The Introduction to our book Mindful Retirement, with an overview of the contents

If you walk into Barnes and Noble looking for books on retirement, you’ll find most of them in the Business section. They offer advice about investing money so you have enough cash for a successful retirement. It’s good advice for Americans because many of us are struggling to save for our golden years. More than eighty percent of us invest in 401(k) or similar plans, but one in three have withdrawn money due to emergency or hardship. The median savings for Americans in 2019 was just $5,300. We could all use some help with our finances.

But to have a successful retirement, you need to invest more than money. A well-funded retirement can still prove fatal for the retiree. The impacts of retirement are particularly hard on men. Harvard Health reported in a 2015 study that men who continued working past age 65 were about three times likelier to say they were in good health than men who had retired. Harvard’s data also showed that men working past age 65 were half as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, or cancer. The article also celebrates the benefits of work for brain health, combating depression, and keeping a positive outlook. But there is a problem with Harvard’s conclusions about retirement. Harvard’s advice on how to retire successfully amounts to, don’t retire at all.

The book you are reading now assumes there is an alternative to staying at work in order to stay alive. We start by defining retirement as withdrawal from the workforce. (The word “retirement” comes from a French term meaning to withdraw to a place of seclusion or safety.) The way we see it, everyone who remains in the workforce and continues to sell their labor as a commodity is not retired. Retirement is the part of life when we cease to sell our labor.

We aren’t suggesting that retirees retreat from the world and do nothing. Everyone should do some physical work, like volunteering for charitable organizations or joining other retirees in group projects. It’s especially important to learn a new skill, which will keep you younger and livelier. But there is no reason for otherwise financially stable people to keep making money. You Can’t Take It with You, as Frank Capra’s 1938 movie said. If money is how you keep score, then you’re destined to lose the game.

The essence of our approach to successful retirement lies in turning away from money, assuming you have enough of it to last. The question becomes what you should do with that money, and what you should do with the time you used to spend working. Some people we’ve interviewed envision a beach house, a chaise lounge with an ocean view, a cocktail in their hand. That approach will last you a little while, but not as long as you think.

Other people don’t seem capable of thinking about their retirement at all. They can’t see past the moment of retirement, like it’s just a blank wall without shape or meaning. The turmoils and fears and anxieties brought on by the prospect of retirement are the subjects of this book. We think everyone would do well, in the beginning stages of retirement, to retreat to a place of safety and seclusion; once there, do some work of a new and different kind. 

The retiree we have in mind is free from financial obligations and blessed with time and liberty. Yet it is also true that some retirees end up alone in a chair, in a quiet room, with no one to keep them company except themselves. We talk to those retirees, too. Assuming we have enough food to eat, medicine to stay healthy, caretakers to keep the windows clean and the roof watertight, then a final question always remains: How shall we pass the time? What might we talk about with ourselves? What if the self we discover in those long, quiet afternoons turns out to be boring, or cranky, or bad company?

The question becomes, how can we prepare not just our bank accounts for retirement, but ourselves?

Fortunately, a long tradition of thought exists to help us answer these questions. It stretches back through our collective past, offering answers that have endured. These answers used to be passed from one generation to the next. We call these answers wisdom.

In Defense of Wisdom

The long tradition of thought stretching back through humanity’s past has value that too many people fail to see. But think of it this way: If a hundred different people in a hundred different places thought deeply about the same problem, and the majority of them came to similar conclusions, wouldn’t you want to know what they found? And if a hundred different people across a hundred different centuries kept reaching similar conclusions about the challenges they faced in their own times, wouldn’t you be interested to know? And if people have lived essentially the same way for thousands of years, wouldn’t you assume that what they were doing was worthwhile?

We understand why people are skeptical about wisdom. Times change, and reasonable people change with them. Since the 1600s, things have changed more rapidly than ever, and many of those changes were for the better! Technology has produced wonders. Water treatment plants solved the huge problem of illness from bad water. Antibiotics and vaccines eliminated many diseases that used to kill us in great numbers, like tuberculosis and smallpox. And computers can take us anywhere we want to go, virtually, while bringing troves of knowledge and entertainment to our fingertips.

However, it is also true that each technological development has brought new problems. Water treatment plants are vulnerable to sabotage or mismanagement, which makes it risky for us to depend on them. Antibiotic-resistant viruses and bacteria are blooming all over the world, and vaccines only work where there is trust between the governments offering them and the citizens who need them. Computers and social media have all but destroyed our capacity to get along with each other in person, in a room, as people rely more and more on smartphones.

