Dear LPG readers,

I am speaking very generally when I say all this. Still, I think that many people who have not yet arrived at the side of retirement, where you have to look back on it, envision the life of a retiree as slow, relaxed, and relatively unimportant in general. But we older people know that, even with the limitations that our health and finances add to it, it can be anything you want it to be, much like all the other phases of life.

When I look, I have to think back some 12 years to when retirement started.   Before that, I remember the priorities being the need to achieve my employer’s required standard of success each day, arrive on time, not overstretch my lunch hour, and be ready to start work on time and not leave early.  I think that working for a living can be seen as a time when so many spend their hours of employment just achieving the minimum productivity required to keep their bosses happy.  The result for those who do is that they have spent years earning enough to keep food on the table, but each working hour becomes one where it is more important to be seen to have done enough to be just above the standard your boss requires not to be seen as a lazy worker. 

My observations come from the way I hear so many of my younger relatives and friends talk when they are referring to what they call the daily drudge.  I also wonder why that is the answer to so many questions; they are asked about the one activity that often takes up the most significant chunk of their time for a good forty years. It could sound so dull because it is one way of not having to dwell on it when they are not there.

It got me wondering if, now that I have had time to step back and look objectively at what I did when I worked, I view those days differently.

Many of those who dared to work for themselves in some way find themselves at an advantage when they retire because they have learnt something that employees who spend a lifetime working for someone else miss out on.  Being your boss comes with that territory, so even though your work is just as important, the result will likely mean more to you.  This means that while working has to be about what money you get for doing it, what you do stops being as driven by how much you will get paid and is more about what you achieve, which is a lesson that is so important for everyone to bring to their retirement years.

The self-employed are much more equipped for retirement than we, who have spent a working lifetime being told what to do and when to get it done by. They have already learned the discipline needed to measure their success.  

I have concluded that happiness in retirement has much to do with the people around you. Still, it is also essential to acknowledge your daily successes even though you cannot measure them monetarily anymore.  The Word ’salary’ implies money, the stuff that makes nearly everything else we ever achieve possible and even though our ‘salary’ is likely to be well and truly fixed when we are retired, just like any other salary we ever drew when working, we oldies need to be able to measure our achievements.   

I feel it is vital to be able to look back either daily, weekly, or monthly and objectively assess your life’s successes. They don’t have to be huge, but having a list of them makes life seem much more meaningful and allows us to see the value of what we achieve daily.

So, suppose any readers feel that their real lives are now as humdrum as their working life might have been. In that case, it is time to make a daily note of what you have achieved: the person you talked to for the first time, the new meal that you tried, the wall you painted, the new idea you had, the interesting fact that you heard, the phone call you made to a friend you have not heard from for ages, the thing you managed to fix, the funny thing that you saw happen on the way to the shops, the draw you managed to sort out, the kind thing you did for someone else around you and the list goes on…

There is something special about looking back at a daily list of your achievements again and again.

VM, Surrey.