Yes, You Can Create A New Community.

By Erica and Karen

A few weeks after you retire, you may start feeling a little lonely. The people with whom you spent your workdays until you retired will be working. They still love spending time with you—but they are not available. Your families have their own lives. But you will be going through a significant life pivot. You may feel adrift. 

Loneliness is a foreseeable result of retiring. 

Loneliness can be defined as a subjective experience of social isolation based on frustrated needs for belonging and a sense of dissonance between the expected and the actually existing quality of social relationships It is a truly universal experience, which means that every person will encounter loneliness at some point in their life  The concept of loneliness has been discussed since Ancient Greece. Aristotle himself emphasized that a person who is not social cannot be anything other than a beast or a god; i.e., he cannot be a fully human being.

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Retirement represents the culmination of a phase in the life of every individual who no longer has professional activities, loses regular salary for the work performed, and brings the working life to a definitive conclusion. According to many experts, retirement is characterized by elevated stress levels and the dissolution of previously held roles and responsibilities. Before the advent of globalization, modern technology, and an organized pension system, people worked as long as their health allowed them. There was no limit that marked when a person was ready for retirement. 

There are two categories of retirement: voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary retirement refers to an employee’s decision to leave their position prior to reaching the statutory retirement age. Involuntary retirement is caused by external factors, not by personal choice  It has been shown to negatively affect depression, life satisfaction, and stress levels. .

To avoid loneliness, and to move forward on your plan for the next phase of your life, you will need a new community.

Start with a friend. Someone who retires more or less when you do–or someone who just did. Or some other empathetic soul. Someone to talk to about how retirement has upended your life. 

We were lucky—we knew each other, we retired close in time, and we had similar instincts—there had to be more to post-career life than rocking chairs or golf. We were willing to work together to figure out what was going on, and what options we might create for ourselves after we repeatedly hit brick walls. We talked about how badly we felt when people turned away from us after they learned we had retired. We developed strategies to support each other, and we worked hard to create a new path forward. We worked together to change the old ideas in order to find a fulfilling retirement. 

Even so, we felt acutely the loss of our work community. We were really not sure how to create a new one. We met with the few women we knew who had worked until retirement, and we were all glad for the companionship. Not everyone felt the way we did, of course. Some were delighted to be jobless, free to do whatever they liked. We were not. We needed more structure, more purpose, more community. It was a motivating force for the founding of Lustre.

We did come up with some approaches. We reached out to everyone we knew, and said yes to every offer of lunch or coffee. Erica found new friends by being strategic about her design classes. She realized she was more likely to find people not working full time if she took classes during the day, rather than at night. She was right. Karen was not so bright, taking flying lessons during the day with young people on their way to careers. (But she had fun!)

And there are lots of other ways to meet people–volunteer for a cause you think important, get involved with a religious community, engage politically.

If you find yourself feeling lonely, you do have an option we did not have. You can talk to other Lustre members, and maybe make friends with a few. Join the monthly community calls, ask questions, talk about your feelings. Learn what other women have done. Meet up with nearby members, or online with members anywhere. Remember–most of us do feel a bit off kilter for a while, and are happy to talk about it.

Start building your new community. Consider that to be your first task once you recover from the retirement party—and after a few months of lounging around and catching your breath. By then, you’ll be ready to think about next steps. And you’ll have lots to talk about with your new friends.