I was at the hardware store last week when I ran into a former colleague. He’d retired six months after me, and something was off. Not his appearance or his health—he looked fine.
It was the way he kept steering our conversation back to his old job, dropping names of people who’d replaced him, explaining problems the company was surely having without his expertise.
When I asked what he was up to these days, he paused, then said, “You know, keeping busy.” That hollow phrase that means the opposite of what it says.
I’ve seen this pattern enough times now to recognize it. The retirees who struggle most aren’t the ones with smaller pension funds or modest savings.
They’re the ones who never figured out who they were beyond being indispensable. They built their entire sense of self around being the problem-solver, the decision-maker, the one everyone turned to.
When that role disappears, they discover they never developed an identity that could survive without it.
The trap of being needed
During my career, being needed felt like success. Every urgent email, every crisis that required my input, every colleague who couldn’t proceed without my approval—these weren’t interruptions.
They were validations. Benjamin Laker, a university professor, captured this perfectly: “When you’ve spent decades being the person everyone turns to for decisions, suddenly having no decisions to make creates an existential crisis.”
The insidious part is how being needed becomes your primary source of worth. You don’t notice it happening. Years pass where your value is measured in problems solved, teams managed, expertise delivered. Your identity narrows until you are your utility. Then retirement arrives, and that utility vanishes overnight.
I keep a notebook where I write the same question periodically: “What am I optimizing for now?”
In my working years, the answer was clear—results, reputation, being the person who could handle the difficult personalities and navigate the politics.
Now? The answer requires thought, and that’s precisely the work many retirees never do.
Why money isn’t the real problem
Financial advisors love to focus on the numbers. Do you have enough saved?
Have you calculated for inflation? These are important questions, but they miss the deeper issue. I know retirees with substantial portfolios who are miserable and others living on Social Security who’ve found genuine contentment. The difference isn’t in their bank accounts.
The difference is whether they developed interests, relationships, and sources of meaning that existed independently of their professional roles.
The executive who only socialized at industry events now has no social circle. The manager who derived all satisfaction from leading teams now has no one to lead. The expert whose entire intellectual life revolved around their field now has no reason to learn.
Think about your current sources of satisfaction. How many of them require you to be employed? How many depend on your professional status? If the answer is “most” or “all,” you’re setting yourself up for a retirement crisis that no amount of money will solve.
The identity work nobody talks about
Before retiring, I thought the transition would be about adjusting to a different schedule. Sleep in a bit, read more, maybe take up golf.
What I didn’t anticipate was the identity reconstruction required. Who are you when nobody needs your expertise? What matters when your calendar isn’t dictated by external obligations?
Research from the American Journal of Epidemiology found that the transition to retirement is associated with a higher risk of depression, particularly among those who retire involuntarily.
But even voluntary retirees struggle when they haven’t done the psychological preparation. The study suggests that the loss of occupational identity negatively impacts mental health in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
I still get calls from younger colleagues asking for advice on handling difficult personalities and internal politics. I help when I can, but I’ve noticed something: these calls don’t define my worth anymore.
They’re nice, but they’re not necessary for my sense of self. That shift didn’t happen automatically. It required deliberately building other sources of meaning.
Building an identity beyond usefulness
The retirees who thrive have figured out something crucial: they’ve separated their worth from their usefulness. They’ve developed what I call “non-transactional identity”—aspects of self that don’t depend on providing value to others.
This might be creative pursuits where the only audience is yourself. It might be learning for the sake of curiosity rather than career advancement.
It might be relationships based on mutual enjoyment rather than professional networking. The specific activities matter less than the principle: you need sources of identity that exist independent of being needed.
I’ve watched too many former colleagues try to recreate their professional identity in retirement—consulting, board positions, anything to maintain that sense of being essential.
Some of this can be healthy, but when it’s driven by the inability to exist without being needed, it’s just postponing the reckoning.
The work is to discover who you are when you’re not solving anyone’s problems. What interests you when there’s no external validation? What relationships matter when there’s no professional advantage?
These questions feel uncomfortable because we’ve been trained to see value only in productivity and usefulness.
Closing thoughts
The hardware store encounter stayed with me because I recognized myself in my former colleague’s desperate recounting of his old importance. The difference is that I’ve been doing the work—sometimes reluctantly—of building an identity that doesn’t require external validation.
Here’s the practical rule I’ve developed: for every hour you spend maintaining your professional identity in retirement (consulting, advising, staying connected to your field), spend two hours on something that has no connection to your former work.
Learn a language nobody needs you to know. Join a group where your professional background is irrelevant. Develop expertise in something completely impractical.
The goal isn’t to become someone new. It’s to discover parts of yourself that were always there but got buried under decades of being useful. Those parts don’t need to be productive or impressive. They just need to be yours.
The retirees who struggle aren’t failing at retirement. They’re confronting the fact that they never developed a self that could exist without being essential to others. The ones who thrive have done the harder work of discovering they’re enough, even when nobody needs them at all.
