All the world’s a stage — including retirement

All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare famously observed, “and all the men and women merely players.” (Or, as Sean O’Casey amended it,”All the world’s a stage, and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”) Acting is one of Shakespeare’s favorite metaphors for life – after all, he was a playwright and actor – but he gives this version to Jacques of As You Like It, who regards the comic action from the sidelines, with a jaundiced eye and a snarky tongue. According to Jacques, we stumble through life blindly acting out the parts assigned to us, from “the infant /mewling and puking” to the old man “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” He paints a depressing picture: The schoolboy is bored, the lover dreamy, the soldier foolhardy, the judge pompous. (Women are not there at all.) Those of us entering retirement are living in the sixth age, with “spectacles on nose and pouch on side.” (That’s accurate enough, in my case. Also mean.)

We now call this way of thinking “life-stage theory” – although modern assessments tend not to be as bleak as Jacques’. Poets and thinkers have always seen that life presents us different challenges as we move from student to worker, leader to retired person. But in the early twentieth century, as Freudian psychology focused on the lasting effects of our early experiences on our personality structures, life-stage theory fell out of favor.

That changed dramatically when Erik Erikson published Childhood and Society in 1950. I didn’t learn about it, though, until Gail Sheehy’s Passages came out in 1976. I read Sheehy’s book with an excited sense of “Yeah, this makes sense.” Life-stage theory brought psychology (with the focus on individual experience) together with sociology and anthropology (with the focus on broad social patterns). It seemed less deterministic and pessimistic than classic Freudian psychology, too.

Best of all, it seemed immediately applicable to my life – and helpful. I was in my early twenties when I read Passages – at the beginning of what we now call “adulting” – and I was struggling in the usual ways people do in those years: wrestling with who I was, who I loved, what I loved, and what I wanted to do with my life. Although I’d devoured plenty of novels about growing up, reading a semi-academic study on the same topic felt strangely reassuring.

Now here I am, in the first year of retirement, grappling with another demanding transition to another new stage of life. In the past few months, I’ve been looking back over those theories and thinking about whether they can useful to us as we negotiate this challenging passage.

Where Jacques described seven ages of man, Erikson initially set out eight: four stages of childhood, then adolescence, then young, middle, and mature adulthood. (In her nineties, Joan Erikson added a ninth stage that people now label Very Old Age.) Every stage involves challenges to confront. In adolescence, as everybody now knows, we start forging an identity that feels like our own. In mature adulthood, according to Erikson, we reflect back on our lives and struggle with “integrity” (wholeness, synthesis, or acceptance of  the competing parts of our selves). We wind up feeling fulfilled in who we have become and what we have achieved, or we sink into despair. If that sounds like a middle-aged man’s diagnosis of the retirement years, that’s because it was: Erikson was in his forties when he wrote and published Childhood and Society. I don’t think he knew much, or cared much, at that point about this later stage of life.

Although Erikson became an intellectual hero for many Americans, it was Gail Sheehy’s Passages that popularized life-stage theory. (It didn’t hurt that she explicitly included women). Because American psychology and sociology had focused so much on childhood and adolescence, Sheehy paid more attention to the transitions experienced by adults: from what she called the “Trying Twenties” to “The Golden Years.” In 1995, astonished by the rapid changes in American society, she published New Passages.

I re-read New Passages this winter, with a focus on what Sheehy called the “Age of Integrity” (65 – 85+). Because we Boomers talk a lot about retirement — and because I’ve now read a lot of books about it — aspects of her analysis felt like old hat to me. But there were helpful things, too.

Sheehy argues in the opening chapter that developmental stages rarely correspond exactly to external markers (marriage, birthdays, retirement). For her, they bubble up from an “underlying impulse toward change” from an “inner realm” of consciousness and emotion. Hmmmm, I thought as I read. Maybe. Partly. For most of us, the decision to retire does arise partly from external markers: we reach 62 or 65, our friends are retiring, we’re eligible for Social Security, and the institutions we work for start implying they’d love to hire young people to bring in fresh perspectives. In part, though, those external markers give us permission to notice our weariness with long commutes, long committee meetings, and long, long winters. Or maybe they just give us permission to act.

According to Sheehy’s interviews and data surveys, moving into retirement is messy. Most of us want it to be easy and graceful, like slipping a canoe into a quiet river. But we experience it as turbulent — financially, socially, and emotionally. We try things out. They fail. Or they succeed some days and fail others. We watch too much television or disappear into the internet. We feel restless but also full of inertia. We find excuses not to exercise and get exasperated with our spouses instead of ourselves (after all, they’re around the house to get cross at). We discover that some of the activities that we thought would occupy our days just make us shrug and go meh. Or they’re absorbing for an hour or two a day but turn out not to be the all-consuming, life-justifying passions we expected them to be.

Sheehy normalizes these ups and downs. In fact, she cites national surveys confirming that retirement is one of the most troubling passages in adult life for Americans. But she also shows that lots of people navigate these rapids successfully. After some scary moments, most people settle happily into the new stage of their lives. They fall in love with grandparenting, volunteer work, or a new partner. Or they work out a slower-paced life that balances those passions with long walks, tai chi, reading, and laughter with friends.

In her final chapters, Sheehy includes some useful questions to ask ourselves as we enter retirement: 1) What new ventures or adventures can we now dare to try? 2) What old shells can we slough off? 3) How can we best give back? 4) What investments in learning and changes in lifestyle are we willing to undertake to make all the extra years ahead livable? And 5) How long do we want to live?

These are great questions to mull over and talk over, whether we’re edging closer to retirement or have already plunged in. They’re big questions, too, and more than a little intimidating. Luckily, no one expects us to pivot on a dime. We have time. We can feel our way along and slowly work out what feels right to us. These blogs are my reports from the front line. Send me yours!