If you’re like most academics, once the prospect of retirement begins to loom large, you seek financial advice. But few of us seek help on the personal issues that factor into this decision and the professional unknowns about life after retirement. How, then, do you decide when to take the plunge?
We are three 60-something academics who, four years ago, began to face the retirement dilemma together. As psychologists who have studied human development, we knew intellectually that retirement would be a transition with opportunities for growth. Yet some of the changes that lie ahead gave us pause, especially the loss of professional identity and community. We were not sure how to process our fears of irrelevance, how to deal with unfinished projects, and how to shift toward new life goals.
We were fortunate to join seven other academic women to explore the retirement dilemma together in a group called “The Post CV Life.” We were sponsored by CoRE, an organization that offers retreats for feminists in academe and industry to network and discuss common professional concerns. Its retreats follow a structured format that allows each participant time to present their dilemma, entertain questions, and get feedback.
Our initial meeting had to be virtual because it was held during the early days of Covid. But we so appreciated our first half-day session that we have continued to meet virtually twice a year (we’ve met in person once and plan to do so again this summer). At each meeting, we use the same CoRE format to discuss our concerns, fears, and hopes openly. On the practical side, we have compared notes about different types of institutional support for faculty members in the retirement transition as well as strategies for how to approach administrators.
Collectively reflecting on this major life transition has been enormously valuable for us. We encourage you to consider this approach in mulling retirement, whether you are part of an organized group such as ours or an informal one created on your campus. In what follows, we share some of the most useful insights and advice we generated, in the hope that it will help other academics who are pondering their “post CV life.”
Embrace ambivalence. The road to a retirement decision is rarely straightforward. Conflicting emotions and motivations push and pull you in different directions. Ambivalence was the overarching concern for all of us, and we suspect that feeling is universal in the beginning of any journey toward retirement.
The most important lesson we learned together was to embrace our ambivalence about moving into this stage of life as normative. Our discussions allowed each of us to take an honest look at our myriad feelings and desires, and then move toward a resolution that felt right.
Articulate your fears and losses. Not everyone loves what they do for a living, but academics generally do. As teachers, researchers, and academic leaders, we hold treasured positions at our institutions, and we are often recognized for individual achievements and accomplishments. The members of our group thought a great deal about the losses associated with retirement: What would it feel like to no longer mentor students, generate new knowledge, and support programs we had built? One of us lamented, “We will leave behind so much unfinished business.”
We also worried about how to spend our time, postretirement, without work to structure our days. Would we be able to continue to enjoy our academic friends, connections, and colleagues? Would we be forgotten? How would we forge new social connections and find meaningful and intellectually engaging activities to replace some of the work we would leave behind?
As women of a certain age, we began our academic careers at a time when higher education was not especially welcoming and accommodating to female faculty members. We wondered if identifying as trailblazers made it harder for us to surrender our professional identities.
Whatever our fears, we found that it helped to articulate them out loud and to know that they were shared. Along the way, we cohered as a group and learned how to manage our concerns and assess which ones were a real priority for each of us as individuals.
Anticipate the gains. The retirement decision is not just about the potential downsides. Inevitably, it’s also about envisaging the rewards. As Joni Mitchell taught us, “Well something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day.” Over time, our discussions evolved as we voiced what was pulling each of us toward retirement.
One of the big attractions was the prospect of freedom — not only freedom from work stress and pressures, but also autonomy and control over our daily, monthly, and yearly schedules and activities. As a faculty member, your life is tied to the academic calendar; to some extent, it determines what you do and where you have to be for most of the year.
Retirement brings with it the ability to make decisions about when, where, how, and with whom to devote your time, energy, and skills. In our group, one of us talked about having the time to work on a local task force on homelessness, another planned to study a foreign language, and everyone foresaw more time for the people they love. We continuously asked ourselves how we would want to spend our remaining years of vitality, and how we could make that vision a reality.
Many of us planned to stay engaged with our campuses and research circles, to some extent, after retirement. We planned to keep writing or teaching in a limited way. In short, we saw retirement more as gliding down a path rather than jumping off a cliff. Understanding our goals for the next chapter of our lives — and the potential gains — brought clarity to our cost-benefit analyses and helped each of us decide when to take the next step.
Choose your timing. Thinking about retirement does not mean that a decision must be imminent. In his 2013 book, The In-Between: Embracing the Tension Between Now and the Next Big Thing, Jeff Goins writes, “In the waiting, we become.”
In other words, by reflecting on our current and future lives, the decision — whether to stay or retire — became clearer. Sharing our stories revealed our individuality. We evaluated our satisfaction with daily tasks and accomplishments, our motivation for new projects, and the joy and meaning we derived from our jobs. We asked ourselves and one another: Did the rewards of work explain our reluctance to retire? And, if not, what else might be holding us back?
Our answers varied. For some members of our group, the work felt unfinished and still fulfilling, and these women had no immediate plans to retire. Others felt they had accomplished what they set out to do.
We talked about the mistake of waiting too long to retire. All of us wanted to retire before our abilities and contributions had significantly waned. Some of us discussed the importance of retiring in good health, so as to have the strength and energy for exciting, new activities.
Still others felt a bit reluctant or stuck — they were not ready to make a decision, and the group supported their decision not to decide. One of us had a mentor, a leader in her field, who struggled with retirement until a friend reminded her of her many successes and advised her to “declare victory and move on.” This story resonated with all of us. As academics, we are privileged to have agency over the decision of when to retire.
Recognize that postretirement life is a work in progress. Retirement is a process that continues long after your last day of full employment. Academics are, by necessity, planners — a helpful skill in building a different kind of productive and rewarding day. And once you do retire, that skill comes in handy as you choose how to spend your time.
In our group, one of us described the early phase of retirement as feeling like an adolescent moratorium, a period of active exploration. Our postretirement lives will continue to evolve across domains as we evaluate opportunities, both personal and professional. One member of our group spoke eloquently about the “unfurling” that lies ahead, which struck us all as an apt metaphor for this phase.
Over the past four years, we have often reflected on why our group continues to be a significant and powerful force in each of our lives. It is telling that we continue to meet, even though most of us have retired or have signed a retirement agreement.
Our group’s success may stem from the fact that none of our members had a personal stake in another’s retirement decision. That is generally not the case when you talk about retirement with your work colleagues, relatives, or even friends. In fact, many academics are reluctant to discuss retirement in an open way, because people have a tendency to move to problem solving rather than listening, or they might be critical rather than accepting. In the workplace, opening up might result in feeling pressured into a decision, being perceived as a “lame duck,” or having rumors about your retirement plans reach the administration prematurely.
Our group avoided those pitfalls by following a specific principle of CoRE: Listen without judgment. As one member concluded, “we were holding space for one another.”
Anthropologists sometimes use the term liminality to denote a transition from one stage to the next. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word, limen, which means threshold. When we are in between stages, we are neither here nor there — it is hard to move from a familiar stage to an unfamiliar one filled with uncertainty, which is at the heart of the retirement dilemma.
Not everyone considering retirement will want to start or join a support group. Yet in our experience, workshopping the retirement dilemma with like-minded people provided a way forward. Regardless, we believe the lessons we learned offer a framework for academics who are contemplating this important life decision.
