Retired Husband Syndrome
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
For the most part they just boss around their families, driving them nuts.
I think we're lucky in that for most of us our hobbies and work intersect, at least to some degree, such that even in retirement, if we're truly idle, we can still write software.
If you don’t take joy, pride, humility, and reward in the feeling of genuinely doing good work for entirely no benefit to yourself, volunteering isn’t for you.
There's a real freedom in fun or interest for its own sake and not needing to rationalize its usefulness. One way to accomplish this is to deal with those externalities in some other fashion, like through effective altruism, e.g. donating to favorite charities, and periodically (not constantly) being informed on what the big issues are.
Of course it needs to be monetized. This is America - if you are good at it, it must make money
BTW, this is SOLID sarcasm.
I noticed this effect most prominently when moving from Pittsburgh to NYC. In Pittsburgh my circle of friends generally had noncommercial side projects, weird art installations, and hobbies that had nothing to do with their day jobs and no commercial potential. In NYC my circle of friends spent a lot more time discussing how much their rent cost (more than 2-3x the cost of comparable units in Pittsburgh) and it felt like people spent a lot more time "hustling", trying to monetize their side projects, or advancing their (or their children's) chances at earning more.
I have no way of knowing if these two circles were representative, but I suspect the fact that NYC salaries are generally only ~1.5x higher than Pittsburgh salaries meant that many people had to devote more of their mental and financial resources to the cost of living.
5 years on, they still just do nothing, all day, every day. I'd they were actually happy doing that, fair enough, but as it is, I really don't understand their attitude.
Personally, health permitting, I won't struggle for stuff to do when I retire, and I'll certainly be doing it!
I think you found the cause. Corporate media.
On the other hand, some people thrive doing nothing, or barely nothing - just tending to their hobbies in short bursts, and living a chill lifestyle. You really don't know before you're in that position.
I'm saying this, because I've seen many people that took out early retirement, only to fall into those traps. They envisioned a grand life of hobbies, travel, and just fun times - then 1 month went by, 6 months, a year, etc. and they hadn't done jack sh!t. And it also hit them that 90% of their socialization came through work, and that their friends that still work, need to prioritize their own spare time.
When Covid hit and I was WFH, I was hit with this fact. I HAD to learn new ways to socialize.
Best of luck to anyone who needs to learn this.
Put in other way humans need to score a win every now and then to keep moving forward, else you don't have anything to look forward to. You dread waking up in the morning because you need to carry around yourself the whole day without a purpose.
This is more in the bracket of anything in life in general and not just retirement.
For that matter continually failing at things in life without scoring a win for long has the same effect, even if you are not retired.
Leaving the industry has been a hard adjustment (years) - but folks can get through it. I've been thinking about this a lot, so here goes.
Ok, so, my theory is that when leaving a profession our brains have been hardwired for being really good at to the point where we dream about code - it's likely a large number of our brain cells don't know what to do with each other. Yet, if you get successful enough, you may also decide that you hate all the corporate drudgery and politics, and the reward of success is getting out, so you're out. And you have to adapt.
It's important to remember why you left. Yes, remember those bad things. There is a reason you aren't there.
But how to do you fill in and appease all those brain cells still grabbing on to the desire they want to do this thing, this thing that, especially when you were just starting, you really loved?
Can you still program for fun? Yes ... but you'll miss many levels of social interaction, especially if you had a really big thing before. You have to be able to enjoy building things that people don't see or appreciate. This is very hard. You may struggle from not having the user interactions or interactions with other developers you worked with. After starting many things that you can't get an audience for, this can become pretty isolating.
It does help to cultivate a degree of mindfulness - and ability to reframe negative thinking - and of course to cultivate hobbies. Everyone can do that now. But I would look at it not as a quest for "what's next" or a repeated success as this may be frustrating, but a chance for reinventing yourself (slowly) and enjoying various things in life with a bit more attention and interest.
Maybe the addiction to the success was the problem. Maybe there's something about the Buddhist definition of "attachment".
Still, I want to fix this - though I'm not working to anymore. I feel we feel the promise of open source in corporate settings but really the whole "anybody can make something and get lots of users to have fun with" isn't true really. There's too much noise. There is lost opportunity. In trying to do programming for fun, I ended up questioning all of my religion about open source communities. A weird experience.
