June 12, 2006

Without those pesky E-mails,
you'd feel a loss of CONNECTION


By Betsy Streisand

Anyone who has ever left a job knows how difficult staying connected can be. Best intentions notwithstanding, lunch dates become phone calls, phone calls become E-mails, E-mails get fewer and farther between, and eventually relationships fade away, taking with them a sense of belonging that can be hard to replace.

Nowhere is that more true than in retirement. Yet, many would-be retirees fail to consider before it's too late the potentially negative social consequences of leaving the working world.

"People overestimate the amount of pleasure and satisfaction that comes from being on their own, and they underestimate how important and valuable it is to be where there are people who know your name and with whom you can mix it up on a regular basis," says Ken Dychtwald, president of consulting firm Age Wave and coauthor of "The New Retirement Mindscape," a study of attitudes, behaviors, and emotions regarding retirement. Sponsored by Ameriprise Financial, the study of 2,000 adults ages 40 to 75 found that when preretirees were asked what they expected would be the hardest thing to deal with related to retirement, only 13 percent answered "loss of social connections at work."

Feeling cut off. When the question was put to those who had been retired for a year or two, though, the number jumped significantly to 22 percent, putting loss of social connections just below loss of income as a major hurdle. "Once you step out of work, there is a great sense of liberation,'' says Dychtwald, who has written several books on baby boomers and retirement. "But after about a year, many people begin to feel disconnected, and that is directly related to the fact that they are no longer socializing with other workers."

Steve Kling, a former business development manager with Verizon who took an early-retirement buyout in November 2003, can vouch for that. "For 30 years, I got my energy by interacting with other people, and all of a sudden I felt totally disconnected. It drove me nuts," he says. Although Kling says he tried to combat his isolation "by seeing old coworkers and sending E-mails to everyone I've ever known," by July 2004 he no longer could bear "watching everyone in my family have someplace to go each day with other people, except for me." After seven months of retirement, Kling took a job at a telecommunications trade association in Washington, D.C. At 56, he is decades older than some of his coworkers, and the interaction isn't always as fulfilling as he would like, he says. "But it's energizing to be with other people again and much better than not working."

One reason it is so easy to be blindsided by the social losses that can accompany retirement is that connections come almost effortlessly while you are working. "The whole notion of having to make social relationships occur and then sustain them is foreign to many people," says Helen Dennis, a retirement expert in Redondo Beach, Calif. "It takes a lot of initiative, and most people are not well prepared for it." That's why Dennis and other retirement experts urge people who are ending their primary careers and moving on to second or third ones (the new nonretirement retirement) to give their future "social security" as much consideration as they do their financial security. "You need to find the arenas where there are people with whom you are going to want to connect," says Dennis. "The other piece is to enhance the relationships you have now."

Many "reformed" retirees say the same. "I have advised all of my friends to be very sure if they are planning retirement that they are making the best decision," says Stan Gibson, who joyfully retired in 2004 after a long career in the U.S. Foreign Service. He and his wife moved back to West Chester, Ohio, where reconnecting with family and old routines kept Gibson busy for a while. Then reality set in. "My wife and I really missed our social life and our outside-of-work activities and friends," says Gibson. After less than a year as a retiree, he took a job for a local company that grades essay questions on standardized tests. "I wanted to spend more time around other people," he says. "It's really been therapeutic."