Despite all of these changes, some truths have continued to stay the same. Researchers and scientists keep rediscovering these old truths. Since these old truths are so enduring, they can offer refuge from the storm of change. Their wisdom has been recorded in our religions, in stories recited and written down as folktales, myths, poems, songs, and novels. Wisdom is a form of knowing that we rarely encounter in colleges and universities, which emphasize intelligence over wisdom. 

What is the difference between intelligence and wisdom? Anyone who has played Dungeons and Dragons knows. Both intelligence and wisdom are ways of knowing, so both produce knowledge. But intelligence produces the sort of knowledge that is fixed and stable. Intelligence gives us knowledge that can be packaged and moved intact from one person to another. You can memorize a list of facts and take a multiple-choice test on it, where there is only one correct answer to each question.

The problem is that all such tests are fundamentally disconnected from real life. Their knowledge can be removed from real life without any effect on real life. Pretend that you could memorize every fact in the known universe, and you could walk around with all this portable knowledge inside your head at once. How would you know which piece of knowledge was most important at any given moment? How would you know which facts to focus on right now and which to ignore? How would you decide where you should use your knowledge to change the world and where you should let the world be? Wisdom is what allows us to know those things. Wisdom shows us how we should use intelligence in our present moment. 

Retirement is the time of life when we set aside intelligence and turn our focus on wisdom. If you have an intact brain, then you have enormous potential to develop wisdom. The latest research into neurobiology shows that the human brain has two hemispheres, each of which perceives the world in its own way. We describe these as “left-brain thinking” and “right-brain thinking.” One of the early books to describe these two ways of thinking was Iain McGilchrist’s excellent The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In our book, we will connect McGilchrist’s ideas with newer research by various scientists. The neuropsychologist Chris Niebauer discovered research findings that led him back to the insights of Buddhism. The neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had a sudden stroke in her own brain, which led her to rediscover her right-brain consciousness. We discuss Taylor’s description of right-brain thinking and show you how she echoes artists and philosophers, like the great novelist Aldous Huxley who took mescaline and journeyed into his own right brain. We show you how reconnecting with your own right-brain thinking can lead you to pleasure and curiosity. 

In addition to science, our book draws upon themes and patterns visible in a wide range of arts and philosophy, from films like The Shawshank Redemption to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. We believe that all these people found wisdom. We believe wisdom aligns with right-brain thinking. Like many other researchers, we believe American culture has become imbalanced in favor of left-brain thinking, which favors intelligence over wisdom. This book is an effort to restore the balance between the two ways people are capable of thinking in order to have a complete, well-rounded retirement.

While we can promise that the end of this path leads you to pleasure, we admit that getting there will require some hard work. Wisdom can be tough to take. For example, wisdom shows us that each and every one of us is mortal. On the other hand, our intelligence focuses on how to put off death as long as possible. For instance, in Silicon Valley you can find billionaires who swear they are going to live forever. They plan to upload their consciousness to a computer, or they take vitamins and supplements while disciplining their bodies through meditation and exercise. Some of these same people believe that all of us are living inside a computer simulation, as in the film series The Matrix. All of these people are hyper-intelligent. But so far, no one has lived forever. Wisdom says it’s better to make the most of the time we are given.

Wisdom puts us on a path toward accepting our problems as unfortunate but simple facts of existence. Wisdom is what moves people to say, “A problem you cannot solve is just an inconvenience you have to endure.” Or to add, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.”

We intend for this book to fill the gaps in advice about how to prepare for retirement. While most books on the subject say a lot about money, very few discuss what all the money is for. They advise retirees to find “meaning” or “purpose” in post-work life but offer almost no guidance on what meaning and purpose are, or where to look for them, or how to recognize them when you find them. Too many of these books suggest you should just keep working. We believe that answering the challenges of retirement requires work, but not the kind that focuses on money. It is work on the self. The work is doable with guidance, and completing the work can make your retirement years the richest, happiest time of life. 

To complete this work, you will need to confront life’s harder edges mindfully. If you’re going to trust us enough to do this work with you, then we should introduce ourselves.

About the Author, Bill Adler

I feared solitude. At age 54 I started asking myself, “What will it be like when I’m 75, or 80, or even 85?” Ironically, at the time of my inquiry I was engaged in a solitary activity—hiking the Appalachian Trail. When I wasn’t walking or asking questions, I was reading books in preparation for a lecture on the retiring lawyer. One author, an English professor named Willard Spiegelman, discussed the increasing isolation of old age in his book Senior Moments. Intuitively it made sense. Absent the socialization and challenge of work life, as one’s hearing diminished and one’s eyeglasses got thicker, interactions with the physical environment would become incrementally more difficult. The growth of aloneness is directly proportional to awareness of mental noise. As western civilization mandates, overcoming this mental chaos is necessary to harness the mind’s focus just like we harness electric power from Niagara Falls. I wanted to learn how to harness this energy as a defense against solitude. My mission, now twelve years old, was launched. 

