The Retirement Conundrum - Managing the Remaining 1500 Weeks
The challenges and issues of retirement
The Book
Bhavin Jankharia
The Detailed 15-Point Guide to Live Long, Healthy
Bhavin Jankharia
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"Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age" Dorothy L. Sayers could not have written wiser words.
In Hinduism, the third stage of life is the Vanaprastha stage, where the householder slowly renounces his duties and then retires to a hut in the forest, with or without his wife, maintaining minimal contact with his friends and family, a metaphor telling us that as and when we grow old, we need to make way for our children/young people and move on to another, perhaps slower/leisurely phase of life.
This could be terrifying if you are not prepared for it, and perhaps even if you are…or it could be extremely satisfying. It all varies from individual to individual.
“Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first one is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.” Bertrand Russell used this quote whenever people complained of being overworked.
If you are one of the vast majority doing the first kind of work, retirement may actually turn out to be quite pleasurable, freed of the yoke that kept you going round and round for 3-4 decades of your life. If you are one of the minority doing the second kind of work, retirement may leave a sudden void in your life that you may struggle to fill. Or it could just be the other way around…there are no set or fixed rules.
If you retire at age 60, and assuming the way our lifespans are increasing each year even in India, chances are you will live till 90. Taking a page out of Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks, this means you have 1560 weeks or around 10,920 days of life left (more if you live longer, but for simplicity, let’s stick with 1500 weeks and 10,500 days) and you will need to figure out how to live these well.
So, what are the challenges and issues?
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1. Money
This is the perhaps the most important. You need enough money to live well for those 1500 weeks and preferably some more, in case you land up living longer. In Sep 2021, I had written about the investment needed to live long, healthy for those 1500 weeks, which came to around 1 cr or Rs. 10 million (USD 120,000). But this is only related to health expenses. You will need much much more to maintain a lifestyle similar to the one you had before retirement, including money for vacations and travel, entertainment, eating out, gadgets, vehicles, etc.
You need to sit with a financial planner much earlier in life, perhaps at the age of 30 or 40 and figure out how to set aside enough for all this. The earlier you start investing, the bigger the payout later in life and the minimum investment, assuming you already have your own paid-for house, would be at least Rs. 5 cr (Rs. 50 million or around 600,000 USD) to live those 1500 weeks well.
This also means that if you don’t have the money set aside to take care of your financial needs for those 1500 weeks (you cannot and I repeat again, cannot assume your children will take care of you…seriously? and do you really want to be dependent on your children to give you money to spend for travel and fun?), then you probably need to find another job or another source of income and NOT RETIRE, which is easier said than done in India (see point 3).
2. Freedom
“The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.” We can sympathize with T.S. Eliot, being part of a sandwich generation that we are, stuck between our children and our parents.
But the older we get, the more we can relate to what Anthony Burgess said, “One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going”.
One of the advantages of the “vanaprastha” stage and of being old is, more and more the ability to do what you want to do and to listen less and less to others. It means refusing invitations to travel to cities for 10-15 minute lectures, saying no to 1-2 hours of travel to attend the wedding reception of a colleague’s son or daughter, whose existence you only came to know when you received an invitation, saying no to large, loud parties, and sometimes even foregoing family gatherings. Again, if you love doing all this, then that’s your call…you have earned the right at this stage to pick and choose and do what you want and not do what you don’t want to.
Once you are past your 70s and your parents are likely no more and the kids are in their late 30s or 40s, you do have the ability to call the shots, provided you have the financial independence to do so. No longer, do you have to be at the beck and call of your children and if you don’t want to take care of your grandchildren, you can say no. Play with the grandchildren and spoil them, but you don’t have to raise them. They are not your responsibility, unless of course the reason your kids had kids is because you mistakingly promised to help raise them. Then, that’s on you.
3. Purpose
This is perhaps the most important issue after financial independence and stability. When you get up in the morning, you need to figure out how to make a difference that day. One of the advantages of being a doctor is that in your late 50s and 60s and perhaps even through your 70s, you are still relevant and make a difference every day to someone’s life. The same is likely true of lawyers, accountants, teachers and other professionals. But those of you who have to retire from jobs or from businesses either because of statutory reasons or the law of the land, have to figure out what to do for the rest of the 1500 weeks left.
While you can take up hobbies and do things you were never able to do before, you also need to figure out how to be and stay relevant. Volunteering is one way of doing this, while taking up another job is another way.
Unfortunately, ageism is a major problem if you try for a second job and unless you bring in much-needed wisdom as a consultant, it is highly unlikely that any company, especially in India, will hire you to do a job similar to the one you were doing when you retired. There are so many young Narayan Murthy worshippers willing to work more than 70 hours a week that you don’t really stand a chance with a second job. Or seeing the average age of our politicians, you could just decide to jump into public life…
4. Managing Health
This is where guides like atmasvasth come in. You need to increase the time you spend on yourself, increase the amount of time devoted to physical activity and try and increase your cardiorespiratory fitness. The payout later in life when you are in your 80s or 90s or if and when you have a major illness, will be worth all that effort.
5. Friends and Family and Loneliness
Some of this interacts with purpose. While being alone and being lonely are two entirely different things and retirement allows you the time to be pleasurably alone, loneliness can lead to increased cognitive loss and reduce your healthspan and lifespan. It may not be easy to reconnect with friends, or to make new friends later in life and perhaps this is the time that children or grandchildren can step in and figure out ways in which to reduce or mitigate this loneliness.
6. Social Media and Financial Fraud
Perhaps by the time we are in our 70s and 80s, we will be less susceptible than those currently in that age group who seem to trust everything they read on Facebook or WhatsApp and eagerly give their passwords and money to people who call promising to give them money for lapsed insurance policies or quick get-rich schemes, etc.
7. Preparing for Death - Materially and Spiritually
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils” Hector Berlioz said this, but more importantly, the last 7 lines of this poem by Franz Wright capture the problem with “dying”.
How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me—
The world
is filled with people
who have never died
It is an interesting conundrum. Learning about death, which is inevitable, from people who have never died. And while ancient religious texts may help, they were also written by the living.
If you are born, you will die, and you should use these remaining 1500 weeks to get ready to move on, if and when your end does come near. While, from a material perspective, it is important to put your affairs in order and prepare your regular and living wills, spiritually, it is important to develop an equanimity to disease and death.
It is easier said than done, but each time there is a health scare, if you start jumping up and down, stressing about dying tomorrow, wanting something or the other to be done, visiting multiple doctors to figure out the next steps, trying to cling to health and life, irrespective of the financial, physical, emotional and mental damage it might be doing to you and more importantly, those around you, then what is the point of having lived all these years? One part of “vanaprastha” is also this…acceptance of this phase of your life, as a preparation to moving on with finality and with grace…and letting go calmly and peacefully when it is time to go.
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