Take a seat.
There is a conversation about retirement that almost everyone has, and almost everyone has incompletely. It goes something like this: Have you saved enough? Will it last? What will you live on? These are not foolish questions. They are real, and for many people they carry genuine weight. But somewhere along the way, those questions became the whole conversation — and that is where the trouble starts.
Money, in amounts that always vary, usually boils down to more options, especially in retirement. The important thing to consider for a long and happy retirement is that we rarely need to have that many options.
Money matters. This Commentary is not going to pretend otherwise, and neither will any that follow it. The financial dimension of retirement is real, it requires thought and preparation, and ignoring it is not wisdom. Money has done something that no single dimension of a life should ever be allowed to do. It has colonised the entire subject. It has pushed everything else to the margins — or out of the room altogether — and persuaded too many people that if the financial question is answered, the retirement question is answered also. It is not.
Consider what that leaves out.
Your physical health. Your diet and what it is actually doing for you at this stage of life. Whether you are sleeping — really sleeping — and what happens to everything else when you are not. Whether you are moving your body in ways that serve it rather than merely satisfying a number on a fitness tracker. Your mental acuity, and the quiet, largely unacknowledged truth that many people in the retirement years are already managing early cognitive changes without quite admitting it to themselves, let alone to anyone else.
Having your own sense of purpose — who you are when you are no longer defined by what you do. Your relationships, and whether they are deepening or quietly narrowing. Your social connection, and what its absence costs in ways that no financial plan has ever accounted for. The rhythms of your time, now that the old structure has gone. Where you live, and whether that place is serving you. What you are still learning, and whether curiosity remains alive in you. And what you will leave behind — not in a will, but in the minds and lives of the people who knew you.
These are not secondary considerations. They are not the soft side of retirement, to be attended to once the hard financial work is done. They are the substance of life itself, and they do not operate independently of one another. With every stage of life, they turn together, like parts of a single system — which is exactly what they are. If sleep deteriorates, cognition follows. If purpose disappears, social interaction often follows — and with it the far more important matter of genuine connection, which is something quite distinct from the transactional surface of everyday social contact. When physical health declines without proper attention, everything else carries the burden. The financial dimension is part of that system too — but only part.
There is something else worth saying at the outset, and it concerns the remarkable system that is your own body and mind.
Throughout your life, and right up to this moment, that mind and body system has been working on your behalf — healing, regulating, compensating, and persisting, often in spite of, and not because of, the choices you made along the way. It did most of this with no conscious direction and asked very little in return. That important part of your system deserves some respect, and perhaps a little reciprocity.
Research into ageing and wellbeing has consistently found that people who cultivate a genuine attitude of gratitude — toward others, toward the circumstances of life, and toward their own body and mind — tend to fare better as they age. Not as a technique or a practice to be performed, but as an orientation: looking at yourself with appreciation rather than criticism, focusing on what you can do rather than what you cannot. In later life, when the world can be quick to remind you of what diminishes rather than what endures, that orientation is no small thing.
Jack Lack’s Listening Chair exists because the full conversation about retirement — the one that includes all of these dimensions and takes each of them seriously — is not happening loudly enough or widely enough. The Commentaries, Interviews and Voices and Issues you will find here are an attempt to change that, one subject at a time, one voice at a time.
Money has its place in the conversation, but money will not be the whole of it.
Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.