Go4yourGrowth · Angela Baucke
Go4yourGrowth · Angela Baucke
On the transition into retirement
There's a moment many people underestimate: the first Monday morning with no appointment waiting. No emails to work through. No team waiting on a decision. For some, this is the freedom they've long looked forward to. For others, it's ground that has suddenly disappeared from under them.
The transition into retirement is often treated as a single, clearly defined event — the last day of work, a party, a gift, and then "retirement" begins. In reality, it's a process that often takes months or years to truly settle. And it affects more than just the calendar.
For many people, their sense of identity has formed almost entirely around achievement over the course of decades: goals reached, promotions, successful projects, numbers that added up. That's no coincidence — it's exactly what they were seen, measured, and validated for throughout their working life. The problem only becomes visible once that inner scoring system suddenly has no game left to count toward.
What emerges then is more than boredom. It's a kind of meaninglessness — the feeling of no longer being "worth" anything yourself, because the yardstick you measured yourself against for decades suddenly has nothing left to measure. A qualitative Swiss study describes exactly this pattern: the loss of one's professional role as breadwinner or expert can feel like a loss of identity, especially when self-image was tightly bound to success and status. Internationally, this is sometimes referred to as a "purpose crisis" — researchers estimate that roughly one in three new retirees experiences temporary depressive symptoms, and that adjustment often takes one to three years. That's not a small thing, and it doesn't disappear automatically with a few new hobbies. It takes a genuine inner shift in perspective: away from "What did I achieve?" toward "Who am I, regardless of that?"
At the same time, I also encounter the opposite response: confident women — some call them "silver ladies" — who emphasize how strong, fit, and unbothered they are by all the fuss around retirement age. That can be genuine too. But it can also be a new facade, just with the sign flipped: instead of "I'm no longer worth anything because I no longer perform," it becomes "I'm above the idea that this would even affect me."
Both reactions measure themselves against a bar — one against the old logic of achievement, the other against a new logic of strength and composure. And that, to me, is the real flaw in the thinking: how someone experiences the transition into retirement shouldn't have to be judged by anyone from the outside — not even against a new standard they now have to prove themselves against. There's no right or wrong here, only one's own honest answer.
This is exactly the point where it's worth seeking support. Not to stay busy. Not to feel — as sometimes goes unspoken but still lingers — "put away" somewhere, usefully parked. But to become, in this phase, the author rather than the ghostwriter of your own book.
That sounds bigger than it is: above all, it means listening inward again. What truly fulfills me once no one expects performance from me anymore? That question is rarely answered in your head alone — it needs space, time, and often someone who asks the right questions without rushing to offer solutions.
One thought keeps coming back to me: how much potential for greater satisfaction — and, quite concretely, for the economy too — goes unused here. A model calculation by the Bertelsmann Stiftung shows the potential in the so-called "Aktivrente" (active pension) reform: under optimal conditions, it could theoretically create 25,000 to 33,000 additional full-time jobs — provided that policymakers and employers actively promote the reform and remove the legal hurdles. Those roughly 30,000 jobs certainly wouldn't save the economy. But they would represent a decent chunk of extra freedom — for people who want to keep working without having to. Currently, only around 5 percent of 65- to 75-year-olds are employed, though that's twice as many as ten years ago.
This carries extra weight right now: if the special status of mini-jobs is abolished, many of the roughly 1.2 million currently employed people over 65 would lose one of the few low-barrier ways they have to keep contributing. All the more reason to ask how older people in particular could more easily become self-employed.
Retirement isn't an endpoint — it's a new stage of life with its own tasks. One of them is to consciously ask yourself once more what truly matters to you, without the pressure to be productive, but open to whatever might emerge from your own motivation.
What helps is rarely one big plan made overnight. It helps more to ask yourself a few honest questions early on: What will I miss, and why? What have I saved for "later" that's now due? And who am I once the professional answer to "What do you do?" falls away?
The transition into retirement isn't a break you simply get through. It's an invitation to decide, once again, what a good life means to you — and perhaps also what of it you still want to pass on.