Why Your Free Time In Retirement Doesn’t Feel Right.

What are the chances that the following statement would be found in any of a financial planner’s training manuals?

“Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.  Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”

This little slice of advice comes from Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (henceforth, for obvious reasons, referred to as Mr. C), considered one of the co-founders of positive psychology and originator of the psychological concept of “flow”, a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity.

When you’ve been hanging out in the self-development world for multiple decades and plowed through several hundred books in that genre as I have, you are bound to bump into Mr. C repeatedly and his concept of “flow”.

You may be more familiar with another common description of “flow”.  It’s often called “being in the zone”.  It’s Michael Jordan going off for the playoff record 63 points; it’s a pro-golfer shooting 59; it’s you when you become so immersed in something you love that time disappears and the work just simply flows without much effort.

In Mr. C’s words, flow is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it”

He went on to say: “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

That’s the “flow” mental state.

When he published his book “Flow” in 1990, his findings pushed back against conventional wisdom.  That conventional wisdom, which still prevails today, is that relaxation will make us happy.  Less work and more leisure are what we want.

Mr. C’s research revealed that we have that wrong.  He found that people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected.  The more “flow” experiences a person has in a week or month the higher the person’s life satisfaction.

He takes this perspective further:

“Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.  Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”

Human beings, it appears, are at their best when engaged deeply in something challenging.

Boredom ahead

As I’ve engaged soon-to-be-retired executives with my retirement coach hat on, many express concern about becoming bored.  They know that going from 110 miles an hour to a near full stop isn’t going to work for them.  Several post-retirement execs have confirmed that it’s a legitimate concern.

Steve, a newly retired hospital CEO, found his new free time a nice change.  But after a year he began to miss some of the challenge, identity, and structure that came with his high-profile management role.

He had no shortage of volunteer activities come his way but found most of them “shallow” in nature, lacking the type of “deep work” he had been accustomed to and that occasionally took him to a flow state.

We talked about a “middle-ground”, finding a project that he valued enough that he could see himself experiencing a taste of the deep work he retired from and balancing it with taking advantage of the new free time.  He has a shortlist of projects under consideration.

It occurred to me as I revisited Mr. C’s flow state theory that this is a concept that is non-existent in retirement conversations.  Can you imagine a financial planner suggesting to a client that s/he should consider remaining in some level of a “deep work” state while retired?

But then, that’s easy to understand why they wouldn’t.  Financial planning was started by insurance salesmen and they are trained to sell products.  At the core, their goal is to help people move away from that nasty four-letter word called “work”. I suspect there isn’t much training in psychology, the metaphysical, mind/body, or the understanding of the importance of flow in life satisfaction.

My inference is simple: traditional, vocation-to-vacation retirement takes us away from a proven life-sustaining activity – structured, goals-based, flow-state deep work – and into a world that erroneously links relaxation and shallow work to happiness.

The act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile.  Flow generates happiness.