world is straightforward because the person is ready to retire, society expects them to stop working, and they retire!
I actually love the term “full retirement.”
This is the phase where the blissful reality of fully experiencing one's wealth sets in. This is a time of calming yet exhilarating sensations as retirees immerse themselves in the fruits of their labor. Enjoying one’s wealth is more about relationships, identity and purpose than it is about money.
In the lower right (“Working”), the world also is straightforward. The person isn’t ready to retire, society expects them to keep working, and they keep working. I don’t think this quadrant requires much definition!
The subtlety we were talking about were the different perspectives in the upper right (“Semi Retirement”) and lower left (“Discomfort”) quadrants of this matrix.
Discomfort
In the lower left (“Discomfort”), these friends didn’t start their retirement journeys quite mentally ready to retire. However, being older than I am and of retirement age, they felt that society expected them to stop working. While their choices weren’t strictly eliminated by acute illness, injury, or even forced retirement policy, there was a sense of ageism in the workforce that perhaps limited some choices to keep working. As such, an amount of choice is removed, and the research shows that choice is an important part of happiness in retirement.
These results show that voluntary retirees have a higher level of subjective well-being than involuntary retirees not only in the short but also in the long-term…
The vicious cycle
At a purely tactical level, I reflect on how quickly the workplace has been changing, even in the tool chains used. I have observed through volunteer work how difficult it could be for some individuals to step back into the workforce even if they wanted to try.
While choice might have been initially limited by ageism and the societal expectation for an individual to retire, these limits can get reinforced by a rapidly changing workplace that makes retirees who have been out of the workforce less culturally suited to modern work, even if they had a desire to do so.
The ageism and rate of change create a vicious cycle.
Rapid workplace changes
For examples of changes I’ve personally observed since retiring in 2018, three come to mind immediately.
Slack culture. During my professional career, email was the primary method of electronic communication. I have observed (and been a part of) massive changes associated with Slack culture.
In my last full-time role at Igneous in 2018, we were just transitioning from HipChat to Slack. I didn’t become a heavy Slack user until after retiring and doing consulting gigs. Funnily, I had never used Microsoft Teams before consulting either! These tools changed workplace communications styles in ways that the old school corporate IM tools just never did – not just HipChat but remember Lotus Sametime, Microsoft Office Communicator, Yammer, and Google Chat? They just didn’t have the same impact on how communication happens in the workplace.
It’s funny to me how many of my consulting clients seemingly have more Slack channels than employees, and how hard it can be for modern workers to keep up with so many channels. On the positive side, it’s also nice to see how formerly private “hallway” conversations can become a lot more open when people follow the etiquette of conversing in public channels. The trick is getting all this right!Real-time document collaboration and democratized ownership. I was lucky to have been in the tech industry where Google Workspace already changed the paradigm of real-time collaboration on office documents. This collaboration style allowed wholesale replacements of traditional desktop planning and graphics apps through tools like Monday.com, Figma, and Miro. While all of these apps existed before I retired, they really came into much more widespread usage after I retired.
Moreover, some of the legacy toolchain still hasn’t caught up. I continue to sympathize with clients who remain on a Microsoft ecosystem for office collaboration, as the OneDrive or Dropbox integrations with Microsoft 365 still just don’t seem to have the same collaboration functionality of the Google ecosystem. It’s getting better though, and change is afoot.
I find it interesting how many whom I’ve encountered in retirement still have trouble getting used to this very open form of collaboration. Many retirees still prefer to email around traditional desktop app attachments and exercise almost dictatorial control over document revisions. A desire to come out of retirement would require most to re-enter with not only a very open mind, but a willingness to reset and reprogram work habits.Limited face-to-face interaction. In small technology companies, hiring practices during the COVID-19 pandemic not only created work-from-home (WFH) opportunities, but they also enabled employee moves away from the office, as well as hiring outside the region. As such, the whole “HP Way” of “managing by walking around” no longer works when everyone is not only working remotely but has their calendars filled with scheduled Zoom calls all the time!
Likewise, the practice of junior people chatting up more senior people in the lunchroom doesn’t work when everyone is eating lunch at home. Many of the ad hoc ways of seeking mentorship have disappeared and require much more deliberate action.
The basics of making a sales call have changed because employees can’t travel to a city to visit customers’ offices face-to-face when those customers all work from home! Creativity has been required to engage sales activity, so tradeshows and events have taken on a new importance.
Day-to-day, it has been challenging even in the projects that I’ve been working on to effect change at the same pace or with the same types of timing. Reacclimating both employees and managers to a new set of norms when there is less regular face-to-face interaction is happening, but it is taking time.
The net from these changes are that they all happened within the last six years. These changes in my opinion, further distanced retirees from returning to work, reinforcing the impact of ageism toward limiting choice for those in the “Discomfort” quadrant.
Semi-Retirement
In my case, I was mentally ready to retire, but with most of my peers still in the workforce, my experience was that society expected me at my age and energy level to keep working. Early on, I allowed myself to get sucked into some consulting (and, at times, too much.) This workplace participation put me in the “semi-retired” quadrant. (Humorously, as a former product marketing guy, I suppose I was always trained to put myself in the upper-right quadrant!)
Small companies
In my career, I think I benefited from spending the bulk of time in the space of small, growing companies, where there were always more interesting things to do than people around to do them. As such, promotions come pretty easily with company growth.
In retirement, I’ve also found that small, growing companies have also been a place to consult for the same reason because there just aren’t enough people around at any time to do everything that small, growing companies want to do. I have been grateful to former colleagues who continue to involve me in interesting problems in their small companies.
(I think this situation can be different in very large companies, where there can be very many qualified people all competing for the interesting things to do, leaving potentially less interesting opportunities for retired people to come and help.)
The impact is that there has been a much more accessible way for me to straddle both the worlds of enjoying retirement but also staying “current” enough to be constantly presented with opportunities to reaffirm my choice to step away from the world of full-time work.
Impact on choice
I have been fortunate to be retired, enjoy my freedom, and also stay tied into both trends and challenges today. By staying “fresh” on certain mechanics in this changing workplace, I also believe I’ve been able to stay fresh on many of the challenges facing my younger work friends and colleagues. In the current, predominantly work-from-home, world of tech companies today, they face new challenges that I didn’t face in my prior career. While a lot of the fundamentals of business strategies didn’t change (the need to choose the right business, create the right strategy, design the right organizational structure, implement the right systems, and get the right people), the mechanics of how certain things get done have changed a lot.
Still, I’ve appreciated both the opportunity to learn, as well as the opportunities to contribute. I am happy to have a balance to be able to lend my experience to help with business issues at hand, but still be able to have enough bandwidth to pursue other endeavors - like writing and sharing my thoughts on this Substack! I am hoping that I am able to offer a different voice and vantage point to this conversation of retirement.
Final thoughts
The advice I’d have for anyone reading this post is to do a set of planning upfront for retirement and not just the financial kind. Instead, I believe it’s about looking inside and pursuing what’s personally important while not letting the “vicious cycle” kick in that can start with skills and attitudes getting out-of-date.
It’s also about staying in touch with a wide variety of friends, both those that can be companions in retired life, as well as those who can involve you in their day-to-day problems in their working lives.
This balance can possibly help keep you feeling you have choices as you transition. I am six years in, and this situation is working well for me so far!