... Many people are not psychologically adapted to having to make their own decisions concerning how they are going to fill the hours. They essentially 'need' the work regime to maintain stability.
All those who have retired from 50 odd years of work will be cognisent of the strange feeling for the first few days (weeks ?) of not following the old routine. And we all know how the current unemployed who have never worked or spent time in, say, serious study over a prolonged period, have turned out. ...
I spent some years as a claims representative with the US Social Security Administration, during which time:
- I interviewed prospective, new, and ongoing retirees daily
- I had access to our service area's death reports that had to be filed with our office by law
This allowed me to form some pretty coherent, though admittedly informal, impressions about retirement and how it affected people. Here are the main impressions distilled from this experience ...
The folks who were most stressed over retirement were always the ones who'd essentially done one and only one thing (farming; factory work; etc.) during their entire working lives. Some of them explicitly dreaded retirement, and some were frankly drifting into retirement in a sort of shell-shocked daze. The same effect was noticeable, and even more obvious, with stay-at-home spouses (overwhelmingly wives / mothers / widows). The more severe cases were frankly nothing short of soul-crushing existential angst.
This same lifelong single-career motif was the most common characteristic shared by retirees who died within 1 - 3 years of stopping work and / or reported major family / personal problems (divorce, etc.).
These effects were most evident with folks whose working lives had involved lesser-skilled jobs (e.g., blue collar / farm basic labor). It affected more skilled workers (e.g., white collar office types) as well, but not as dramatically. My hypothesis was that a possibly higher education level and skills that didn't rely so much on physical health and strength helped to explain this difference.
This motif was also the most common context in which retirees reported stresses, disruptions, and even fighting within their households. After years of operating around the schedule and needs of the particular household breadwinner(s) the household members had to adapt to retirement as much or more than the retiree him- / herself. These household disruptions (as one would suspect) most often involved spouses having to adapt to the new state of affairs now that one or both of them were no longer going to work every day of the work week. In some cases, individuals and couples openly admitted they were having problems suddenly finding themselves spending lots of time with a person they didn't know as well as they'd thought.
Among these (lifelong; single-career) folks, the ones who had the most positive attitude about retiring (both before and during retirement) seemed to be the ones who had other activities into which they could invest their time (volunteer work; church; family; hobbies). These were the ones most likely to survive for years following retirement.
On a less firm / more ephemeral note ... It always seemed to me the folks who had the most problems adapting to independent living in retirement were the ones who (broadly stated) had lived their lives drifting with the ordinary or default flow. By this I mean doing what was most probable, accepted, and / or expected in their social / economic context - e.g., finish the mandatory school years, get a job, get married (with or without kids), stay in the same place / area, etc., etc. These were the folks who'd essentially never taken a chance, tried new things, or otherwise put out effort beyond just getting by on an everyday basis.