Extract from ABC News
For three decades, Jim Kilkenny worked as a financial planner advising people on solid plans for their retirement.
It was reasonable, then, for him to expect that, upon his own retirement, leaving his fairly stressful job behind would be a breeze.
Only it wasn't.
After a few months of "decompressing and doing very little", Mr Kilkenny realised that he wasn't very happy.
"I found myself drinking more than I should earlier in the day. My mental and physical health was starting to suffer. And I was starting to really get on my wife's nerves," he tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
"And all of those things were going to turn out badly unless I did something about it."
Things you don't realise you'll miss
Mr Kilkenny says there's a post-retirement state referred to as "relevance deprivation syndrome". In his career, he saw plenty of clients experience it.
"They lose things like the structure in their day, social networks, intellectual challenges, tasks, projects, timetables — all those sorts of things that you don't realise you miss [until] you don't have them," he says.
"Some people could transition into retirement and shrug off their work life like an old coat, and throw it in the bin and move on and never think about it again."
But others "were very attached to that coat".
"They were constantly looking for ways to be able to fill the gap."
He says retirement can be especially tough for "type-A personality" people, who have highly stressful working lives, long hours and jobs with lots of emotional and intellectual engagement.
Often in the lead-up to leaving work, they're excited. They think, "I can do what I want, when I want; I can sleep in; I can do lots of other things with my time; and I can dramatically decompress and reduce the stress", Mr Kilkenny says.
"They [are] sort of blissfully ignorant of the fact that the 'nothing' can create a vacuum."
And a vacuum can manifest in "listlessness, a reduction in mental acuity … a clear lack of contentment [and] feeling more and more disengaged".
Mr Kilkenny says for a lot of people, there's a jarring disconnect between expectations and reality.
"You don't really comprehend what the impact of retirement will be, because you haven't done it before.
"And you're still harbouring that fantasy that this will be fantastic, [that] doing nothing will be great.
"So I think for a lot of people, you have to actually go through the bitter experience of it. And certainly that was my situation."
Finding a network outside work
Mr Kilkenny's wife was instrumental in helping him to turn things around. She encouraged him to get out and start doing "something meaningful", and particularly something intellectually challenging.
He enrolled in a French language course, something he says was "fantastic".
Aside from the intellectual stimulation, the course gave him much-needed structure.
"Plus, it opened up social networks outside of work, because almost all my social networks were work related," he says.
Mr Kilkenny also delved into researching and writing about his family history, which he says "was incredibly cathartic and rewarding and fulfilling".
He also took on some short-term jobs — that "financially wasn't particularly rewarding", but which "showed that I still had some intellectual capacity left".
Battling isolation
Jan Wild is semi-retired and the founder of retirement advice website, Retiring Not Shy.
More than a decade ago, in her 50s, she and her partner decided to retire at the same time and move from Melbourne to a regional Victorian property.
As in Mr Kilkenny's case, things didn't go exactly to plan.
"We had visions of growing our own vegetables and … playing music and … getting back into some other creative roles as well," Ms Wild says.
"What we found, though, was there was definitely that sense of relevance deprivation syndrome."
They found it hard to immerse themselves in their new community, and they began to feel isolated.
"It was a dream — and dreams can be challenging," Ms Wild says.
They can also prove to be not quite right.
After several years, the couple found they needed a different life in retirement, and have now made the happy move to an inner-city Brisbane home.
"[It] couldn't be more culturally and restaurant saturated," Ms Wild says, which suits her and her partner perfectly.
For them, socialising is an important part of being content in this new phase of life.
"We have realised again how important our families, including non-blood families, are to us," Ms Wild says.
"We're [not] out every night of the week," she says. "But [we're] really keeping in touch with people, keeping those connections strong."
'Opportunity to rewire our brains'
Bec Wilson is the founder of a large online community for older Australians, and author of How to Have an Epic Retirement.
She says, despite the fact that retirement might occupy almost a third of our lives, we don't tend to think too much about it, beyond financial planning.
"We do live with these job titles and hierarchies in the first half of our life, that are so significant to our sense of identity [and] all of a sudden, there's a hole in what our identity is.
"I feel really passionate about the fact that we've got to look at who we want to be in the next stage of life before we get there.
"The shift is real," she says.
In retirement, there's often an onus on pursuing activities that have meaning or offer a sense of purpose, but generally people "haven't taken the time to really stop and discover them" beforehand, Ms Wilson says.
"They've been so busy working, making ends meet, meeting the cost of living, managing their families, and looking after everyone else that they might have forgotten.
"I think it's a really exciting proposition to think about your purpose in advance, like five years ahead."
Ms Wild also believes retirement offers huge benefits — if you're able to seize them.
"Our purpose is to enjoy life, basically. And we don't need external gratification to do that," she says.
Retirement is "a more gentle time".
"It's an opportunity to rewire our brains and to [consider] what really is important to us."
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