Retirement not only brings financial worries – it will probably also bring with it feelings of loss and insignificance

Most discussions about retirement concentrate on the financial elements of leaving the workforce: “How to save enough for retirement” or “How to know if you have enough money for retirement?”

But that is probably not the largest issue facing prospective retirees. For some employees, the deeper questions of meaning, relevance and identity that retirement can bring are more significant.

Work has develop into the middle of recent American identityas Journalist Derek Thompson complains in The Atlantic. And some theorists have argued that work shapes us. For most individuals, as business ethicists Al Gini argues that one’s own work – which is often also the job – means greater than a paycheckWork can structure our friendships, our understanding of ourselves and others, our ideas about leisure, our types of entertainment – ​​indeed, our entire lives.

I teaching a philosophy course in regards to the selfand I find that almost all of my students think in regards to the identity issues without interested by how a job makes them a certain type of person. They think mostly in regards to the prestige and pay that include certain jobs, or where jobs are situated. But after we get to Existentialist philosophers like for instance Jean Paul Sartre And Simone de BeauvoirI often ask them to take into consideration what it means to say, because the existentialists do: that “you are what you do.”

How you spend 40 years of your life, I tell them, not less than 40 hours per week – the period of time many individuals spend working – just isn’t only a financial decision. And I've realized that retirement just isn’t only a financial decision either as I take into consideration this next phase of my life.

Usefulness, tools and freedom

For Greek and Roman philosophers Leisure was nobler than workThe lifetime of a craftsman or artist – or perhaps a university professor or lawyer – was to be avoided if wealth allowed it.

The good life was a life not driven by the necessity to supply goods or earn money. Work, Aristotle said, was an obstacle to the attainment of the actual types of excellence characteristic of human life, equivalent to thought, contemplation, and study – Activities that express The special character of man and are done for their very own sake.

One might assume, then, that retirement would supply individuals with the leisure time essential to human excellence. Yet today's retirement doesn’t appear to encourage the leisure time dedicated to the event of human excellence, partially since it follows an extended period of self-objectification – something that doesn’t come free of charge.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished between the worth of objects and that of subjects through the concept of ​​”use”. Objects are usually not free: they’re designed for use, like tools – their value is tied to their usefulness. But rational beings like humans, who’re subjects, are greater than their use value – They are precious in themselvesin contrast to tools.

And yet much of latest work culture encourages employees to take into consideration themselves and their value by way of their utility valuea change that might have led each Kant and the traditional Greek and Roman philosophers to wonder why people didn’t retire as soon as possible.

“What we do is what we are”

But as considered one of my colleagues said after I asked him about retirement, “If I'm not a college professor, what am I?” Another friend, who retired at 59, told me that she doesn't prefer to call herself a retiree, although she is. “Retirement means being useless,” she said.

Retiring, then, just isn’t nearly giving up a chance to earn money; it’s a deeply existential query that challenges one's self-image, one's place on this planet, and one's usefulness.

One could say, with Kant and the ancients, that those of us who’ve intertwined our identity with our occupation have made ourselves tools, and that we must always throw off these shackles by retiring as soon as possible. And perhaps, from the surface, that’s true.

But from the participant's perspective, it's harder to withstand the concept that we’ve got develop into who we’re through our actions. Rather than worrying about our funds, after we take into consideration retirement, we needs to be more concerned about what the great life should appear to be for creatures like us – those now free from our jobs.