When it comes to ambition, pacing and purpose, every generation has its own healthy operating beliefs. There’s an overlap but overall, the development of wisdom is cumulative and comes about from the processing of life experience, something that happily retired baby boomers who are happy in retirement have in abundance. Nevertheless, for baby boomers, the temptation is to share what we’ve learned with our offspring. But the wisest among us keep at least some of our discoveries about life in retirement largely to ourselves. In doing so, our adult children switch lanes prematurely and skip important steps needed for their development. For this reason, happy retirees have learned to keep secrets and now one life stage expert is willing to share.
Boomer author Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., a leader in the conscious aging movement and author of 36 books for and about life stage development, has studied people in their post-career years and come to some paradigm-shifting conclusions. In search of her wisdom, I interviewed Orsborn about her new book, Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. Following are her 5 Secrets happy retirees keep from their children:
1. Leave Careers Behind
After living a life driven by ambition, the biggest secret happy retirees keep to themselves is how fulfilling life can be without it. The focus changes from trying to be an important somebody (being a player) to becoming a nobody, yet living in an engaged way. Many retirees who hail from the boomer generation realize that we let our ambition get out of hand and we now are happy to disengage from pushing ourselves to succeed and explore a less-driven pace for ourselves. Many of us had parents who were depression-era children. The success scripts passed down to us were often to be hard working, prudent, careful, risk averse, and more. Orsborn teaches that we have earned the right to drive ourselves less and enjoy life more. Along these lines, we want our children to follow a healthier script that includes permission to find a better life balance and more inner directed, and purpose driven.
But because we have learned to keep some things to ourselves, credit for younger generations’ “The Great Resignation” and “quiet quitting” needs to be shared with the pandemic, an extended timeout that gave the younger generations time to pause and evaluate their lives —-a reset regarding how they want to spend their time and energy. However, it is healthy to want our children to identify career paths or interests and commit the time and discipline necessary toward making their own livelihood. In other words, we don’t have to feel guilty about enjoying our freedom. We want to be supporting our adult children’s passion project and lifestyle, but we don’t want to encourage them to skip the making a living part.
2. Accumulating Is A Burden
The first half of life tends to focus on accumulating things. Gathering objects, experiences, and even certain relationships can confer comfort, status, and beauty. Plus, collecting things and even people is fun. However, most happy retirees eventually discover out the joy that comes from getting rid of all the material things we accumulated over the years. In retrospect, we often regret time wasted working to buy things that felt important when we were younger. We don’t want to ruin our children’s fun in collecting material objects and experiences. But the second half of life is about simplifying, editing, and downsizing. This can be even more fun and liberating. And It’s tempting to try to hold on to things for our children—but chances are our children don’t want our stuff anyway.
3. We’re Really Not That Busy
A big part of being retired is the earned freedom and flexibility of choosing when and where we want to do things. We get to be in control of our time. Doing “nothing”—just reading, listening to music, or gazing at a flower is perfectly fine. However, other people may not understand the value of that nothing time, and be more than willing to fill up empty space with demands or busywork.
Orsborn suggests that we keep how we spend at least part of our time to ourselves. We really don’t have that many doctor’s and physical therapy appointments as we tell our children. We just don’t want to be the on-call sitter for dogs or grandchildren or drop everything to pick up their dry cleaning.
4. We Were Never In Control
Much of our pre-retirement years were invested in the goal of life mastery, and to control everything we could. In this new life stage of retirement, we are forced to admit that our powers are limited: we never really had the ability to fix, cure, or solve everything for everybody. Ironically, of the things we worried about, most of them never happened. What does grab our attention are often things that had never occurred to us. Being retired does not mean we will not have demands on us, or that things won’t go wrong. But we have the wisdom and life experience needed to deal with whatever issues do emerge. When Orsborn speaks of aging as culmination, she is referring to the expansion of consciousness and spiritual growth and these can take root in both serenity and crisis.
5. Continue To Go and Grow
We think retirement should liberate us from all the pressures that have driven us through life. We want all of our issues handled, without more drama or challenges to overcome. Orsborn teaches that it’s worth the effort to try. However, even the happiest retirees report that life post-career—even with money—is not carefree, but that’s okay. This can be the time to take calculated risks and accept challenges. While we don’t have to go skydiving, we can use this time to pursue passions and interests we had put on the backburner earlier in life and embrace what it means to be fully alive.
Orsborn teaches that we’ve earned the right to be our authentic self and not worry what everyone else thinks or says. We are finally beyond seeking the approval of others. There is no right or wrong way to be a happy retiree. There is only your way. And this is not a secret you need to share with your children—or anyone. Be a role model. Simply living a life that brings you happiness will light the way for others without having to say a single word.
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