How Will You Fill 8,000 days of Retirement?
Imagine you have decided to retire in your 60s. Probably feeling good, or maybe not? Initially it may be liberating, but then you face the daunting realization that you may have decades to live with not standard to-do list. That is the premise of the article in BankInvestmentConsultant.com. These sites often focus on the important mater of financing your retirement (the time when we are supposed to stop working full-time), but what will you make of this ‘Gift of Longevity’?
In the book, “7 Principles for Living With Authenticity: Discovering Your True Self When Facing Life Changes”, author Jack Beauregard challenges people to recognize that they must do some deep introspection in order to maximize this new time in life. He also offers a study-guide to complete the many exercise in the book as a pdf, if you contact him.
Retirement should be more than the other ADD – I often joke that the whole concept of the Golden Years and retirement are nice words for what is really happening to us: “Aging, Declining and Dying”. The challenge has been understanding a process to get our hands around this. On ThePlatinumYears.com, you can find a lots of information, books, articles, podcasts, videos and programs.
We need a New Story – In the article in BankInvestmentConsultant.com, the author Joseph Coughlin, posits that our society does a nice job telling us a story to follow in 8,000 day increments: birth/youth is education, then early career, then mid-life. But retirement is oh so vague: golf, gardening and grandkids (I call them the 3 Gs) and what else until death? Will your story be a new career, investing your time volunteering, traveling the world by selling most of your possessions, or something else? What’s the right balance?
Framework for Purposeful Living – I suggest that we need to replace the whole idea of retirement with ‘purposeful living’. We should explore ten aspects of life: Paid Work, Volunteering, Physical Health, Intellectual Stimulation, Fun/Recreation, Activities with Family, Activities with Spouse/Partner, Deciding where to Live, Creating New Social Connections, and Experiencing Spirituality. This robust framework empowers people to live with a sense of purpose, one that might be lost when you ‘retire” from your current full-time work. That sounds like a great way to spend 8,000 days.
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If you would like to think more deeply about your future, download Chapter One of 7 Principles for Living With Authenticity by clicking here or the image at left: