I meant to edge up to retirement the way I’ve edged up to most of my life’s big changes: I would 1) read about it, 2) talk to friends, and 3) journal.
It didn’t work out like that. Because my husband is a few years older than I am, so are his old friends from college. I got to listen to them weigh retirement issues – the whens, wheres, and hows – for a few years before the prospect was serious for me. (I found it not only useful but fun to listen to the conversations.) And once I’d decided to retire, I spent the months leading up to The Big Day writing in my journal, just to get a handle on my feelings.
It was the third part, the reading stage. that didn’t happen. Ironically, I had a tough time finding the mental energy to read up on retirement before I actually retired. But now that I’ve had a summer to decompress from a demanding final year of work, plus six weeks in Italy to celebrate retirement, I’ve settled down to reading. And what an interesting time it’s been.
Online. I started with a casual search on Google. (Isn’t that how we start any research project these days?)
What comes up when you type “retirement” into your search engine is mostly written by money managers who hope to get your business. Luckily, one of those money types put together a broader list of the best retirement blogs of 2019. Here’s Chris Granwehr’s complete list: Sightings Over Sixty, Alliance for Retired Americans, Baby Boomer Retirement, Having Fun Cracking Retirement, Soldier for Life: Army Retirement Services, TopRetirements.com, Life Lived Forward, How Much Can I Afford to Spend in Retirement, Real Deal Retirement, The Retirement Café, and Mr. Money Mustache.
Granwehr gives a brief description of each of these sites. Some are mainly or exclusively financial. But plenty of them, like Sightings Over Sixty and Top Retirements, cover lifestyle matters as well (travel, purpose, wellness).
A more extensive list is on SMARTLiving365, a blog by Kathy Gottberg. She includes two lists, one on “Positive Aging No Matter What Your Age” (including the large and deservedly popular Boomer Café) and a second on “Blogs and Websites for a Positive Retirement.” Gottberg’s list sometimes overlaps with Granwehr’s list, such as Sightings Over Sixty and Baby Boomer Retirement.
I’m still in the process of checking out these blogs. I’ll give a more substantial report later. But my first response is that there’s a surprisingly robust conversation happening online. Maybe I shouldn’t have have surprised. After all, it’s Boomers who are retiring, and most of us are pretty computer-savvy. Some of us probably even wrote blogs for our workplaces. As a result, lots of articulate, thoughtful people are writing about their experiences and publishing those posts in various blog environments.
It’s a little overwhelming, this explosion of writing. Sometimes I’ve found it mildly irritating: blogs often end just when they’re getting interesting. (Maybe that’s the point. They’re designed to prompt thinking, not lay down the final flourish.) But for the most part, reading these blogs feels heartening. Retirement is a big transition. People are writing about it, and people are listening.
Books. If the blogosphere is alien to me, libraries and bookstores are my natural haunts. Plus, I like the longer format of books. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading my way through the first few I stumbled across. Here are my notes on the first four books I ran across about general retirement issues.
The Third Act: Reinventing Yourself After Retirement, Edgar M. Bronfman with Catherine Whitney (2002) This is the granddaddy of books that focus on an active and positive retirement in terms other than financial wealth. Bronfman combines his experience retiring as CEO of Seagram (in order to hand over the company in good time to his son and also to be active in organizations he cared passionately about) with information and advice gleaned from interviews with other powerful people. Seven chapters address what have become the key existential issues of retirement: making the initial choice to retire, finding a passion, doing good, learning and teaching, staying fit, finding personal support networks, and setting clear goals
My Take: Bronfman’s voice is thoughtful and his advice sensible (much of it has become standard since he published the book). But it’s mostly designed for men retiring from big jobs in the corporate world. And in its reliance on big-name celebrities, the book felt old-fashioned to me – not surprising, given that it was published in 2002.
