Making & Keeping Friends…in Retirement – Janice McCabe

Making & Keeping Friends…in Retirement – Janice McCabe

From The Retirement Wisdom Podcast by Retirement Wisdom

March 23, 2026 · 29 min · Season 9 · Episode 405

About this episode

The episode discusses the importance of friendships in retirement and how to cultivate new connections during life transitions.

Choices shaped your career. But when retirement approaches, a new design challenge appears. Not a financial one. A life design challenge . What will your days look like? What will energize you? What might the next five years become? In the Designing Your New Life in Retirement program, you’ll step back from the fray and apply design thinking to those questions, with a bias for action. Learn more here . We begin in April. Join us and get started – on your most important project. _____________________________ Friendship is one of the most powerful forces shaping our lives—and our health. Friendships become harder to maintain as life evolves, especially during major transitions like retirement. Losing work friends is normal, yet few realize how new connections can be cultivated. Our guest today highlights why identity shifts can, perhaps counterintuitively, create oppotunities to build new friendships. My guest today is Janice McCabe , is a sociologist at Dartmouth and author of Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends . Her research, mainly on college campuses, illuminates key principles of forming friendships like the hidden structures that shape our friendships. In this…

People in this episode

Guest: Janice McCabe

Topics covered

  • friendship in retirement
  • life design challenge
  • building connections
  • health and well-being
  • identity shifts
  • friendship networks

Keywords

  • retirement
  • friendship
  • social connections
  • life design
  • health
  • identity
  • networking

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Dartmouth

Books & works: Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends

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