Retirement

[vinteuil]

.

... I wonder if there is still some 'gendered' thinking about retirement. That men are still in some sense seen as being defined by their 'work'.
I say this bicoz I took very early retirement, and people would ask, in terms of some concern, what was I going to do "now that you're retired". No-one would ever have had such concerns about my mother, for example, who never did a day's "work" in her life - and who was constantly busy doing lots of things.

I enjoyed much of my working life : I was fortunate enough to have an interesting and diverse occupation. But I hardly "defined" myself by it, and was delighted when the possibility of ceasing work arose. That was some twenty two years ago, and I have not been bored...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Perhaps a generational thing involved, vinty? Most pre-retirement aged women I know are preparing for (and looking forward to) retirement and can answer the "what are you going to do with your time?" question with a facility that suggests that they are used to being asked.

[Lat-Literal]

A part of the problem in early retirement is in the stepping back. There is too much time and scope for developing a clearer objective overview. Some of that is about the past. Individuals and even groups from the mists of time don't necessarily look so good with hindsight. One becomes aware of the negatives when at the time those were brushed away a bit more easily on the grounds that this is how interaction in life takes place. Plus in a sense they make a contribution to any notion of one's own life story. So the positive aspects are comprehended too but I do think one sort of realizes who was putting in the effort to make it all work. In reasonable moments, I was called the lynchpin - the one who kept everyone together - when I was the one who could most easily have dropped out of any sort of functional role or functioning living. That was no coincidence. It was a mechanism.

In the present day - when walking hither and thither - what is most striking is the sheer generality of routine life. That is not at all the same from the point one has when one is involved in work or whatever it may be and the potential for observational understanding is limited. People on the move become hoards. Attitudes often now noticed more than personally encountered are seen as generational traits which don't change a great deal in some ways from one half century to the next. The more you see a hundred or a thousand homes or schools or offices or hospitals, the more there is a feeling that the signposts have been removed and usurped. While that has to do with one's own life, it is far more about the unequivocally positive symbols beyond parents in the past as they were there too. A few early people effectively provided the lens for a lucky and rewarding worldview. Later, they are largely smashed as the wider world comes in and insists that its version is accurate. Ultimately one has to accept that in today's terms it is right if in opinions often wrong. The resentment is not in what it says about me at any age or stage or what it says about folk today but what it does to those symbols and their positive legacy in me.

Also, there is the media role which in some respects is about progress. Once it would have informed or reinforced home truths in the similarities and differences it portrayed. In retirement it is definitely on the world's side - more in line with those who are "in the system". Politics is closely related to it. There is less and less other than that of a historical nature one feels able or willing to take in. Plus of course parents become elderly and that can be a state where all of the more peculiar aspects rise to the fore. That is a pity as where the experience of parents was overwhelmingly positive - a point that can be rationalised by others' unusually huge positivity towards them - it too erases what one was/is.

Would I want to be in work? Absolutely not. Too many Hitlers there. But the paradise isn't here and much of what occurs now suggests that it may on balance exist in the afterlife.

[french frank]

I wonder if there is still some 'gendered' thinking about retirement.

I have two friends both (now) retired teachers. When the wife retired what she was dreading was her husband retiring too …

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I have two friends both (now) retired teachers. When the wife retired what she was dreading was her husband retiring too …

Frau A would agree with that.

Anyhow, I've now returned to work with a photo archiving and restoration business, albeit from home.

[ardcarp]

I think those of us with some sort of skill and a knack for getting work are OK when we reach retirement age..... b*******g on not just to keep the bills paid but to enjoy a few of the finer things life has to offer. That's the theory anyway. But the people I feel genuinely sorry for (and I don't mean to be patronising) are those who are 'retired' from a routine sort of job and have nothing to fall back on but the OAP...oops, sorry, state retirement benefit. Life can be very black, bleak and worrying if you are one of the JAMs.

[P. G. Tipps]

.

... I wonder if there is still some 'gendered' thinking about retirement. That men are still in some sense seen as being defined by their 'work'.
I say this bicoz I took very early retirement, and people would ask, in terms of some concern, what was I going to do "now that you're retired". No-one would ever have had such concerns about my mother, for example, who never did a day's "work" in her life - and who was constantly busy doing lots of things.

I enjoyed much of my working life : I was fortunate enough to have an interesting and diverse occupation. But I hardly "defined" myself by it, and was delighted when the possibility of ceasing work arose. That was some twenty two years ago, and I have not been bored...

How true!

In my latter years at work it was made pretty clear that older experienced employees were simply no longer particularly valued by employers and the move was towards cheaper younger staff many with little or no experience of the employment offered. Like some others I quickly "got the message" and retired earlier than required. For once that was an unusually wise career move on my part which I've certainly never regretted.

The one thing I do miss though is the company of colleagues and the fun and banter that sometimes helped us all get through the working day. I certainly enjoyed all of that however much the 'Little Hitlers' tried to prevent it!

