The “System Effect” of Retirement

System effect: where improving one component simply exposes other issues in the system

As an engineer by training, I’ve always been fascinated by system effects. I was aiming to solve a set of physical and mental health issues associated with workplace burnout by retiring. What I didn’t anticipate was how retirement is associated with other happenings mainly in family life that have forced significant personal growth and learning.

While each section below likely deserves its own post, I’ll try to summarize!

No longer a “breadwinner” mindset

Once becoming a dad, I stepped into the mindset of earning money to enable the family to thrive. 

Once retiring, it was easy for me to transition to a set of similar activities, and I started doing some income-generating activities like consulting and certain investment activities, such as direct private lending (more on these later!). However, there is a necessary shift in a retirement mindset when earning money isn’t a primary objective. 

Since a period of taking on too much consulting early in my retirement, I’ve turned down a number of otherwise money-making activities because all of this consulting felt too much like going back to work. The whole point for me to retire was to create space for another journey. Being stuck in the mindset of being a breadwinner would forgo the purpose of retirement and not give me the space to take the journey and grow in other ways. So a big first step was to walk away from the breadwinner mindset. 

Coincident with the “empty nest”

My wife, Marsha, and I spent 20 years living with and raising our two daughters, who have emerged into truly fun and wonderful people. We timed my retirement in 2018 with our younger daughter going off to college, so we often conflate the impacts of retirement and the empty nest.

I believe there can be a healthy evolution in the relationships between parents and children. When the children are young, parents can be rather “directive.” As the children mature, the conversations can evolve into “perspectives” between adults. We are blessed that our daughters have been willing to invest in this evolution. They are eager to share their perspectives to help us understand them as individuals, as well as to hear our perspectives in this new context. These skills as adult children were ones that Marsha and I never developed as young adults with our own parents, and we have been experiencing a paradigm shift in the new generation that involves a different level of openness, willingness, and perhaps ability on the part of both children and parents to engage at this level.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented an interesting opportunity for us to begin this investment as a family. Our daughters both came home from their respective colleges in 2020, roughly a year and a half into my retirement. For us, living together in our Portland condo, a 2-bedroom, 2 ½ bathroom unit, put us in close quarters for six months. While it had been previously easy over winter breaks and short holidays for all of us to settle at home into old roles of Dad, Mom, Big Sister, and Little Sister, more of everyone’s true selves needed to be expressed over the course of a 6-month global pandemic. We got to do a different version of “forming / storming / norming / performing” with the new, adult versions of our daughters and the new, retired versions of ourselves as parents! This process took some investment! There were some late nights and tears. I’ll talk through some of those lessons in a future post.

Just this past Christmas, a different example in this investment was a gift from our older daughter and her partner of subscriptions to Storyworth. The concept is that each week, they select a question for both me and Marsha to answer, and the compilation will be printed into a hardcover book at the end of this year. These questions have prompted us to reflect on and communicate past experiences, decisions, and actions (both the good ones and the mistakes!)  We share these essays within the family, and our older daughter has been very diligent to comment on these stories each week after we write them. Our younger daughter has also expressed appreciation to us verbally for the stories. To me, this gift demonstrates the desire on our daughters’ part to understand us better. I’ll also look to share some of these insights on self-reflection (in more condensed forms, I promise!) in future posts.

Recalibrating and renegotiating with a spouse

In our family, Marsha and I historically took on a classical division of labor, where my role was to work outside the home and her role was to run the operations inside the home. As I have been spending more time in the home, it became evident that this was an area that needed some more focused attention. Consider the following conversation:

Me (happily): “Isn’t retirement great?”
Marsha (hint of side-eye): “Uh sure. With the exception of being a water polo team-mom and some day-to-day parenting, nothing has changed. I still do all the grocery shopping. I still cook. I still clean. I still do laundry. I still worry about home maintenance….”
Me: Awkward silence.

This is still a work in progress, and a natural rebalancing of activities is healthy. Retirement has been “great” but I was not fully thinking through what has been making it great as Marsha has made everything very seamless for me all the way along. I always had the desire in my retirement to support her in her own journey as she had done for me, but honestly, I didn’t fully understand what that looked like. I am now seeing a bit more clearly the shape and form of what that means, and it goes beyond just doing “household chores.” More to come on this later.

Part of our recalibration has also been taking the time with each other to work through some latent emotions we may have set aside over the years when I was head down in my career and Marsha was busy with operating the household . The whole trend of “gray divorce” has hit the news, and we have been growing to understand why this happens and what proactive work it takes to avoid it. This whole topic will be another set of future posts, so I won’t belabor it here. For now, suffice it to say that Marsha and I have been engaging in dedicated, weekly “State of the Union” meetings with each other where we both take turns as speaker and listener to share both positive things from the week, as well as to check-in on our relationship.

Aging parents

Overall, both Marsha and I have been really fortunate here, but we have enough peers of retirement and empty nester age that it’s worth opening up the discussion for future posts. The challenges faced can be pretty profound. People are living longer, families are more spread apart, and day-to-day life is just more complex than it was in the past.

For context, Marsha’s mom passed away earlier this year, but her older brother had been living with their mom for 23 years after their dad passed. Marsha’s formal role in the care of their mom kicked in when her brother’s business travel resumed after pandemic restrictions were lifted. By 2023, this business travel became significant, and Marsha spent probably about 30% of her time away from our Portland home caring for their mom in Washington. Still, primary responsibility for their mom was really up to her brother.

My mom is still going strong at 90 years old, surviving my dad who passed away 11 years ago. My older sister moved in with Mom during the pandemic, and Mom is very grateful that my sister could do this. Also, Mom is lucky to have a set of wonderful friends, neighbors, and nearby extended relatives who make up a phenomenal support community when my sister has business travel. Other than some occasional online transactions and financial review, my formal role in the care of Mom is pretty minimal in comparison.

As mentioned, Marsha and I were really fortunate here. There are some emotions related to both the guilt of not being more involved in caregiving, as well as the anxiety about both the well-being of aging parents and the burden those providing the caregiving. However, these emotions pale in comparison to what is going on inside the minds of the aging parents themselves and their caregivers.

Final thoughts

When we were raising our daughters, we always joked to them “Tell your future therapists that we were doing the best we could.”  Little did we know that this kind of rationalization was characteristic of dismissive parenting, and that we would all be working in the future to dissect our own emotions and unmet needs through therapy.

I think it’s important to remove some of the stigma of mental health care, focused on not only improving ourselves as individuals but just as importantly toward improving how we “show up” in our relationships whether with family, friends, neighbors, etc. We’ve so altered our social worlds from our millennia of human evolution, that a bit of coaching for our mental health should be considered normal, too. We somehow don’t mind taking classes or hiring a personal trainer to coach us to get into better “physical” health, particularly as the Western world has wrecked its food supply through industrial farming and ranching, and as computers and office work have made our lives more sedentary. So why are we not viewing our emotional and mental health in the same vein? Much of my aim with this Substack, in addition to talking through some of the mechanics of the retirement journey, is to continue to explore these emotional aspects as well!

Stay tuned!