Upon returning from the Trail, I unlaced my boots, cleaned up, and that week enrolled at a community college in World Literature I in the middle of the semester. I had the idea that during the solitude of old age I would at least enjoy the companionship of literary greatness. Even though I had graduated from law school and practiced law for decades, the insecurity of illiteracy plagued me in the classroom. Reentry into college ignited a smoldering flame. While still practicing law, I took just one course per semester in order to dive deeply into the subject matter. Each of the courses I enrolled in mollified my insecurity—Creative Writing, World Lit II, American Lit II, Native American Lit, Philosophy, Literary Theory. The more I studied, the closer I came to my literacy goal. But I never quite got there, and I never will. (This theme will become a leitmotif throughout our book.) Paul and I spend time with Shakespeare and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Arendt, and other famous thinkers join our conversations. I have never been more deeply engaged in thought. I now fondly anticipate long drives as opportunities to contemplate ideas. I consider this a significant milestone in preparation for solitude.

The Covid-19 assault wrenched us from family, friends, and colleagues. Solitude became an international crisis. Nursing facilities became psychological jails without visitation. Zoom entered the vernacular. We watched our distant relationships refresh 120 times per second on our computer monitors. Coincidentally, Paul and I had been studying 100 Years of Solitude. The retirement lecture series I had been planning was reborn.

The lectures meshed with my elder law practice, which was complemented by my 35 years of service on a Jewish nursing home board. The significance of the concept that started me down this road expanded. The lectures I originally delivered had focused on maximizing monetary return on a lifetime of legal practice. The content evolved into an exploration of psychological aspects of retirement, but I started to realize that the lawyers’ anxieties about withdrawing from practice prevented them from making meaningful plans. I read whatever I could find on retirement and aging. It provided a menu of possibilities to offer to the attorneys, such as healthful living, forethought in planning, and the call to find meaning. But no universal instruction manual on the topic existed. In the initial lecture I only fleetingly mentioned these themes, as none of the books I’d found had much to say on them.

Meanwhile, I threw myself into my favorite hobby, ballroom dancing. For those who are not familiar with ballroom dance, it includes routines relegated to a bygone era such as cha-cha, rumba, east- and west-coast swing, waltz, Viennese waltz, and the foxtrot. I had dabbled in ballroom dancing for years, probably due to the genes passed from my grandmother to my aunt and her daughters and also to me.  Over the last ten years, my wife Janine and I have taken a deeper dive into dance, with regular practice, lessons, and social mixers. The Sunnybrook Ballroom in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, was a favorite dance spot—a cavernous hall most active during the WWII era. We also belong to a Cotillion Dance Club in Allentown that has been around since the 1950’s. 

I refer to ballroom dancing regularly throughout this book. Dance is memorization and synchronicity. Each movement has to be learned by both partners. When Janine and I dance, I give the cue and she responds. My lead must be clear for her to read. It must fit the rhythm and geography of the dance floor. Learning and perfecting these movements requires constant growth, and there is always more to learn. In the intimacy of dance, two people move with the slightest inclination of arm or torso. To learn each move requires breaking it down to its smallest parts, learning that part, then putting the parts back together into a single fluid motion. We learn one move at a time. On the dance floor, we string multiple moves together, but not in any prearranged program—more like a body-to-body conversation. I cannot think of any place where more communication occurs than a ballroom dance floor, though no words are spoken. As with any conversation or good lecture, I never know exactly where the dance will go. If I make the mistake of trying to design a dance routine ahead of time, it always gets too tense. I have to memorize the routine in order, which kills all the spontaneity and creativity. On the social dance floor, no two dances are the same.

It seems to me that all the lessons I’ve learned from ballroom dancing apply to the subject of this book. I also see connections to one of the great joys that came from researching this material. During our research, every Tuesday afternoon Paul and I met at the Waterfront Bar and Grill in Marysville, Pennsylvania. The restaurant is famous for its expansive deck overlooking the Susquehanna River. We ate lunch as we spread books and paper all over the table. At first it was Shakespeare and Marquez, but eventually the focus turned to the source material for this book. We assigned each other readings and interpreted them together. We applied the ideas we’d discovered to politics, philosophy, literature, and law. Sometimes we stayed until the lunch shift departed and the dinner shift arrived. Time disappeared until we realized we had to get home for the next meal. The Blue Mountains in the distance seemed to shelter us as the wide river slid slowly through the water gap. The leaves changed spectacularly. These afternoons were joyful, challenging, rewarding, difficult, and thoughtful. 