[Serial_Apologist]

A part of the problem in early retirement is in the stepping back. There is too much time and scope for developing a clearer objective overview. Some of that is about the past. Individuals and even groups from the mists of time don't necessarily look so good with hindsight. One becomes aware of the negatives when at the time those were brushed away a bit more easily on the grounds that this is how interaction in life takes place. Plus in a sense they make a contribution to any notion of one's own life story. So the positive aspects are comprehended too but I do think one sort of realizes who was putting in the effort to make it all work. In reasonable moments, I was called the lynchpin - the one who kept everyone together - when I was the one who could most easily have dropped out of any sort of functional role or functioning living. That was no coincidence. It was a mechanism.

In the present day - when walking hither and thither - what becomes most striking is the sheer generality of routine life. That is not at all the same from the point one has when one is involved in work or whatever it may be and the potential for observational understanding is limited. People on the move become hoards. Attitudes often now noticed more than personally encountered are seen as generational traits which don't change a great deal in some ways from one half century to the next. The more you see a hundred or a thousand homes or schools or offices or hospitals, the more there is a feeling that the signposts have been removed and usurped. While that has to do with one's own life, it is far more about the unequivocally positive symbols beyond parents in the past as they were there too. A few early people effectively provided the lens for a lucky and rather rewarding worldview. Later, they are largely smashed as the wider world comes in and insists that its version is accurate. Ultimately one has to accept that in today's terms it is right if in opinions often wrong. The resentment is not in what it says about me at any age or stage or what it says about folk today but what it does to them and their positive legacy in me.

Also, there is the media role which in some respects is about progress. Once it would have informed or reinforced home truths in the similarities and differences it portrayed. In retirement it is definitely on the world's side - more in line with those who are "in the system". Politics is closely related to it. There is less and less other than that of a historical nature one feels able or willing to take in. Plus of course parents become elderly and that can be a state where all of the more peculiar aspects rise to the fore. That is a pity as where the experience of parents was overwhelmingly positive - a point that can be rationalised by others' unusually huge positivity towards them - it too erases what one was/is.

Would I want to be in work? Absolutely not. Too many Hitlers there. But the paradise isn't here and much of what occurs now suggests that it may on balance exist in the afterlife.

For me, the saddest thing was always seeing men breaking into tears at their office retirement presentations - the carriage clock and all that - when I for one could hardly wait to become my own man once again - or maybe even for the very first time!

RD Laing told a story - it may have been in Sanity, Madness and The family - of a man who regains who he really is, following retirement, and his family, assuming he must have lost his mind, has him sectioned. They have got so used to knowing the person who has become so self-identified with his role that they can no longer "place" him. I was living at the time with people for whom the opening introductory question, "And what do you do?", was an obligatory non-starter. We become most what we really are when totally engaged in what we are doing, as opposed to identified with our role. Total engagement - which can be in meditation, listening to music, peeling potatoes - allows us to detach from ideas, not just the loaded variety of definitions in life's continuum, which being always in flux makes nonsense of them; so it's about detachment on many, interrelated levels.

What one IS is what one is at this precise, but fleeting moment. And one has to make a leap in faith, if you will... and enough practice at this in "unlonely aloneness" reveals what is worthwhile and what isn't. One learns that any look-back is in its very essence selective, because it is looking back to times and moments when one was identified with ones role, the one imposed by social protocols which at least need seeing through for the conventions they in fact are, and how they so often uphold status quos, with all the political implications therein, as well as being internalised willy-nilly and in effect maintained unconsciously by oneself. Going along with what is expected of one by others is fine if it is socially cohering, because belonging is a condition of all living creatures, and our human equivalent lies in the norms that keep this going in not necessarily very sustainable ways in terms of wisdom.

(At deeper levels one sees language as a tool, useful or destructive insofar as it ties up the self-description process in the practicality, like a recipe, but not if it is confused with the journey, the actuality that can never be fully encompassed in its net, any more than the individual can).

One hides all this from oneself in the cause of not stirring things up too much when the odds may be against one, or one may be mistaken in one's assessment of things not being right, and then ends up forgetting that one once questioned - the way we see small children beginning the process, constantly irking their parents with why is this and why that - and ends up giving up, and thereafter forgetting that one had given up. The right thing to do is consensually to have a cultural understanding that when the balance of forces in any situation is disfavourable, one either figures out the odds of support and solidarity, or plays the game, while never forgetting that it is a game. The latter insight is the most important guarantor of sanity in unacknowledged situations of insanity, because it pre-prepares oneself for that moment when you become free of others' expectations and demands, so that you (and this goes for all of us) don't seize the moment to get your own back.

The old man suddenly remembered that he had forgotten and started to redefine himself as an undefinition of what ineluctably had been imprinted over his birthright by significant other's attributions of acceptability and unacceptability in what is only this "agreed" socially constructed context. Sometimes I would dearly love to accept one of those school gatherings, just to see what others who bullied me have "made of their lives". My father decided (much against my absence of judgement at the time) to commit me to the school magazine being delivered as one of the conditions of my being an "old boy"; so far I've managed to desist - what would be the point? - while gaining some satisfaction from finding out that I have managed to outlive many of them, including not just the masters!

