Flourishing or Floundering During Retirement
- Michael D. Matthews, Ph.D.
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Personal Perspective: Is retirement a social death or a rebirth?
Key points
Retirement carries a risk of what sociologists call social death.
Social death is not inevitable. Remaining socially engaged is the key to flourishing in retirement.
Social death can be turned into social rebirth, setting the occasion for a meaningful retirement.
At the end of August of this year, following a long (45 years) and rewarding career as a college professor, I retired from my position of Professor of Engineering Psychology at the United States Military Academy. During my decades in higher education, I had the privilege of teaching and mentoring thousands of undergraduate students, engaged in a variety of stimulating research projects, and participated in a important community service for my institution and my profession. I could not have asked for a better career.
My decision to retire was not a quick one nor did I arrive at it without substantial thought. My work was a source of meaning and purpose in my life, and I knew that leaving that behind would be a challenge. I readily acknowledge and am grateful to have had a profession that was so rewarding and therefore hard to step away from. Plenty of people – maybe the majority – do not enjoy the luxury of such a situation.
Social Death
One of my colleagues and close friends at West Point, sociologist Morten Ender, and I often engaged in discussions about retiring. Morten pointed out that retirement may pose the risk of social death. That gave me pause because there is truth in what he says. Most of my social interactions over the past five decades have revolved one way or another around my job. The daily give and take in the classroom with students provided social stimulation. Research collaborations and hallway or office chats with colleagues did the same. My department at West Point sponsored regular social events, ranging from football tailgates to formal dinner gatherings. Stepping away from this certainly seemed like a form of social death.
My department at West Point gave me a grand farewell. There were speeches by colleagues and current and former students. They gave me plenty of mementos to adorn the walls of my home office.
It didn’t take long for an indicator of social death to occur. I was taken off the department’s email distribution list. To be sure, I complained as much as anyone about the volume of administrative emails emanating from the department’s leadership. But I wasn’t prepared for the impact that a total absence of information about department operations would have on my situational awareness and connectedness to former associates. I was not informed about four of my colleagues who were selected for long-term faculty positions in the department. Nor was I told who was selected to be our next department head. I only learned about these events indirectly from former colleagues who passed along the information informally. This made me feel disconnected.
Social Rebirth
So, in some ways Morten was right. Two months into my retirement, I do miss the personal and social engagements offered by full-time teaching. But social death is not inevitable. There are other ways of filling this very basic human need. Here are some steps I have taken:
Actively seek out new social relationships. Now that I am retired, I can nurture and savor social relationships that I had less time to enjoy previously. Spending time visiting with neighbors and engaging with friends from past eras of my life are two ways to do this.
Learn to draw upon your personal virtues and character strengths to provide meaning and purpose. Following Peterson and Seligman’s Values-in-Action categorization of character strengths and virtues, I find myself shifting from virtues important to my professional success (mostly the virtues of wisdom and courage) to those important in other aspects of life (mostly the virtues of humanity, transcendence, and temperance). By doing so, one can discover new ways of finding meaning and purpose in the post-retirement years.
Find ways to remain involved in your profession. After retiring, I accepted a visiting professorship at England’s Buckinghamshire New University. In this role, I offer occasional lectures and mentor graduate students. The workload is minimal, but it maintains my professional identity and maintains a sense of self-worth.
Remain intellectually engaged. I have submitted a book proposal and continue to author this blog. I am less interested in conducting and publishing basic research and more interested in synthesizing what I have learned in my decades as a psychologist and sharing it in forms that others may easily digest and appreciate.
Maintain or increase your physical activity. Exercise helps maintain brain health. Moreover, many forms of exercise include social interactions. I walk several miles a day around town, stopping to visit friends and neighbors. Take up a new sport (pickleball, anyone?!), join a bike or running club, or go to the gym several times a week. Your physical health and social health will improve.
Be grateful for the past and optimistic for the future. Nothing lasts forever. I am proud of my accomplishments but excited to see how my post-retirement life unfolds.
It Is Your Choice
The surest way to turn retirement into social death is to become a couch potato. Watching television, surfing the internet, or following social media day in and day out does not provide the level of social engagement and physical fitness needed to flourish in your retirement years.
Social rebirth, then, requires effort. The good life, whether working or retired, requires engagement, meaning, and purpose. There are many ways to achieve this and with thought and effort, everyone may develop a plan to ensure that retirement is indeed a rebirth and not a spiral into oblivion.
