The New Retirementality, Fifth Edition

CHAPTER 6A New Mind-Set: Retire on Purpose

Too many people die with their music still in them.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

I have seen too many retirees adrift on a sea of aimlessness, boredom, and discontentment. They found freedom from their old job and the old routines but didn't sufficiently contemplate what that freedom could lead them toward. There is an entire generation of people arising who have decided to make their “second life” of life the most meaningful one. This group understands the habits, attitudes, and pursuits that directly correlate with successful aging and staying young at heart. Words like curiosity, connectivity, challenge, and contributing are hallmarks of a new generation of retirees, who are transforming “retiring” into “refiring” and “reclining” into “refining.” These people are leaving an indelible impact on the people, ideas, and causes they care about the most.

In an excellent The Atlantic article titled, Making Aging Positive, Linda Fried, one of the founders of the Experience Corps, stated, “The truth is that we have created a new stage of life but have not yet envisioned its purpose, meaning, and opportunities, and the space is being filled with our fears. Like a drunk searching for a lost wallet under the wrong lamppost ‘because that's where the light is,' we are not looking for answers in the right places.”¹ Fried is correct, as is her prognosis of what it will take to change the problem: “We don't yet know what this new stage of life can be, ...