Beyond all this is politics - before all that is the possibility of shaping one's perspectives so that one does not make all the usual errors of hoping for saviours, whether of the religious or the political sort.

I was set thinking along these lines earlier on today as I saw that photo of the Dartford school class containing the one black face that yesterday made catastrophic sense of his own existence as he mowed his way across Westminster Bridge to yet another premature violent demise: one can't of course underestimate how difficult it is for some whose very acceptance is predicated on how they look, not just on disproportionate self-identification, as was shown in a very interesting documentary that showed attempts in the early 1970s to introduce African Americans to a previously successful programme of Gestalt Therapy involving mostly middle class American whites at Palo Alto, some years ago. In the one case self-attributions are unconsciously internalised, and can be part-overcome by insight into the mecanics of their making, but in the other they are forcibly imposed, at the ends of discriminatory laws, us-and-them attitudes, and police truncheons; and this enforces the necessity for a collective process of identity re-definition. If we should be so lucky!

[Nick Armstrong]

Next season starting soon, Cali?

the British Formula 4 championship ... begins in earnest next weekend

(We've already had some days of testing)

[Petrushka]

I can't believe I'd have much trouble occupying my time, mostly with good works of course.

Self evidently ,I guess the state of mind is what matters. I'm trying to sort out a four day week , on lower pay, sometime over the next year. Just the intention and thought of effectively 10 weeks extra holiday is a great help.
I'm also lucky in that I probably enjoy my current role more than any other I have done, so I'm happy( generally !!) . I'm still learning new things about this business too, which is a good thing I find.

Edit: And almost everybody I work with, both inside and outside the business is ( considerably) younger than me. That kind of crept up on me.......

I too recently looked at the possibility of going down to a 4 day week (I'm two years from retirement) but when I did the mathematics it was clearly a non-starter. Losing a day's pay each week would impact on my salary and pensions to a degree I wasn't in the end prepared to accept. Bills won't go down, electricity, gas, water and council tax are only ever going to go up so for the sake of a couple of years, which will fly by, it didn't seem to me to be a financially sensible option.

Regarding working life, there is an old Russian proverb: In order to get to the other side of the bridge there are times when you have to walk with the Devil. I'm now very nearly over the bridge and, boy, have I had to walk with some Devil's in my 43 years at work. I've already made it plain that I will never go back (never do it, they've forgotten about you as soon as you've gone out of the door) and I plan to never work again.

[teamsaint]

I too recently looked at the possibility of going down to a 4 day week (I'm two years from retirement) but when I did the mathematics it was clearly a non-starter. Losing a day's pay each week would impact on my salary and pensions to a degree I wasn't in the end prepared to accept. Bills won't go down, electricity, gas, water and council tax are only ever going to go up so for the sake of a couple of years, which will fly by, it didn't seem to me to be a financially sensible option.

Regarding working life, there is an old Russian proverb: In order to get to the other side of the bridge there are times when you have to walk with the Devil. I'm now very nearly over the bridge and, boy, have I had to walk with some Devil's in my 43 years at work. I've already made it plain that I will never go back (never do it, they've forgotten about you as soon as you've gone out of the door) and I plan to never work again.

I know you have looked long and hard at your options, and I guess our decisions come down to a mixture of financial situation and outlook.

I won't get a state pension for another 12 years, which isn't much later than most men on this board did. But with only very modest private provision, my outlook is coloured by the fact that my in laws died aged 63 and 67, and my father didn't make it into his 80's. So given that I'm likely to have to work for a good while yet, and that's not something I can afford to worry about, it seems to me to make sense to try to get more time to myself while I can, and while I can afford to do it, albeit on lower pay.

A lot of teachers seem to be taking their reduced pensions at 55 ( 5% reduction for each year they retire early), and for a lot of people, for instance if the mortgage has been paid off, that makes sense, even if they still have to do some other work.

[Petrushka]

I won't get a state pension for another 12 years, which isn't much later than most men on this board did. But with only very modest private provision, my outlook is coloured by the fact that my in laws died aged 63 and 67, and my father didn't make it into his 80's. So given that I'm likely to have to work for a good while yet, and that's not something I can afford to worry about, it seems to me to make sense to try to get more time to myself while I can, and while I can afford to do it, albeit on lower pay.

I can perfectly understand your outlook viewed from a perspective of your family history but it ain't necessarily so. My own family history is something of a mixed bag: on my father's side there is a history of longevity (he himself lived to 94) while on my mother's side, some have lived long lives while others have gone early so it's difficult to make much of it.

[EdgeleyRob]

It doesn't necessarily mean history will repeat,but my mum died at 63 and dad at 69,so being diagnosed with a serious heart condition at 58 and then coincidentally being offered retirement/redundancy at the same time I grabbed it with both hands figuring that my days might be numbered.

[EdgeleyRob]

Have some posts been removed from this thread ?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Some deemed too political and off topic have indeed been removed.