Winter solstice thoughts on reinventing oneself in retirement

It is now the winter solstice, the Holly King has vanquished the Oak King. It seems a good time of year to reflect on the balance of opposites, because uneasy lies the head that wears a crown...

The search for wisdom to go with knowledge is one of the themes of the second half of life.Joseph Campbell talked about the value of myth in passing on wisdom, in his magnum opus The Hero with a Thousand Faces. For nearly two decades after my mid-twenties I hardly read any fiction at all, and it probably impaired my ability to comprehend the mystery of being human. That was okay then – you don’t become an engineer because you have a burning sense of wanting to work with people and understand how they work

Establishing themselves in society in the Turning Outwards in one’s twenties, most people find some aspects of their psyche easier to face the world with. The extrovert seeks the company of people, and feeds off their energy. I was not one of these, I was never going to become a salesman, a politician or a motivational speaker. The inferior function, that aspect of one’s psyche that is not normally set against the world, slumbers across the working years, it is not efficient to play a weaker hand.

In my case this is pretty much the whole of the humanities in terms of knowledge, and perhaps a gentling of the introverted nature. I didn’t pick any of this up when I retired in 2012,  perhaps the first few years were occupied with the process of recovery.

But I am picking up signals from these inferior ¹ functions, now that enough time has passed since stopping work, and now that I have moved. Although we knew a few people here from before, it is invigorating to start anew, and the people we are meeting here value different things in life. They are generally from a more artistic rather than an engineering background. It is early days yet, but perhaps widening the range of activities I cover offers a different kind of reward, developing what has been idle for a long time. I am learning different things – to take one example I have become a better photographer in the areas of composition and the decisive moment, while perhaps weaker in the technical control of the camera since I let this be done automatically a lot more now. I needed to push myself in different areas of the craft, ones I have left fallow too often because they weren’t my strong hand.

Jung posits that the inferior functions of the psyche  still run in the background, and as one gets older these seek expression, to maintain balance. I was surprised to come across the same concept derived from a very different angle from the author Brene Brown, with an unusual twist.

Looking at others, there is a general principle, that energy and capabilities need to flow, the water must find its way to the sea. What is suppressed backs up and will out, but I hadn’t really thought this extended to what is unused.

life as a journey

I am fortunate in that the town I moved to has several bookshops ², and on some previous visit a couple of years ago I picked up one that was remaindered for £5, titled New Passages, by Gail Sheehy. I had already read the original version titled Passages, (predictable crises of adult life) as a library book, and drew on a lot of it when I wrote Journey’s End. There was also a lot of dissonance for me in the case-studies of people as they went through the stages of life. I assumed the dissonance was due to the fact that most of the cases were American, and the book was written when I was a teenager so it describes a world several decades old.

The blurb of the new book was

At last, this is your story. You’ll recognize yourself, your friends, and your loves. You’ll see how to use each life crisis as an opportunity for creative change — to grow to your full potential.

Mrs Ermine appropriated the book so I never got to read it at the time, I figured she may as well read it first since I had already read the original version. I’ve only now started reading the new version, which was written in 1995, and the original version was written in 1976. And saw Sheehy had written about the end of my career when I was just over halfway through it.

“Just at the point when […] reached their forties. however, sweeping structural changes were revolutionising the American and Western European economies. A digital revolution happened under their noses. Worldwide industrial competition grows more fierce every year”

This did happen to The Firm, when I was in my thirties. I had just foolishly overpaid for my first house, so I kept my head down and sucked it up. I was lucky enough to be too young to be the obvious target for the massive rotating axe swung above the workforce’s heads in 1997. Some of those guys got fantastic payoffs, some in their 50s being able to draw their pensions immediately with no actuarial reduction, effectively transferring the cost of redundancy payment from The Firm to the pension scheme. And Sheehy foresaw that, and in applying it to the generation 10 years older than me, foretold what would happen to me just over a decade later.

Sheehy’s description of the experience of the American blue collar workers presaged Donald Trump’s base. I shared  with them a roughly fixed work identity after I had job-switched in my twenties. I was intellectually agile enough to change field entirely, from electronics engineering to software/IT/networking as well as leading people as I drifted up the greasy pole. But it’s nothing like Peter Drucker’s ³ exhortations

“you have to take responsibility for knowing yourself so you can find the right jobs as you develop and as your family becomes a factor in your values and choices. […]Simply being well-educated is no longer enough.[…] When you don’t communicate, you don’t get to do the things you are good at.” ⁴

Hindsight is always a wonderful thing. because all the decision trees that fan out from any one state have been collapsed into what did happen, the one path pruned from the bushy growth of potential outcomes. But I can’t help wondering what would have happened if the younger Ermine had picked up Gail Sheehy’s signal earlier. I can’t even take solace in the thought that others didn’t see that coming – Jim at SMHD saw the writing on the wall in his thirties,

I used to worry about losing my job in my fifties quite a bit, and it was quite a driver behind the saving and investing that I did in my thirties and forties.

Jim SHMD

and I am a similar age. Jim may have been ahead of the curve here. The Cambridge alumnus magazine ⁵ Cam 81 has a spine chilling vision of the ‘new normal’ global economy 3.0 where everybody should worry about losing their jobs, pretty much stick your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye. It’s automation wot’s doing it, and

the reason firms in high-income countries want to pursue automation is because they are under competitive pressure from foreign imports.

A deadly economic flat spin coming our way. But hell, the bear case always sounds smarter, so let’s all whistle a dancing tune and invoke the optimist’s cure-all ‘human ingenuity’ and hope it doesn’t happen, eh? Having seen Sheehy be right on the economic forces, I figured I would see what she had to say about the more personal future.

