- Motivation for writing this essay: Why am I wasting my valuable retirement time writing about retirement? Because I want to have a better understanding of what I am doing and what I should be doing. I discovered during the past couple of years that when a question won’t leave me alone, writing about it allows me to either move forward to the next question, or put the question aside with a well thought out answer. This essay has freed me to move on confidently and with enthusiasm for future questions.
What do I or should I expect of my retirement? I have been pondering this for the last five or so years, but the question has more urgency now that I have been retired for 2 years. I had the idea in my high school years to learn about the world of work (men, machines and martians) for about 25 years, and then settle down to enjoy literature and write stories. I would accumulate money in order to relax and read my books full time, maybe hike the White Mountains in New Hampshire with a backpack of good science fiction. Over the years this idea has evolved to the ambition to fill the gaps in my liberal education as soon as I could. I assumed that any educated person who was not an engineer or scientist had learned the history of our culture, understood the philosophers, theologians, and knew the ongoing conversations of politics and economics over the last 2,500 years. It is very rare to find anyone who doesn’t have some gaps in their “liberal education.”
What happened to the liberal education and the bachelor of arts degree? I have recently learned from some of the essays of Mortimer J. Adler, that a liberal education is a life time effort. We should expect high school and college to only provide the basic skills of critical and independent thinking needed to acquire a liberal education through one’s own effort during a lifetime.
This is what I aspire to. Adler says that “The direct product of liberal education is a good mind, well disciplined in its processes of inquiring and judging, knowing and understanding, and well furnished with knowledge, well cultivated by ideas.” Quoted from Adler’s essay "Liberal Education—Theory and Practice (1945).”
I can look back on my experience now and recognize many good minds, independent, critical thinkers, in my life. I am fortunate to have known and worked with so many good people.
What is retirement for me so far? Retirement brought unexpected observations of how my body and mind work. I am learning to understand other people. During my “working” years I was in too much of a hurry and too sleep deprived to notice my own feelings and sensations, to pay deep attention to others, (except my wife, Amanda, she has always had my deepest attention), to listen to my body’s response to sugar, caffeine, alcohol, fatigue, exercise, or to notice my conditioned reflexes.
I have been reading a lot of books from the libraries. My spontaneous reading about health lead me to the discovery of conditioned reflexes and their role in the placebo effect. I spent several months, spring and summer of 2018, closely observing how my body and lower mind act on their own, almost like a well trained dog, without (and sometimes in spite of) my conscious effort. These experiences may be part of another essay.
Amanda has educated me on all the good drama and comedy from the last 40 years that I missed because I was busy working. I had never appreciated the quality of acting and writing that goes into so much of the fiction and literature available to us. I learned negotiation tactics from various legal dramas that I wish I had paid attention to back in the 80’s when they first aired.
What is retirement for others? I have paid attention to what others are doing such as, acquaintances from the Navy, celebrities and politicians, and biographies of people whom I admire or want to understand. Some people just keep on working, lawyers and supreme court justices, actors and actresses, writers and artists, politicians and business people. I gradually came to the realization that a lot of the people I respected had taken time to get advanced business and political education at various points in their lives. I never seriously considered this for myself, I was too busy studying the technology of what ever business I was involved with.
Many people travel. A Freakonomics podcast reported that the great majority of people, world wide, across all income levels spend the first two or three years of retirement traveling, then they come home, sit in front of their televisions and die. (See Retirement Kills (Ep. 75), Freakonomics podcast.). Note also Peter Drucker has a lecture that includes preparing for retirment by finding new activities and building the needed skills prior to retirement. For me, my Navy years satiated my desire for extensive travel. Amanda fulfilled her travel desires a couple of decades ago while she was still working. I enjoy watching occasional Youtube videos of past Navy acquaintances sailing the north Atlantic, paddling the Arctic ocean or hiking across the Himalayas. Fun to watch but not for me to do.
What is work? Two retired acquaintances, both former senior executives in the nuclear power industry, with whom I discussed pros and cons of retirement, are just so glad to be out of the workforce and “being able to do what I want to do.” I never understood this phrase “being able to do what I want to do?” Don’t we always do what we want to do? Who is stopping us? This should be especially true for people who have some autonomy in their jobs. Most of my working years were challenging and fun. There were occasional tedious tasks, but I took them as interesting, sometimes fascinating, opportunities for streamlining procedures, training, and incremental automation of tasks. In Peter Drucker’s words, I never considered that I was cutting a stone, I was building a cathedral! (I tried to leave as many great stones and foundations behind me as I moved from job to job.). Adler would probably say that carving stones as a job is work, carving beautiful stone blocks or building cathedrals is as a leisure activity because they are making me a better person in the process. I never really felt like I was “working” in any of my jobs. (On rare occasions I even felt guilty because why are they paying me so much to do this great stuff!)
How did I decide to retire? Amanda showed me that we could retire, I was convinced. If she had left it to me I would not have re-evaluated the possibility for another five years or so (I had developed a routine of re-evaluating time to retirement once a decade or so). Amanda had retired several years before, but she was still taking calls from old customers. I was just beginning to learn about the business side of the IT world and contracting. Business is full of exciting challenges that I anticipated practicing for a few more years. Maybe by the age of 70 I would have taken a serious look at retiring. Jane, my younger sister, retired several months before I did. She advised me to follow Amanda’s advice. If you can retire, do it! This was good advice for us. Once I agreed with Amanda that it was time for me to retire, I couldn’t wait to get there.
