Life is but a bore so pensioners say

According to a recent survey carried out by the Skipton Building Society, one half of a group of retired people canvassed said that within ten months of retirement they were bored with life! Having spent most of their working lives dreaming, scheming and saving for a life in retirement they found the freedom to do whatever they wanted with their time had not given them the happiness they had hoped to have.

For some,the extra lie-ins and the opportunity of watching daytime television had quickly palled in appeal.No longer did they feel useful or able to rely on a structured work life to offer meaning to their everyday existence. Sometimes loneliness had replaced the comfort of camaraderie in the workplace. Also of course, for some, the cause of dissatisfaction was a shortage of disposable money to indulge themselves, or at best to maintain their standard of living on a reduced income.

If you are like a rudderless ship, you should look to find a new structure for your life, and one which will utilise transferable skills employed prior to retirement. Of course your health may dictate what you can and cannot do but your future activities can be tailored to your abilities. There is an opportunity to learn new skills and acquire new interests.

I hope that you will regularly return to these pages where we will be offering solutions to help drive away the hopelessness many feel when faced with the challenges of a new life beyond work – work of another nature, paid or unpaid, may also,of course, be a part or the whole of the solution to this dilemma.

… but offers one wherein everyone will find something that will help improve their lives. For now, I leave you with this thought : during a busy work life  the successful order of things rested heavily on acts of behaviour or routines very much driven by habit, like buying a newspaper on the way to the bus stop, or cutting-up for your lunch box,simple things which you did without much thought or extra learning, but if you missed out doing them it mattered to your general wellbeing. The number of these good daily habits was large, and probably ranged from the trivial to the vital,but all together played their part in keeping your life together and moving forward with some meaning.

In retirement,or any new life, we need to develop a new set of good daily habits some of which we may or may not have incorporated in our previous life.It is a time to sort through and retain what is useful from the past for the future.

The good habits may help us in retirement to:

• eat well and exercise for health;
• likewise sleep better
• take on new learning, doing something each day in which we excel utilising our experience or skill;
• reduce stress;
• socialise, or at least make yourself known;
• do things that make you feel better, this might be for instance helping someone else through a problem;
• have a routine when you first wake-up

Many of these interact,and there are many others, which will be covered in detail soon in future posts on this site, and in my newsletters.

You can read a Skipton Building Society report on aspects and attitudes relating to retirement