The more we continue to study and think about the material, the more connections we make between past, present, and future. Many times, while making these connections, we experienced what William James and Sigmund Freud called an “oceanic” feeling of drifting within a vast, cosmic order. I have found a purpose, which is bigger than a goal.

Our research books and articles have revealed anxieties and stumbling blocks to overcoming retirement challenges, primarily growing out of a culture devoted to science. I have discovered an alternative to the beliefs that were dictated by the Enlightenment and now dominate our data-driven culture. Western civilization’s logic and reasoning are not sufficient to navigate what may feel like death to some individuals—the loss of the work life. Money is an idol for too many of those seeking a satisfying retirement, for so much of western culture is commodified and packaged and sold. All we understand is utility. In our book, Paul and I attempt to get beyond the bonds of commodification and utility in order to reach the source of human motivation and need, to find what is truly important after the necessity of work has ceased.

About the Author, Paul Cockeram

After twenty years of teaching English Composition and Literature, I resigned my post as a tenured Associate Professor and walked away from a guaranteed income. I had no plan. It drove my poor mother crazy.

From my teaching career, I had learned how to satisfy curiosity with conversation. I learned that I am happiest when I can say true things to people who need to hear them. Unfortunately, teaching has become less and less like a conversation. Learning seems less focused on finding truth. The No Child Left Behind Act created a curriculum based on standardized tests, so teachers nationwide taught students how to pass tests. Quickly, colleges and universities began to value what they could measure and nothing else. Students started falling into silence, wanting only to hear the correct answers so they could fill in the correct bubbles on the test. When they realized that my classes required them to write papers rather than multiple choice tests, and required them to produce thoughts rather than regurgitate facts, many of them grew sullen. It was time for me to go.

Leaving a two-decades career felt a bit like retiring. I peered forward at a blankness that sometimes looked like an endless expanse of thrilling possibilities. Other times it looked as frightening as death. One of my friends called it my “life sabbatical,” which sounded better than “unemployed.” Then, suddenly, a virus shut down the world. The colleges where I might have taught shifted to online-only classes. Hospitals began overflowing until patients in beds were lining the hallways, and refrigerator trucks were called in to warehouse the dead. Jobs disappeared day by day, until the only work left was done from home on a computer, or else from the front lines by “essential workers” who risked their lives to sell us groceries and pizza and bleach. Friends met each other exclusively on video chats. I was jobless, without health insurance, at the start of a global pandemic.

I was farther than ever from my community. I roamed through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania until I reached the ends of streets I thought were endless. That was when things began changing inside my mind.

I fell in love with our Covid year. I believe others did, too. Albert Camus’ novel The Plague shows how a pandemic forces “inactivity upon” the city it strikes. The comedian Marc Maron enjoyed a relief from the pressures of career and success. He noticed that he didn’t feel bad about doing nothing with his life because nobody was doing anything with theirs. There was no reason to resent other people’s accomplishments or to condemn his own sloth. The frozen world gave us time to figure out what was truly important. 

Then, out of the blue, one of my former students named Bill Adler started emailing and texting and calling. Bill had been a solid writer and careful reader in the three classes he took from me, always ready with perceptive insights and clever comments. He was also a bit strange. He worked twice as hard as the other students for no class credit. He came to my office hours as frequently as anyone despite not really needing the help. He just seemed to enjoy conversations about ideas. He was a successful lawyer who wanted to study Shakespeare.

So we met during the fall pandemic twice a week, always at a restaurant, always outside. Two-hour lunches became four-, then five-hour dialogues. After the weather turned cold, we huddled in his open garage at a table under which he’d placed a heater to warm our legs. My feet were always cold, but after conversations about Othello or King Lear, the cold didn’t matter. That winter, Bill and I found our way back to wisdom.

Whenever I asked Bill about his work, he mentioned a series of lectures he was giving to lawyers on the subject of retirement. At first his lectures concerned money. “There’s a lot more to retirement than money,” I told him. A year later, we had written more than half of this book. The twice-weekly conversations shifted to the subject of meaningful retirement. The transition from Shakespeare to meaningful retirement proved easy. A lot of what we learned from Shakespeare answered the worries people have about retiring.

When we looked around America, we saw record numbers of people leaving their jobs in 2021. Many were opting for early retirement. It seemed, suddenly, that Bill and I were in a position to say true things to people who needed to hear them, work I’d done all my life.

What Are the Lessons?