It is easy to delay retirement due to bad decisions and bad luck. If my life had gone according to plan I would have retired about age 45 instead of in my 60’s. Recounting and understanding these mistakes may be part of another essay.
I discovered the idea of leisure. Thanks to Mortimer J. Adler’s essays, I discovered that what I wanted to know about was leisure, not retirement! I’ve been thinking and planning retirement since I started working as teenager. My Dad advised us children “pay yourself first.” Leisure is something that I never distinguished as an idea worthy of thought, I thought that leisure was lazy, that is not me! I am doing some preliminary reading on the topic of leisure. Leisure is not simple to describe. Leisure activities could be considered an art and a science.
I was very fortunate to acquire a set of the Great Books of the Western World that my father owned. My Dad told me that he had expected to do some reading of these books during his retirement. He found that he never took the leisure to read as much as he had expected. His retirement became too busy with chores, family (my mother and his sister), and volunteer organizations (school board and church committees). I developed my planned reading list for the topic of leisure by using the Great Books Syntopicon. The list starts with readings from the old testament Genesis and Proverbs through Plato, Aristotle, … Shakespeare up through modern times including Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Karl Marx, Tolstoy, and Freud. From my own reading I would include a review of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
I looked at what people are saying now about retirement and leisure. Most of what I found on-line, or in the AARP literature, is a repeat of valuable classic ideas, such as what Sylvia Porter said in her book about money management (Sylvia Porter’s New Money Book for the 80’s). When I was a child and questions of money came up, my father would say, “Let’s see what Sylvia Porter has to say.” He would pull her book down from the shelf in the living room and bring it back to the dinner table to look up our question. College classes on leisure seem to be focused on marketing to the retired or vacationing folks. My quick survey on Google found no college classes offering real discussion of what leisure is or how it should be used. This is a sad transition of the college BA degree from how to live well to how to make a living.
I found an excellent summary of leisure in an essay by Mortimer J. Adler “Labor, Leisure, and Liberal Education (1951).” He starts off with, “ … the end of liberal education, … lies in the use we make of our leisure, …”
Adler continues with several interesting points:
- A liberal education has three departments: physical, moral, and intellectual.
- "The good or happy life is a life lived in the cultivation of virtue. … it is concerned with leisure. The good life depends on labor, but it consists of leisure."
- "Leisure activities constitute not mere living but living well. They are what Aristotle calls ‘virtuous activities’ or the ‘goods of the soul.’”
Retirement is not a vacation. My initial impulse was to treat retirement like an extended vacation. After a few months my body told me this was not working. Life still requires many of the skills that I used in my working years. I found that focus, goals, planning, and deliberate practice are still values that are important to my happiness. I cannot just lounge around exploring the backroads of New Hampshire, eating cinnamon rolls, muffins, Oreo creme filled cookies, and drinking craft beer at every opportunity. There are still bills to pay, (my wife keeps us current), health to look after, (for both of us), and fitness to maintain and improve, etc. My wife is exploring cooking, painting, and organizing our lives. She signs the Plan of the Day (POD) now, in addition to writing it. My kids are no longer required to give “chow calls” (a military school hazing practice) when they visit. I have learned to have patience with my workouts, take the time to warmup properly and do easy calisthenics in sets of 40, 80 or a 100. (I still lack patience to do cool down stretching.) Large sets used to be just too boring, now it is routine, imagine that! I discovered that doing pushups once a week is as useful and less risk of damage to my shoulder than doing pushups three times a week. This is some of the work of leisure.
What is the best use of my leisure? I realized in the first months of my retirement that I have a strong desire to be productive. But I want to be productive in the right way. I don’t want to sink my time and energy into local politics, volunteering, random travels, random reading (idle curiosity). I want to understand how our world and our society has come to its present condition. Why do we make the choices we do? Why do politicians and leaders make the decisions they make? What does it mean to have good conversation? How can I truly understand myself, my friends, my neighbors, the people I meet in my local community?
Rather than reinvent or rediscover these conversations, I am spending time looking into the what has been said about leisure in our western culture. What saved me a lot of time and fumbling around in my ignorance was Mortimer J. Adler’s recounting of Aristotle’s discussion of leisure activities. This essay described the distinction of “leisure-work,” that the crown jewels [my words] of retirement are philosophy and politics, both broadly interpreted. Other important activities of leisure are love and friendship. (See the postscript to “The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense by Mortimer J. Adler,” page 11.)
My conclusion so far is that my retirement provides leisure choices. Adler’s description of Aristotle's evaluation and ranking of leisure activities is a life changing insight for me because I see that Aristotle’s words classify my own desires, they classify the activities that took up so much of my father’s time in retirement, the activities of many of my former associates from the Navy, the civilian working world, and the people I learn about in books or in the news. My retirement is an unfolding mystery. My retirement facilitates the leisure activities of discovery (philosophy), teamwork (politics) and spending time in conversation with friends (love and friendship)!
