137: Rethink Retirement: Taking Charge of Your Next Chapter with Andi Simon
About this episode
Dr. Andi Simon discusses the challenges and opportunities of retirement, emphasizing the need for agency and community building.
"Take charge. Your retirement is your time." Our hosts, Stephanie McCullough and Kevin Gaines, sit down with Dr. Andi Simon, corporate anthropologist and author of Rethink Retirement , whose research offers a bracing corrective to how most people think about life after work. Andi spent years embedding herself in senior living communities on the w est c oast, interviewing residents who had done everything "right" financially and still found themselves empty, bored, and stripped of identity. Through it all, she's concluded that retiring from something is not the same as retiring to something. The central tension Andi identifies is one of agency. Retirement is a transition most people face without any rehearsal. Unlike a career, which assigns identity, purpose, and daily rhythm almost automatically, retirement demands that individuals build those things from scratch. Most people don't realize this until the calendar is suddenly, completely clear. Her research also surfaces a loneliness epidemic quietly accelerating among retirees. Work colleagues disappear, and friendships built around shared roles don't transfer easily. Also, relationships don't deepen automatically just because…
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