Identity

Take a seat.

In the last commentary, I suggested that the money question — for all its real importance — had crowded out almost every other question worth asking about retirement. Today I want to begin the work of asking those other questions. And the one that sits beneath all the rest, the one that makes the others harder to answer than they might otherwise be, is this: Who are you?

Not what did you do. Who are you.

For most of us, that distinction barely existed during our working lives. The question Who are you was answered, quickly and without much thought, by the question What do you do. We handed over our occupation like a passport at a border crossing, and it got us through. Lawyer. Nurse. Engineer. Teacher. Manager. Tradesperson. The word did the work. It told people where to place us, and it told us where to place ourselves.

Retirement cancels the passport.

This happens overnight in the administrative sense. One day the title is attached to your name. The next day it isn’t. But the psychological adjustment takes considerably longer — and for many people it never fully resolves, because nobody warned them it was coming and nobody gave them anything to replace it with.

I have met people, years into retirement, who still reach for the old title in conversation. Not out of vanity, or not only out of vanity, but because it remains the most efficient answer to a question that retirement has made really difficult. Without it, the honest answer is: I’m still working that out.

Which is, of course, a perfectly good answer. The difficulty is that our culture doesn’t treat it as one.

There is also a more uncomfortable dimension to this. For some people — and I suspect more than would readily admit it — the occupation was not merely a convenient shorthand. It was load-bearing. It carried self-worth, structure, social standing, and daily purpose all at once. When it goes, what goes with it is not just a job title but a significant portion of the architecture of a self. That is a loss, even when the retirement is chosen and welcome, and it deserves to be named as such rather than glossed over with cheerful talk of freedom and leisure.

The good news — and there is good news — is that identity is not fixed. It never was, even when it felt that way. The person you were at thirty was not the person you were at fifty, even if the job title stayed the same. Retirement is not the end of identity. It is an invitation — a rather abrupt and sometimes unwelcome invitation, but an invitation nonetheless — to construct an identity more consciously than most of us have ever had to.

That construction is what the next several commentaries are quietly about. Before we can talk sensibly about purpose, or mindset, or how you spend your time, we need to have a moment with the prior question. The one the working world used to answer for us, without our having to ask.

Who are you, now?

Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.