(1).jpg)
 |
Carol Rahn reflects on retirement….. Editor's Note: Carol Rahn '72 presented these remarks during a panel presentation for the London edition of a Princeton Global Net Night on careers. I had a very accidental career. I was always willing to jump off a cliff from time to time and do something completely different, but jobs came along and if they were interesting, I took them. I was always motivated primarily by the need to be useful. My last job was the only job I took because it achieved an ambition. I decided to retire because the job was okay; I really liked my colleagues; but I was working very hard (and away from home ~50% of the time)– yet I just didn’t feel that I was as useful as I wanted to be. There was not really anywhere else to go within the company; I was really not interested in looking for a job outside the company, and I was old enough to retire. So I did. Of course retiring did not solve the problem of needing to feel useful. First point: what you need and want from retirement may not be as different as you might think (in those wistful moments). “Moving On” really is another career move. And it is becoming subject to all the status pressures of the rest of our career: become an advisor, board member, change the world, show your friends how successful you are at being retired. A few will have a stellar second act. But for most of us, one of the challenges is that when we retire most of what we will accomplish in life is behind us. Retirement just makes that official. That’s hard. Being the type that got myself from a nowhere small town to Princeton – just guessing some of you might have similar drive-to-achievement profiles – this is sometimes still an issue for me. Wasn’t I supposed to do something more? I’m probably not going to. That mix of skills, character, habits that got me where I was – and no further – is not any different now. And probably nor will yours be. Pros: All those things you hear about people retiring and being as busy as they were when they had a full time job – it’s all true. We just have a little more trouble figuring out what’s keeping us so busy and the “to do” list is as long as ever. My husband was very worried about my retirement. He saw me as being so driven by work; he thought I would go nuts. Once the job was removed, I wasn’t driven. He’s not worried anymore. Not commuting; not setting the alarm clock; not having the pressures and crises of work; having so much more control over how you spend your time – that is all as wonderful as in your fondest fantasies. Cons: If, like me, you’re a bit introverted the big loss is no longer having all that built-in sociability. I used to spend a good chunk of my day talking to people, people all over the world, and there was a lot of friendliness and fun interwoven with that, and that is gone. I have a more local network now—very enjoyable; great to walk down the street and run into people you know—but it is not as dense a network Also gone and not easily replicated is the individual recognition and congratulation and the celebration of collective achievement that was part of working. Bad surprise: All those years of discipline, of doing things that were maybe not so interesting, or were outside my comfort zone because they needed to be done in order to achieve some larger objective – that is pretty much completely out the window and my natural laziness has full scope. If I don’t want to do something, chances are pretty good now that I’m just not going to do it. 2nd key point: In this phase, it’s all much more down to you. Fewer constraints; less support. I did think about retirement and made decisions about what I wanted to do in retirement.
When I was working I needed deadlines to get things finished. Now I have to engineer deadlines to make progress on my neighbourhood project: be the speaker for some event, or commit to writing an article for a local publication. Key Lessons:
|
|