Retirement Is Not the End
For decades the word retirement has been treated as if it describes a permanent stage of life. Work hard for forty years, reach your mid sixties, and then step away from your career. The implication is subtle but powerful. Your working life is over and now you move into a different kind of existence. Yet this way of thinking can create unnecessary confusion and anxiety. Many people arrive at retirement with financial plans but without a clear sense of what the next phase of life should look like. They spent decades preparing to stop working, but almost no time preparing for the years that follow. A more helpful way to understand retirement is to see it not as a stage of life but as an action. To retire simply means finishing one chapter. During the previous twenty five or thirty years, many people organized their lives around full time work. That work allowed them to build financial security, raise families, develop professional skills, and establish themselves as independent adults. T...
