Retirement, time on our hands and the consequences.

 Subject: Retirement, time on our hands and the consequences.



Why do the minutes, hours, days, months and years seem to go by faster after you retire. When you’re working there never seems enough time to do the things that need doing and one of the pleasures in retirement is that possibly, for the first time you yourself prioritise what you feel is important.

There are those retirees lucky enough to visit countries across the world for which they have an interest, there are hobbies to take up and there are commitments to both family and also to people less well off or in poor health who benefit from the time you invest in their needs rather than solely your own.

Time takes on a different meaning when you retire. The impetus to be somewhere at someone else’s beck and call is missing but so is the commitment to be part of a team achieving a wider aim. The sense of belonging is emulsified by this lack of a common agenda, your four walls at home become increasingly your boundary of experience and you are in danger of being minimised by this lack of a alternative perspective. Health is the final abettor of how well your retirement pans out, all the riches in the world can’t compensate for disability issues, even those tours become a chore if your mind is taken over by your painful knees rather than the view.

The substance of most lives has been, up to retirement the type of work we do and those fortunate enough to have the skill to intuitively work from home they can still thrive with the achievement and the money a successful occupation brings but for most of us it’s a matter of keeping the garden ship-shape and negotiating the supermarket isles with the stability a trolley brings.

We do of course have a great deal of time to reflect and judge and in this confusing world where so many of our values and beliefs have been highjacked and the supplanting of concepts which border on being influential as to who we are, seem an infringement to that person. If all we believed in previously, be it gender recognition, personal discipline, the very actuality questioned of what we see with our own eyes, as Artificial Intelligence re-scopes our conception of reality. How will future generations live in a world which, like Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead at the same time. When faced with large-scale unreality we become mentally unwieldy and fair game to unscrupulous gamesters like Donald Trump. At least in Russia and China we are told what to think which removes the psychological turmoil of believing we have choice.