adapt to survive!

Derek Milne  on coping strategies - finding hope...or hopelessness


After a lifetime of work, society is done with people, they have reproduced, consumed, and kept the whole show going. On retirement, Western society is thru with its workers, like all commodities they are thrown into the trash once their “useful” purpose is past.

Hence the title of this blog is “Work-Buy-Consume-Die”.

Ending a lifetime of work in this manner can be experienced as a period of severe loss, and many men struggle to manage or cope with the transition to retirement. In his book “The Psychology of Retirement,” Derek Milne identifies two basic post-work coping strategies: one successful, the other definitely not so. He terms these “approach-based”(adaptive coping), and “avoidance-based”(maladaptive coping).

Approach-based (adaptive) strategies for coping have positive results: people adapt to their new situation confidently, they help themselves, keep busy, find interests, socialize, create, travel, volunteer, or even work part-time. They continue to participate in life, make plans and have hopes for the future.

On the other hand, avoidance-based (maladaptive) strategies have negative outcomes: drug addiction, alcoholism, obesity, isolation, mental problems, loss of money (eg thru gambling) - leading to homelessness, as well further degradation, despair, and hopelessness. When hope is lost, all is lost.

Charles Darwin:"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change" - ie those willing and able to adapt.

And so it is upon retirement - when faced with a totally unexpected set of (often extremely adverse) circumstances, those who can adapt their thinking, responses and actions in a positive manner will enjoy a far better quality of life than those who cannot instigate creative change, but instead seek refuge in ultimately destructive patterns of behaviour.

At the Men's Shed North Shore, Auckland, NZ

Milne: “Instead of retirement being the great opportunity many people look vaguely forwards to, the extent and severity of loss and change can instead render the experience an extremely confusing one. The rate of change in our Western money-orientated world has speeded up immensely with the invention of computers and the internet, to the point where long-cherished dreams, plans, assumptions and opportunities are rendered invalid and lost. Suddenly facing this realization can be extremely disorientating, it can be very difficult when faced with goal posts which are continually widening and moving to pull oneself together  and evaluate the situation in order to understand the new possibilities and formulate new plans, projects and successful ways of coping."

Next up - more on the unexpected issues encountered upon retirement....