Researching this book gave us purpose during a dark time. It also surprised us. After we finished the first draft, we realized that helping people prepare for retirement led us to questions about the meaning of life that have been asked for all of human history. Bill showed Paul what people needed to learn, and Paul showed Bill where and how to find answers. Together, we want to offer the lessons most urgent for today’s final Act.

The first chapter describes retirement as a transformation. Retirees transform from a successful professional into a non-working person. We use Nietzsche’s parable “On the Three Metamorphoses” to explore three stages of transformation that retirees can expect, along with how to navigate your way through each stage. The popular film The Shawshank Redemption illustrates characters who either succeed or fail to transform, shedding light on what retirees can do to transition successfully into retirement.

The second chapter turns to our need for two different kinds of relationship with other people: community and solitude. We survey some American intellectuals to see the important role a healthy social life plays in meaningful retirement. We also define relevant characteristics of a satisfying community. Yet we acknowledge the deep need for solitude shared by every person, to greater or lesser degree. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau teach us the healthiest relationship between solitude and community.

Of course, changes in technology have enabled people to adopt new ways of being in a  community. More people than ever are maintaining relationships through text messaging, email, social media, and video chats while isolating themselves physically. Chapter three examines the role played by digital media in overcoming physical limitations and maintaining relationships with friends and family. We discuss both the good things and bad things afforded by disembodied communication. We make a case for staying connected with your environment and maintaining  physical contact with people you love. 

Chapter four examines questions about wealth and legacy. Successful professionals will have an abundance of money, and most will plan to leave as much of their wealth as possible for their family. This chapter explores various definitions of legacy beyond wealth, including the sense of legacy and honor afforded by what scholars call the “gift economy.” We examine the tensions and potential problems surrounding wealth, especially where money is exchanged for caregiving services or used to convey gratitude to children for caregiving. We offer a view of legacy that is rooted in honor culture and gifting.

Where some books on retirement might include a few lines about the importance of finding “meaning and purpose,” we devote multiple chapters to the subject. Chapter five defines purpose using the latest research in psychology. We reveal several pathways to purpose. We also explore the difficulties of finding meaning in the midst of a centuries-long “crisis of meaning,” as defined by Viktor Frankl and other thinkers of the twentieth century. We acknowledge that the crisis of meaning confronts everyone, even though none of us caused it. Chapter five discusses some resolutions to the crisis of meaning. We reveal strategies to find and create meaning.

Chapter six extends the search for meaning all the way to its logical conclusion. We show how important it is to maintain hope during retirement, so you never give in to despair. We reveal the sources of hope that have withstood the test of time and give you advice about how to tap into these sources of hope. We help you identify reasons to get out of bed in the morning and brush your teeth.

Chapter seven finishes our discussion of meaning by exploring one of life’s most complicated subjects, which we call “the sacred.” We give a history of this important concept and explore some of the ways it appears to us. Since every human life is destined for an encounter with something sacred, we teach retirees what they can expect from what is sacred and how they can prepare to meet it. These preparations are an important part of a meaningful retirement.

The final chapter addresses the final fact of human life. We look at our tendency to deny death, discuss alternatives to denial, and reveal a more appealing vision of it. Death and wisdom converge in the final work we are called to perform, the work of dying well. We try to recover the ideal of a “good death” in order to reacquaint the living with the dead, so that by remembering how to die we might also remember how to live. We look at examples of people who died well and offer practical advice for how to follow them.

As your authors, we have spoken both separately and together in this introduction. But in the body of the book, we combine our voices into a single “I,” a single “me,” who is a blend of us both. We want to focus on the things we share in common, not what divides us.

As you read, then, please understand that both Bill and Paul are “I.” This blended narrator has two fathers and two mothers, the experience of a multi-decade law practice and a teaching career. I get the benefit of experience from walking two different paths, and I get to share that experience with you. In exchange, all of us have to relax about details like whether it was Bill or Paul who drove to Florida and back. Both of them worked over that chapter. I hope this blended narrator doesn’t confuse you. 

Likewise, I hope this book helps you enter your golden years with confidence and a plan for success. The lessons included in this book have all been approved by other, smarter people who said versions of them in the past. In some ways, I’m repeating the insights of Shakespeare and Huxley and Equiano and Sontag and Aristotle and Heaney. The whole pack of them, like you and I and the rest of humanity, are “the same but different.” That’s how the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch describes the human race. We are the same as one another, but different. These days there is no shortage of reminders about our differences. I want to focus on the sameness, in the hopes that one of life’s most fearful and thrilling transitions can be enriched with the greatest possible meaning from people who are not so different, in the end, from you and I.