In those meetings where we had to force a senior exec to actually make a fricking decision and take a risk (instead of sitting on their security fence and sending us away with even more questions), I would say, “Let me pitch it. I am at the end of the career tunnel, it doesn’t matter for me if it goes wrong”. Sure, enough some things did go wrong, and I experienced wrath. Or, as close as they get to wrath. Some of them are shouters but not many. No need. You don’t get to the top of big organisations without learning how to cover your tracks and unload your mistakes onto other people, it’s the same as taking credit for other people’s successes. When I was t 3M, I was amazed at how many people invented the Post-it Note. At Unilever, it is Dove.
Pre-retirement is liberating. When you are in it, you really don’t care. “What can they do, retire me?” is the spirit. This pseudo-philosophical point about getting to the end of the career tunnel fits with the common assumption that life is a balancing act between your three selves: the past yourself, your present yourself and your future yourself. I think we place too much emphasis on the future yourself. In the example above, my reasoning was that I did not have a future. This is wrong.
For reasons I don’t understand but am keen to explore, our future overshadows our past and present. The past we dismiss as spent and irrelevant – “you can’t do anything about it”. It can’t be experienced again. Forget it. Our culture also undervalues the immediate present, because when we when we are in it there is little we can do to change it. The present that is happening right now is the consequence of what happened in the past. Like a super tanker, we have limited scope for manoeuvre. This is one of the reasons why most philosophers believe we don’t have free will. By the time we get to the present-day decision there is no movement in the rudder. The direction is predetermined by past events, including the conditioning and behavioural programming we have accumulated that we use to make decisions.
That is why we agonise over the decisions we make as we head towards the future. We make a huge effort to create the future we desire. Optimism bias (Kahneman) dominates our consciousness. We are over-motivated by it and obsessed with getting to an ideal future where our dreams, fantasies (and fears) are located. We obsess about how we can make last minute adjustments to the steering wheel towards that bit of the future that is still changeable, just in front of us, and more elaborate adjustments to the idyllic future that is further away. The further away future gives us more hope as there is more time for all that hard work and delayed gratification to fulfil the big dreams of our self-obsessions.
Younger (not pre-retired or retired persons) have more time to make sacrifices and win the battles to reach their goals. More time ahead produces more energy and motivation. For the pre-retirement or retired person future philosophy is toxic. With not so much time ahead, and even less as every day goes past, you are forced to compromise, de-scope and compress those hopes and dreams. You are forced to accept the future includes a long expanse without you in it. The immortality fallacy (that illusion where we don’t factor in our life expectancy in daily decision making) loses its luminance. If you find yourself in one of those situations where you see your future timeline is running out, what should you do? Should you become depressed because you have so little future to project your thoughts onto? To avoid this depression I am going to suggest you look at other things on the projector of your mind.
Although his prose is a bit poncey and pretentious, the 18C essayist and philosopher, William Hazlitt is a big help with this. His essay about the three selves; past, present, and future can be read here.
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/TableTalk/PastFuture.htm
Or you can read my pre-chewed up version for faster digestion.
First, you need to zone out a little and think about what consciousness is. Science is still kicking consciousness about and making painfully little progress, which leaves the door open for psycho-waffle. Without getting too hung up on which famous philosopher said what, let’s think about how we experience happiness, unhappiness, and the other stuff in between. The answer is that the whole lot is experienced through a projection screen (consciousness) in your brain organ. One of the things we can do in that device, is re-run the past from memory, using aids such as photos, films, sound recordings, smell, and many other consciousness prompts to re-experience the past and create a happy (or unhappy) present out of it in our immediate consciousness. This is therefore, a present experience and we should maximise that experience. Let me repeat that. A memory is a present experience. Savour the moment. Make sensible records (yes, take selfies) to aid future recollection but mainly savour the moment when you are remembering the past as a moment in the present. More on that in the next paragraph, but first let’s stick the boot into the future.
Obsess less about the future. Really? Yes. Obsess less. As a professional strategist, planner and forecaster who built simulations to test and refine high profile strategy that attempted to shape the future for governments, global firms, and NGOs, I was paid quite a lot of money to help them try and forecast and steer the future. Also, as an observer of others who forecast the future such as SAGE during Covid or the IMF or OECD, the Bank of England MPC, the Climate Change Committee, fund-managers, stock pickers, astrologers, and tea leaf readers, I urge every one of them, with all my heart and my very small brain to be less obsessed about forecasting the future because even you – the top professionals – are nearly always .. crap at it and wrong. And, as Kahneman explains, we nearly always cock it up on the over optimistic side, leading to a big false investment in a future state of happiness.
With that in mind, the pre-retired and retired person should take advantage of the consciousness they can control, (which is not the future as that consciousness has yet to be experienced). As intimated above, the future is far more complicated, random, and chaotic than we can ever predict. Even generative AI and quantum computers will not predict unknown unknowns that frick up plans. As Douglas Adams informed us, you will need a computer as big as the universe to predict the future of the universe.
To those who say some predictions are correct, I say, this doesn’t undermine my position. When you are correct it is more likely to be by chance. Your model made the right prediction, but it could have been for the wrong reasons, or it might have been for the right reasons, but the next time you run it the model will be wrong as the environment has changed (the universe, and even the simple things in it, like biology and weather are not stable systems, they are always changing and evolving). Enjoy it if you predict the right lottery number. Enjoy it if you predict what happens in the next two minutes. But don’t think you can predict the right lottery number every week or what will happen in the two minutes after that, let alone the next two weeks, months or years. The further over the horizon the future is, the less time you should waste fretting about it. Be realistic. I am recommending you spend more of your time in the present (enjoying things remembered from the past) and less time worrying about the future.
Retired people and everyone else would be well advised to shelve the future and pay more respect to the past. The past is not trash to be thrown away or written off. It is a neglected treasure. You can find happiness in the past (a treasure that grows and gives you more to choose from the older you get). We undervalue this source of happiness. Think of the many laughs we have when we get together and retell stories with people who were there when we shared the original experience. Think of the laughs you get when the stories unfold. Those laughs are a gift from the past to today’s present. Let me repeat that. The laughs in recollecting stories with our friends, or even in your memory, are in the present. In fact, we can be even happier in the retelling of stories because we big them up. The telling of stories is a performance pleasure. Look at all the forms of entertainment we pay for: film, books, music, theatre, art; they are all ways of re-consuming investments that were made in the past to create a past we can recall. The laughter of re-running stories can generate more endorphins than the fleeting experience at the time.
So, don’t think of pre-retirement and retirement as a tap turning off the golden pond of your future. Think more about a reservoir that contains many happy memories that is full up. You filled it up. Enjoy the good bits. (Delete the bad bits). Share it with others. And there are other ways to do this besides laughing. One of the most rewarding is to pass on your practical working experience (without being irritating). Enjoy that exchange with younger people who have less past than you to draw on. You can experience a present pleasure (if you do it in a non-conceited, non-know-all way) by sharing useful stuff to help them. They like that and when you see them like it and benefit from it you like it. That past makes you happy. It’s fun being Yoda. It’s a gift that advanced age reserved for your pre-retired and retired self. Your younger ignorant, inexperienced self could not do that. Enjoy seeing others do things that you can no longer do. After all you can do things they can’t do. And when I say “they” I obviously mean you. The you you were, the you you are and the you you will become. Finally, I apologise for using the singular pronoun to all the “theys” who are two people in their pasts, presents and futures. How they navigate life is beyond my comprehension. Good luck to thems though.
