Q: I hope that you have some ideas for me. I retired last spring. I was 73. I guess that is a little later than it is for most guys who retire, but I never really worried about it.
For the past 30 plus years I had been a parts man at one of our local farm dealerships. I loved my job, which is why I kept at it for so long.
The problem is that now that I am retired I am finding that this is not the golden age I always thought that it would be. To put it mildly, it is downright boring.
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I help a little around the house and try my hand at wood working in my basement, but really I feel like I am just wasting time and I cannot get excited about very much.
I keep thinking that there must be some kind of a trick to this thing. Is there a course or something that a guy could take to learn how to enjoy being retired? I need something to get me going. What do you think?
A: I am sure that there are any number of courses all over the place to help people adjust to the moment of retirement, but most of the courses with which I am familiar tend to be those recommending various programs for money management.
That strikes me as kind of ironic. Most of us need more guidance trying to turn as much magic as we can with too few dollars when we are younger and trying to raise our families than we do when we are older and have fewer living expenses.
However, that is what they do, and if you want to grab onto a few more ideas on how to live on a fixed income, you will find all kinds of options.
If you want to live a more complete and wholesome life you will likely not find that much to help you.
Neither are you going to find much help from our general culture. Your friends and neighbors and there to remind you that these are the golden years and all you have to do is sit back, commiserate about your memories of when you were younger and let the world come to you. I sometimes wonder if those who are so quick to offer such advice ever realized how boring their options are.
The problem that you appear to be having, which is one that is widely shared in any number of retirement villas, is that you are not getting the rewards you need to maintain a healthy and positive sense of who you are as a person.
When you were a parts man, you got rewards at least daily for finding and retrieving those parts needed in the shop. You got some rewards from satisfied customers, and if you successfully held that job for as long as you did, you probably got the occasional pat on the back from your supervisors.
Now you get none.
You may not need as many rewards as you did when you were a younger person, but all of us need to get some recognition for whatever it is that we are doing, and if you are not getting any, you could easily get quite depressed.
I think that most people who I see successfully navigating their way through retirement have reward systems in their commitments.
Some get rewards from their grandkids. They get right in there with the kids and help them develop into little men and women.
Others get involved in either their churches or their communities and get rewarded for serving on committees and contributing to whatever projects the church/community initiates.
And then there are those who get something out of helping each other through the latter years of their lives. Someone knocks on doors to make sure that others in the group are well and healthy in the morning, someone goes shopping for those who cannot do so for themselves, someone has a Christmas dinner and others plant a few carrots in the community garden. The interplay between all people within the group is a natural reward system for everyone.
Whatever it is that you choose for yourself, you need only make sure that you are going to find gratitude there — either explicitly from someone saying “thank you” or implicitly from watching the world unfold a little better than what it once was.
