Most of you are probably already familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I believe this model explains why most older, retired adults are not motivated to pursue self-actualization – in spite of the opportunities created by longer lifespans and a greater understanding of how to postpone age-related physical and cognitive decline. Instead, there is the tendency for older adults to get caught up in what Martin Heidegger called “entangled everydayness” – and live their remaining lives in a state of mindless routine and busyness. Let’s look at this relationship in more detail.

Maslow’s theory holds that a certain amount of basic needs satisfaction is necessary before a person will become motivated to pursue higher order needs. In other words, a person will probably have to satisfy a certain level of their physiological and safety needs before they are motivated to pursue their needs for belongingness, love, and self-esteem. Then, these needs must also be somewhat satisfied before the person would ever be motivated to develop their unique life’s potential. All of these lower order needs appear prior to, and are “pre-potent” over the Actualization Tendency – so there is no motivation by the individual to actualize their potential until they have these other areas of their life in order.

The Problem with Retirement

The problem with retirement is that human beings were never meant to “retire” – no matter how old they got. Instead, the type of “work” we do is supposed to change. Now some older adults continue to work professionally almost right up to the point where they die. This is great if they need or want to work. However, some of us no longer need to work at a job that pays us a salary, so we have a different set of options. In America, there is a growing population of older adults who have the time and resources to do – more or less – whatever they want. These people are often forced to retire from their careers at around age 65, and then they have another 20-25 years of life expectancy to plan for.

The myth I see many people believing is that retirement is a time to do what you enjoy and/or never had time for when you were working. Since most people only understand “doing” something as a way to fill time, they immediately start visiting their kids and grandkids, travelling to more exotic parts of the world, volunteering their time, taking up a hobby, serving on community committees, playing golf or bridge, and partying at night with their friends. This doesn’t sound too bad, does it? I could probably do it for a few months, but to spend the next 25 years doing these things “exclusively” seems excruciating to me.

Loss of Post-Retirement Self-Esteem

Now – according to Maslow’s theories – a person will only become motivated to pursue self-actualization once they have met their needs regarding self-esteem. One would think that most older people should have high self-esteem because they punched their ticket day in and day out, either in the workforce and/or raising a family, for many years before retiring. And, in fact, most of them did retire with fairly high self-esteem – which means they felt accepted, respected, and valued by others under pre-retirement conditions. There was meaning in what they did and accomplished, and there was a sense of contributing to the greater good. So, what changes when one retires?

First of all, several sources of our prior self-esteem go away with retirement: our careers, work, raising a family, and certain friendships (especially those we had in the workplace where we also received the majority of our needed acceptance, respect, and value). At this same time we might also start to feel the physical effects of aging, and so we lose esteem for our bodies and sexuality – because we are in pain, lacking energy, or not as beautiful and/or strong as we used to be.

In other words, much of the self-esteem we had accumulated in the second third of life, dissipates as we head into the final third. The caricature of this, in my mind, is the retired business executive who cannot get over what they were in their prior life. They keep telling stories about when they were the boss, and all the deals they closed – but they never fully engage with anything else in life after that. Instead, they might play golf all day and party at night with the same people – telling the same stories over and over – never realizing that this last third of life is a gift that was not meant to be squandered.

Keep in mind that I don’t believe all older, retired adults are like this, but we all are familiar with enough examples of what I just described to know it is the truth for a good portion of our retired population – to various degrees. It explains why a majority of retired people are not motivated to find and actualize their own potential, and instead spend their remaining lives in a state of entangled everydayness.

Self-Esteem and Self-Actualization

Based on my observations, many older adults start to lose their self-esteem after retirement. They are no longer contributing except by spending their money and volunteering their time (seniors volunteer on average one day per week), and they have lost the sense of accomplishment and the respect of others that is most easily acquired through work. They feel they aren’t who they once were, and all they see is decline and death for themselves in the future. The tendency is to then go into denial about their ultimate deterioration and do nothing to either offset it, or develop new qualities that would help them to excel in other areas. Fear becomes the prime motivator but remains largely unconscious. And, all of this seems to result in a sort of confusion and numbness that leads to inaction.

There are many possible reasons why men seem to fall into this category of people more readily than women. My students these past two weeks noticed immediately that the men in the DAP were outnumbered 3.5 to 1 by the women taking the program. Men have always seemed to have a more fragile identity than women, and so the loss of self-esteem that seems to accompany retirement for many men probably results in higher levels of stress and defensiveness. Of course, there are many other reasons why retired men might have less interest in actualizing their potential than women, but my class seemed to find this one of most interest.

Anyway, the solution to a loss of self-esteem at retirement is to get out of your comfort zone. It makes more sense to engage completely with life, develop fresh skills and qualities, and find creative new areas of your life where you enjoy a higher level of accomplishment and self-esteem. Only then will self-actualization become a possibility for a majority of retired adults.

That’s it for now,

Dudley