Sheehy on the ages of (wo)man

First a caveat – some of her work seems to draw heavily on Carl Jung’s psychology. I find Jung an inspirational and accurate mapping for the course of my own development, but this may not be universal. If I look at my closer peer group the mapping is close, but if I look at, say, my mother, it isn’t. She was way ahead of my lifestage development in her 30s and 40s, but I’d say she dropped back after her 40s. Looking at other people, often people stall at one of the stages, recoiling from the change needed. I’d hazard a guess that retirement is one life stage where many people stall mentally at the change from working to non-working, I can think of several family members who shied at that stage.

M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled is a much more lyrical description of the life journey, with a flow that Sheehy’s writing doesn’t have. I don’t find her as bad as this LA Times review, but it’s not a book I can read in long runs. She coarsely divides modern adult life into provisional adulthood (18 to 30), first adulthood (30 to 45) and second adulthood 45+ . Her description of provisional adulthood makes more sense of the cultural changes of people under 30. When I was that age, it was expected that children would leave the parental home when they left school, at 18 at the latest. This was the general norm – many left at 16 to start work, and going to university was vaguely effete and unmanly, considerably less than half of my grammar school even applied. It was a source of pain to me to have to go back to my parents’ place after university because I was unemployed for six months, and it took just over a year before I left home for the last time at 23.

So I look now where you have young adults of almost 30 living with their parents and think to myself WTF, do these guys have no self-respect? But these are anachronistic standards, and with the longer life expectancy and greater material wealth perhaps 30 is the new 20. Sheehy’s description of provisional adulthood matches modern Britain much better than my recollection of my 20s. People start earning a living later in life than my cohort, as well as starting off life with a negative balance from all that student debt. ⁶

In the FIRE community First Adulthood seems to be the period when many want to earn their fortunes, I don’t think it’s coincidental that retiring by 45 is a goal It also coincides with the period when many have children, though the end date is fuzzy. Previous generations that expected their children to be financially self-sufficient by 18 would have managed that if they had their kids by 27, but two things about the modern world run against that goal. One is that many children don’t seem to become self-sufficient until about 30, and the other is that the average age of mothers is about 30, which probably pushes the 45 target out to about 60 nowadays.

Second adulthood

I bought Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul researching this because I found Sheehy’s concept of the second adulthood very reminiscent of Jung’s work. I should have read it much earlier ⁷

Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. I have given psychological treatment to too many people of advancing years, and have looked too often into the secret chambers of their souls, not to be moved by this fundamental truth.

Carl Jung Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Gail Sheehy’s book has case studies of people as they rattle across the railroad switches into the second adulthood, the Turning Inwards. Jung has these too, with a sharp humour –

The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years have this in common, that they betray the attempt to carry the psychic dispositions of youth beyond the threshold of the so-called years of discretion. Who does not know those touching old gentlemen who must always warm up the dish of their student days, who can fan the flames of life only by reminiscences of their heroic youth—and who for the rest, are stuck in a hopelessly wooden philistinism?

Although I have roughly grasped both authors’ summary of the meaning of the second adulthood, it’s hard to put across without having some experience of the transition. The essential problem is that the requirements of work, and outer worldly success demand a high price at the beginning of the first adulthood

We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many—aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.

I would say that for educated professionals, the effect of having to suppress parts of themselves is much worse now than it was, with the increasing pace, instability and competitiveness in the workplace. But even from my childhood living in a primarily blue-collar neighbourhood, I saw some of those glowing coals of the inferior functions, there was one guy who was a metal-basher by day but made exquisitely detailed ships in a bottle in his time off work, and grunts who swept floors and shifted boxes by day and painted watercolours by night.

That diminution of personality has its cost, and this backs up in the psyche, and seeks a way out. An increasingly toxic workplace is having an effect on employees mental health, it’s not that surprising that those that can get out want out earlier.

early retirees get to define their second adulthood at the right time in life

Normal retirement at State Pension age of 67 is a bit late to begin the second adulthood, so early retirees have an opportunity to engage with this change more actively. What makes this hard is many people identify with work as providing a meaning for life. People ask “what do you do” at parties, not “what do you stand for”. Erich Fromm identified that to be is more important than to have, I’d extend that what you are is more important than what you do.

Change is always difficult, particularly after decades of working most of your waking hours. However, the ‘and then what’ comes to all early retirees, particularly if their friends and acquaintances are still at work. I parried this for a while, using practical and mechanical skills on the farm. And yet if I stood back and measured my progress in the terms of work skills, it has been a gradual slide into irrelevance. I look at articles about engineering, even specialisms I had been in, and I am drifting way behind the leading edge of the curve.

That’s fine with me now. A commenter observed offline that scientists and engineers do their best work in the first half of life. I didn’t really want to hear that then, perhaps I retained some of the Calvinist you are what you do. I parked that for a while. Then an opportunity came up for us to change direction. For sure, I learn new things post work, but across a broader spectrum. What I do now lies more on the inferior axis, aesthetic and visual balance judgement calls, sounds, and every so often, people. It’s just as well that I don’t need to earn money doing these, because this is my weak hand. When I look at The Canny Contractor’s What’s your Why it doesn’t ring true for me, though I have no issue with the philosophy and it’s a great article. It’s a younger person’s fight, that one I do not need to strengthen the stronger hand. I need to improve the weaker hand, atrophied from thirty years of being in the shadows. These aspects of life will never be as strong as in people born with more aptitude, but I will gain balance in life, and I have been lucky enough to have the privilege of having this choice. For that freedom I am grateful.

What Mrs Ermine was doing was moving in a direction she wasn’t that attracted to, and she was similarly developing other interests. Perhaps she hears the call of Thoreau’s distant drummer

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.