Phases Of Retirement

You've probably heard of the six stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, ice cream, and acceptance. Okay, maybe there are only five.

This progression works much like that...except that instead of dealing with loss, you have to deal with giving up work and living a life of constant leisure. Sounds pretty easy to get used to. The stages, you say, should be: 1) waiting to retire, 2) retirement party, 3) nursing retirement party hangover, 4) buy fishing boat and get rewards card at the local casino, 5) fish and/or gamble, until 6) death.

But, it's not all lures and slot machines.

Here are the stages (as laid out in the 1970s by scientist Robert Atchley): pre-retirement, retirement, contentment, disenchantment, reorientation, and routine.

Often, when we think about retirement, we think about it in terms of finances. Do we have enough money to retire? But Atchley's insight was that there are physiological components as well.

People derive a lot of their self-esteem from professional pursuits. Also, much of a person's social life centers on their workplace. Thus, a person can experience an early "It's a Tuesday and I'm just puttering around the house watching game shows" euphoria when retirement starts (the "contentment" phase). But it can start to feel a little stale after a while. Enter "disenchantment."

The retiree then has to go through a process of rearranging their conception of themselves as a retired person. New schedules. New goals. New social structures. This process becomes the "reorientation" phase. Then, after some soul searching, the retiree can find their equivalent to acceptance: "routine." Which sounds a little anticlimactic...can't we go back to contentment? Well, guess it's better than "disenchantment."