How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free: Retirement Wisdom That You Won’t Get from Your Financial Advisor, by Ernie Zelinski (2019). Zelinski gives us a fun, energetic gallop through major life-issues connected to retirement, all infused with a strong message about using one’s leisure time to stay (or become) passionate and engaged with life. There are chapters on why one should (and shouldn’t) retire, on taking on a new identity, on trying new adventures, on staying fit, on learning new things, on valuing friendship, on traveling or relocating. He advocates for living a life that feels richly satisfying.
My Take: Zelinski praises eccentricity (by which he means being oneself without bowing too much to social norms), which is natural because he is one. The book sometimes irritated me because it felt so clearly addressed to men in corporate jobs who don’t have a passion for the work they do. (That’s a big market, to be sure, but not one I or most of my friends are part of.) I also got a little weary of the book’s insistent self-promotion and its scattered, repetitive feel. On the other hand, I really enjoyed Zelinski’s enthusiasm for the possibilities of leisure time, which allows us to keep growing as individuals. He’s seen people dwindle away through inactivity, depression, and many hours of television-watching. He champions the opposite choice: to flourish by devoting at least part of the day to cultivating our relationships, our passions, our creativity, our sense of purpose, and our health (mental, emotional, and physical). And he gives lots of advice about how to do that. Zelinski is a cheerleader, and sometimes it’s good to have one of those around.
Happy Retirement: The Psychology of Reinvention, Dr. Kenneth Schultz with Megan Kaye and Mike Annesley (2015) Schultz and his co-writers give us a book on retirement that’s steeped in contemporary psychological thought. The book starts with an overview of retirement issues, then proceeds step by step through the psychological challenges of the retirement process and the actual experience of retirement: planning, leaving work, adjusting during the first years, living well during the retirement years, and reinventing oneself post-retirement. It’s laid out like a magazine (colorful and busy, with sidebars), and it reads like a magazine, too.
My Take: The book is clear, thorough, and well structured. Its emphasis on psychology gives it a grounding in current sociological theory—no doubt a good thing—but also a dry, distanced voice that I associate with textbooks. (To give an example, the five elements of well-being spell out PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, positive Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment/Achievement. Easy to remember, I suppose. Also a little wince-producing.) Maybe because the book covers so many topics, and maybe because the authors chose to leave out anecdotes or examples, it seemed to me to skate too quickly and lightly over the surface of tricky issues. On the other hand, I did find it helpful in places – especially the section on adjusting to retirement. Schultz stressed that, while the first couple of years tend to provoke euphoria in some and anxiety in others, these more extreme emotions tend to fade as we settle into the new phase of life and develop satisfying routines. (That’s good news to someone who’s just retired and is riding the euphoria/anxiety rollercoaster almost every day. . .)
Rightsizing: A SMART Living 365 Guide to Reinventing Retirement, by Kathy Gottberg (2016). Gottberg has collected about twenty posts related to retirement from her interesting blog, SMARTLiving365. Gottberg focuses her thinking on her core ideas of “rightsizing” (= downsizing in an intelligent way = living with what makes you genuinely happy instead of choosing status-driven objects, including homes) and SMART living (a lifestyle that is Sustainable, Meaningful, Aware, Responsible, and Thankful).
My Take: I like Gottberg’s warm and thoughtful voice, her own story of moving to a smaller home in a more tight-knit community, and her emphasis on pondering the choices that will actually make us happy as individuals. (The message is similar to Zelinski’s, but inflected in a female, ecologically conscious way.) Because the book gathers up blog posts, Gottberg repeats her core ideas several times. On the other hand, they’re valuable ideas that can usefully be applied to various aspects of life and retirement. I’ll be following her blog from now on.
So – that’s what I’ve read so far in the category of general retirement. There are more queued up in my Kindle list, including several that specifically address the question of purpose and meaning in retirement. But in the next two posts, I’ll discuss books written for women and then books written for people thinking about retiring abroad. Then I’ll come back to general books.
If you’ve read other useful books on retirement – or if you’ve written one – please chime in!