During a coffee break at our weekly climbing session today my regular climbing partner was telling me about his impending retirement. His foremost expectation is that he will be spending a lot of time redecorating the house, and catching up on the backlog of repair work in the home. I asked him, “What then?”
Having retired from my former career in University teaching about twenty years ago, I am convinced that a very important factor making for the success of that change in my circumstances was the fact that I looked at it, not in terms of the end of a career, but as the start of some definite commitment that I have come to regard as a second career. I “retired” in one sense, but in order to become an artist. My primary definition of myself is not as an “ex-academic” but as an artist.
I gather that retirement presents a common problem particularly among men, for whom their occupational identity tends to be rather more salient than in the case of women. The end of “work” results in a sense that they have lost identity altogether rather than simply changed it. For women, other roles (especially family roles) tend to be more salient throughout their working lives, so that the end of their employment isn’t as likely to be experienced as a deprivation of identity in quite such an absolute sense.
My commitment to my role as an artist can bring its own problems, however, in that when I find myself in a fallow period, when ideas are either not coming as often as I would like, or the ones I do have turn out to be not very productive, the situation tends to be experienced as so much more than mere boredom. I find myself facing the question of who I am.