Retirement and identiy issues

 We do not shed our personalities, our life views, or our habits when we retire. These become the basis of building our new understanding of our new role and our new responsibilities. Having a sense of who you are, in the context of culture and community, may help you see how you can continue to contribute to your world.

The terms self-concept and self-identity define how we see ourselves. Scientists have found that the body's cells largely replace themselves every 7 to 10 years. In other words, old cells mostly die and are replaced by new ones during this time span. The cell renewal process happens more quickly in certain parts of the body, but head-to-toe rejuvenation can take up to a decade. This reality means that we become a new person every ten years or so, however, there may be some aspects of our identity that are relatively stable over time.

Mid-life and retirement are two periods in which one phase of life ends, and we have to dig deep to replace what we may have lost. At this point, some of us may experience a potential identity crisis. Ageing can bring physical limitations or outright elimination of some activities such as hard labour or playing contact sports.

Retirement can cause us to struggle with identity issues. Many can be surprised by the ways in which retirement adjustment can evoke past issues. Self-awareness is a critical influence on an individual’s ability to assimilate or accommodate feedback, especially feedback received from their social environment. Taking stock of one’s life upon becoming a retiree, however, is common.

Our reflections upon the past can take various forms. Some of us may be consumed by nostalgia while others can be troubled by regret for lost opportunities. Others of us might be aware of influences that we think shaped us, but have the wrong ideas of how certain episodes shaped us. Increased awareness of how one’s identity has developed might better equip present and future retirees to understand and cope with the challenges to identity that are triggered by retirement. Adjustments may come from an updating of the foundations of identity laid in prior years.

 

Self-fulling prophecie

Retirement means you no longer want to, or can work. Retirement can be seen as a beginning to the end of a phase of life where you have been focused on your career and the start of a phase of life where the focus is given to free time and rest. To ensure that retirees maintain the quality of their life as before they plan for retirement but the first step in good retirement planning, is not financial planning but self-awareness.

Our past can indicate with high probability what we might do in the future. This means that many aspects of our personalities and behaviour will continue to function in retirement. A person's experience may shape our identity and adjust in order to achieve compatibility of identity and experience can contribute to a balanced identity over time.

Your view of life-based on your experience may allow you to see retirement as a process that will lead to a sense of emptiness, loneliness and a reduction in life satisfaction. Or your life experience and view of life could allow you to see retirement as a process that will lead to a sense of discovery, exciting new relationships and an increase in life satisfaction. Both views are self-fulling prophecies. If you believe the former it will come true, if you believe the latter, it will come true. Your understanding of your "self" and your self-awareness is important in which world view of retirement you take.

Attitude toward retirement

When you retire your attitude toward your future is important. You can believe that retirement is about, creating a new self-awareness and self identification, gaining new friends, living on a smaller income, finding new social supports, creating a new role for yourself, finding things to do to fill the time, and developing new skills.

Or you can believe that retirement is adjusting to a lower income, losing friends and other social support, finding out you are no longer an important person, filling time until you die, and feeling blue because you are not using your old skills.

Retirement is not about being taken care of or being put into care.

According to the school of Mental Health in Ontario exploring self-awareness and sense of identity is a chance for courageous and supportive conversations about strengths, difficulties, preferences, values, lived experiences, ambitions.

To do this you need a safe environment where you can learn, affirm cultural heritages and practise advocating for yourself. Having a sense of who you are, in the context of culture and community, may help you see how you matter and can contribute to the world.

Retirement is a formal departure from paid work that occurs on a given day, a status with new rules to learn and a process that begins the day an employee acknowledges that their worker role will end. For example, there may be losses of social and recreational activities with other workers, a shared history with other workers, pride in and respect expressed for a worker’s competence, the stimulation and challenge of the job, and perks that were part of the job.

For many of us, the job has defined us for all of our working years, Our lifestyle is tied to our work, because work/career occupies so much of our existence. Our career/work defines our Involvement with family, friends, recreations, hobbies, etc. However, the social interaction of the workplace is also part of our social life. These important aspects of the workplace can be missed following retirement.

In retirement the roles and behaviour patterns will or should be abandoned or modified, many face the difficult task of finding new sources of identity to replace those lost. A small but growing part of planning for retirement is to develop a diversified portfolio of “self” so that despite losing your work self to retirement, other selves will be available to fill the gap. Some of these alternate selves (e.g., family roles, club involvements) will continue into retirement and will grow.

Ageing and psychology

 “I hate ageing” was the comment, she made, and she went on to explain that it was not getting old that she disliked it was the restrictions that ageing put on her. She moved slower, she had balance issues, and the list went on. Her partner and she were worried about retirement, she had hoped to retire this year, but due to financial considerations, she felt she could not fully retire. Planning for retirement was something she and her partner may not have done when they were younger. I believe they had not really looked at the fact they were getting older.

A recent study out of Ireland tells us some interesting things about those who are most likely to engage in financial planning. It found that psychological variables significantly predict the likelihood of financial planning behaviour among their sample of older workers. Specifically, they found that older workers with more positive beliefs about their ability to control aspects of ageing are more likely to financially plan for retirement.

They also found that older workers who have an intermittent, rather than a constant, awareness of their own ageing are less likely to plan for their retirement. Perhaps intermittent recognition of ageing is easier to ignore or does not create a sufficiently urgent impetus to begin preparing for the future, or indeed acknowledge impending aging? Interestingly, those with more negative perceptions about the consequences of ageing, but who have a more continuous awareness of ageing, were more likely to have a private pension saving plan. Again, this suggests that being regularly reminded of getting older, especially where those reminders are negative in terms of their consequences, may initiate the prioritizing of planning for retirement.