Shop Rotations at 60
What if retirement takes some experimenting?
I recently read a Facebook conversation about finding purpose in retirement. What caught my attention was how many people pushed back on the idea that they needed to find a purpose at all.
One person said that, after decades of working, she just wanted to enjoy her days and control her own time. Another said that all the talk about purpose, goals, and mission statements sounded too much like work. Someone else had spent so many years defining herself by her career that she wasn’t sure who she was without it.
Why, one commenter wondered, do we expect people entering retirement to know what they want to do with the next 20 or 30 years, when we wouldn’t expect an 18-year-old to have the rest of their life figured out?
It’s a good point. The comment made me think about my daughter.
She went to a vocational high school and started her first year thinking she wanted to study one thing, but freshmen rotate through the different shops before choosing one. Somewhere in those rotations, she discovered engineering. She couldn’t have known from the course catalog that she would love it. She had to experience it.
Later, in college, she changed her major three times. We don’t find that unusual in a young person. We expect teenagers and young adults to explore, try things, and change their minds. This helps them discover that something they thought they’d love isn’t for them and something they’d never considered is a good fit. We’ve built an entire support system for adolescents and young adults, including parents, teachers, guidance counselors, coaches, advisors, internships, electives, and more.
Our culture expects that grownups approaching retirement should know who we are and what we want. We ask questions like: What are you going to do all day? What are your hobbies? Where are you going to volunteer?
Those are useful questions, and I ask some of them myself in my work, but I’m starting to wonder if we’re asking them with the wrong expectations.
Barbara Waxman coined the term middlescence to describe a developmental stage in late midlife with parallels to adolescence. This is a stage of life where the roles we’ve had for decades can disappear or transform, as children leave home, relationships evolve, loved ones need caregiving, and retirement can land right in the middle of it all.
Yet there’s no guidance counselor waiting outside the retirement party. We have plenty of resources to answer one question: can I afford to retire? Financial advisors, retirement calculators, and seminars, plus Social Security estimates, are all available to tell us whether the numbers work.
There’s much less in place for the other important questions: who am I without my work, what matters to me now, and what’s next for me?
There’s far more to think about than the money. And those things deserve our attention long before our last day of work. Our relationships, health, identity, interests, and the way we want to spend an ordinary Tuesday all matter.
In one of my workshops, a participant described his retirement as feeling like jumping off a cliff. That image has stuck with me.
You may think you’ll love having nothing on your calendar, only to discover that you miss structure, or plan to volunteer somewhere and find that you hate it. Or you could stumble into something that never would have made it onto your retirement vision board. You can only know what your days will feel like once you live them.
I named my practice One Degree Turns because I believe change can begin before we know the destination. My daughter found engineering through a shop rotation. That same discovery process is available to us at 60.
We can follow our curiosity, try something once, and see where it goes. It doesn’t have to become a commitment or our new passion. That can be our version of a shop rotation: following something that interests us long enough to see what we discover.
We’re planning for a stage of life that could last 20 or 30 years, and just as we’ve grown and changed throughout our careers, we’ll keep evolving as retirement unfolds.
As you prepare, imagine what you’d like an ordinary Tuesday to look like, and also leave some blank spaces. What are you curious enough to try next?