Getting Busy
The whole idea of retirement is supposed to be to get less busy and to relax, but that seems rarely to be the case. I have written an entire published academic book on pensions and yet despite being a financial professional, I prefer not to delve too deeply into the financial aspects of retirement. That is more about wanting to stay away from the micro considerations than the macro issues. I just figure that so many people have written about how to prepare financially for retirement that there isn’t much left to say without sounding like the latest copy of the AARP Gazette. Save more sooner is the obvious first rule, closely followed by stay aggressive with your investments well through when you retire because everyone is living longer and needing that post-retirement kick in the larger pool of assets represented by your retirement savings nut. The rest is mostly eyewash other than the obvious investment rules of the road like don’t pay a lot for active management, try to go passive and forget about income and just think total return. Now that I have covered the first few pages of every retirement planning article, I feel free to discuss the really import stuff of retirement, which is about how you spend your time.
Every person who retires is bound to want the world to think that they are more than what their work said they were. That means that most often and certainly almost always in the beginning of retirement, the standard line goes something like, “I’m so busy that I don’t know how I ever had time for work…”. That accomplishes two important retiree goals. The first is that it shows people that you are not a lonely retired person with no interests and nothing to do. The second is to be intentionally flippant about how you never really defined yourself by your work and so-there. Depending on how that first year of retirement goes, some retirees like to say with ongoing flippancy that they have “failed retirement”, which is really to say that they are, indeed, really defined by their work and therefore must work in order to maintain a sense of self worth.
I was once ensconced in an “Emeritus Office” at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. When I would travel up to Ithaca for my weekly lecture, which began at 4pm on Mondays, I would go up the day before and spend the whole day in that office where I had been assigned a desk by the administrative powers that ran the building. Faculty offices are widely considered one of the great underutilized resources of the world (along with vacation houses on expensive ski slopes and large shiny yachts sitting at docks in toney marinas). Professors only have to work four days a week as a rule and long before COVID they were allowed a wide berth of discretion about where they spent their time since especially at major research universities, thinking great thoughts is far more important than teaching great thoughts. The loneliness of the hallways in the faculty offices of America is a well-known attribute. But, strangely enough, that did not permeate the one office where emeritus professors were assigned desks. That office in Sage Hall was quite nice in that it had a cathedral ceiling due to the retrofitted gothic architecture of the late-Nineteenth Century building, and it contained four desks to which three retired faculty members and one “special” adjunct or “Clinical” professor (me) were assigned. I probably had more wisdom thrown at me on those Mondays in the Emeritus Office than at any other time in my life.
One of the concepts laid on me there was that there are two types of retirement. The first type involves a sort of de-escalation of work as one knew it. This would involve the extended advisory work of reducing the number of hours being dedicated to obligatory work attendance, but the hopefully full mental engagement in advising the new folks supposedly doing the job how best to do that job. This approach of simply doing less of the same thing one has always done for work seems best suited for people who are real specialists and their accumulated specialized wisdom remains in demand and perhaps in shorted supply than not. This type of retirement seems best for people who liked what they did and have no real desire to distance themselves from it and, in fact, might well like the senior statesman role afforded someone in that sort of advisory role. The second type of retirement is the abrupt change sort where one chooses to do something totally different on the theory that enough was enough and its time to take on other tasks and challenges. This seems best suited for people who got stuck in a rut of their own imagining and want out. One of my prized pieces of memorabilia is a plastic crate (3x3x3 inches) that has a button. Push that button and the crate jiggles and there is a knocking sound as though someone is inside who says, “Excuse me, excuse me…would you let me out of here!!!” This is the iconic symbol of this sort of retiree.
I feel that I now have a third type of retirement and wish I could be back in that Emeritus Office to share my acquired wisdom with my more senior fellows of the academy. I was a banker and then a CEO of various businesses, which means that my job progression moved from generalized finance to more specialized managerial science. Specifically, I consider myself to have been mostly an early-stage business builder. I have been a later-stage business maintainer and modest grower, but that role suited me less well. I have even been a late-stage undertaker of businesses, but that was something done of necessity and totally without enthusiasm. So, as I have progressed into retirement, I think it is fair to say that I have totally changed my daily activities (I have no managerial duties and no people to manage) like Retiree #2, but I have also maintained and deployed my specialized knowledge and skills (specifically in finance) like Retiree #1. This hybrid retirement seems to suite me for several reasons.
To begin with, my main activity in retirement is writing (hence this story). I write for pleasure, for fun, to inform, to keep myself informed, to give myself an outlet for expression and to allow myself to be as analytical as I need to be to feel fulfilled. The two activities I dedicate most of my time to are teaching and bearing witness (as an expert witness). Both require me to stay current, to be analytical, to read a fair bit and stay informed and to write quite extensively. For my teaching I write books. For my expert work I write long reports. Then, everything else I do including traveling, communing with friends and even gardening, all work to feed my writing as a storyteller. I think it all hangs together quite nicely and leaves me always with something to do no matter where I might be. In other words, it doesn’t restrict my movements too much (the teaching does a bit, but I manage to work around it just fine). I am very much left to my own devices to work on things whenever I feel the urge to do so.
At this moment I am doing my early morning writing while the mist still shrouds the hilltop and has yet to burn off. I will read and grade some of the essays from my students (best to stay ahead of the paperwork monster) as I prepare for my class this evening (prepared for a month ago and PowerPoint in the can, as they say). I must prepare for expert testimony tomorrow by reading some recent supportive testimony and apply it to my previously submitted report. I must also download added documents for another expert case and start reading or at least sorting that so that when I am sent revisions to my initial report, I can do my rewrites quickly and on an fully informed basis. And then, I must prepare for a trip this weekend to gather with friends at an event which will deserve a special story from me once the weekend is over. That will leave me a few days to hold another two classes before we leave for Spain next Thursday. I don’t know about you, but I would say that for a retired guy, I’m getting pretty busy.