Finding Purpose in Retirement
One aspect of retirement that people struggle with is the lack of a sense of purpose. It is a source of concern for those thinking about retirement and can be a significant reason why some people carry on working. It is also a source of distress for some who have already retired and feel themselves drifting, without direction.
Most of the time, we don’t really think consciously about purpose. Work and family tend to provide enough of a sense of purpose and direction, and keep us so busy that there is not much space in our lives to think about where we are going and what we are doing. There are a couple of times in life when things are different. Teenagers and young adults do spend time thinking about what they are going to do with their life, trying to find a direction that feels right for them. We can also find ourselves later in our working life, and most often in midlife, questioning whether the direction we have taken is ‘right’ for us.
It is not surprising then that, once the responsibility of bringing up children is largely over and the prospect of the end of our career is drawing close, we start to think again about our purpose. “If I am no longer bringing up a family and I leave work, what is the point of my life?”
The first step in finding purpose in retirement is to realise that it is a normal process that we go through and it is ok to feel a bit lost. Then we can start to think about what our purpose in retirement will be.
There are some who would say that we all have a Purpose for our life and that what we need to do is to find that Purpose. It is a mistake to think there is one single purpose and it can lead us to spend a lot of time and energy looking for it. We may have multiple purposes at any one time and our purpose can change as we progress through retirement.
The terms ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are often used interchangeably but this causes confusion and can make it more difficult to decide what we want to do. The question that people have asked over the millennia is “Why am I here?” and this is a question about meaning. What gives meaning to my life?
From this starting point, we can then ask “What are the things that I can do that will satisfy that sense of what makes my life meaningful?” Those things that we can do are our purpose and could be a whole range of different activities and so the job of finding purpose is about deciding what activities provide meaning.
You may well ask how we know what gives our life meaning and that may not be obvious. We can go through a process of becoming consciously aware of our meaning, starting with identifying what are our values in life and examining our beliefs. For some people that is an exercise that they wish to undertake. But, for most of us, we have a sense of what that meaning is even if we are not able to articulate it. That is the reason why there are some things in life that feel right and some that don’t.
The search for purpose is therefore the process of identifying what activities feel ‘right’ in that they help you to feel that your life has meaning.
Those activities fall into one of three categories:
- Things that satisfy your own needs including not just the need for safety, security and personal growth.
- Things that satisfy the needs of others including the needs of family and friends as well as others that you may or may not know personally.
- Things that contribute to wider society – this is often described as ‘making a difference’
For each person, it is likely that there will be activities that fall into each of these categories but the balance of serving self, serving others and serving society will be different. This will depend on how each person defines what gives their life meaning and maybe also on how they have lived their life to date. People who have lived a life of service to society may decide that they can devote more of their time in retirement to themselves. Alternatively, people who have focussed more of their life on their own needs may want to spend more time in retirement making a difference.
What it boils down to is that there is not a right or wrong answer that anyone can give us to our search for purpose. Your purpose is what feels right for you.
This does not mean that identifying your purpose is easy. Find out how RED Retirement can help with finding your purpose. Email: Coach@REDRetirement.co.uk