It's not really as real as I thought.
We could fix this by making ways for people to discover projects around really niche interests - smaller forums, not sites that scroll by in a minutes.
But I think success in adapting here is by letting those parts go and realizing you can reinvent yourself. If someday they want to code something different, they won't have the same inclinations and it will be more like when I wrote my very first programs - there was almost no one to show them to, but it was still fun.
My advice I think is to be ok with letting that software part of your brain atrophy, because those pathways are likely attached to a lot of other things, and they are going to ... fight.
There's a few people I've encountered where stockbrokers became potters or whatever. I don't really know if I want to do that. But I also know if I'm looking, I kind of feel desperate or something, and it's better to not be.
I could start another company, but I want to avoid the whole VC game - and it's difficult finding people that have lots of time that CAN work for free, but I also know the huge opportunity cost - and once successful, it might create the thing I was happy to escape from. Do I even want to spend that many hours in front of a computer?
It's a process. (twitter DM info in profile if useful)
Not exactly a business exec or even a rich man. I know an uncle in my extended family who retired in late 40s-ish. We are in India, he used to work abroad in the middle east. Retired, returned and turned very grumpy, holier-than-thou and bitter towards kids. Add to this a range of business failures, and ensuing financial troubles.
Eventually the problem just became too extreme and he would make things difficult for every one just for the heck of it(Just to show them he was still in control). You could visit them and see the whole home felt like every one was just walking around with dread, despair and depression just wanting an escape from all this. He also turned to religion and would lawyer his arguments from that perspective too. He eventually morphed into a very bitter, always-angry, jealous and envious man, hating anyone with a good life around him. That included people in extended family too.
Eventually kids left for good.
There is something wrong that comes to happen when a person begins to live without a purpose, work or hobbies.
A common thing I heard in the break-room was "If I worked a normal job I would be divorced by now".
There needs to be an healthy amount of time that is both enjoyable, which is not too much to be invasive of one's privacy nor too less to make the other person feel lonely.
The retired adjust with varying levels of success. Everyone adjusts.
I've absolutely seen it from military families I know, and it's absolutely a known phenomenon. It's great it wasn't an issue for you, though!
That was a generalization based on how frequently I have observed this in "military families"; so frequently that I used that generalization because: "But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions" - Scott Adams.
>Maybe you did but this is classic projection.
I didn't say I did. I didn't say I didn't. Who knows.
>My fathers retirement has been awesome, we game together more than we ever did and he’s now able to be super active in his grandchildren’s lives the way he wasn’t in mine.
This is great. I'm happy for you. I wish I were wrong and everyone lived it the way it went down for you. This is really cool.
Have other kids you knew had a similar experience to yours? If so, there may be something your father and their fathers are doing right, and families preparing well, and some preparation from their organizations, whether at the branch level or other. It'd be interesting to compare in case there's something that can be learned.
We still have some things that he framed (certificate of family name origin, some pictures and the like). It instantly bring classiness level up a ton, but man is it expensive.
We have the final sale bill from when the family farm was auctioned off. I thought it would be neat to frame it for my dad, as a memento (it was a retirement, not a loss). Holy shit is custom framing expensive. I was shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, to hear that it was going to be ~$300 for the right glass and frame that size.
I decided then that my woodworking needed to focus on framing if I ever wanted to make money. (and cutting boards/charcuterie boards)
So...very similar to this RHS.
All I have to say is I know a lot of retired men who get very very into woodworking. Me and the nice handmade end-tables I have are not complaining.
> Conclusion
> The results suggest the limited relevance of the “retired husband syndrome” among middle-aged Japanese couples. The effects of a husband’s retirement on the wife’s mental health depended heavily on her prior behavior.
> A failure of a smooth transition of the husband’s daily lifestyle may also increase his physical demand for his wife’s homemaking tasks
I edited the introduction accordingly on Wikipedia, although I suspect it should be deleted entirely.
Still doubt this is sexist bullshit?
But I agree - the retiree needs a hobby for their own sanity. My parents took up nature photography. My father-in-law got serious about bowling.
Good luck quantifying that without too much snake oil.
This framework was then used by Aleksandr Kogan to profile and harvest facebook users - who then sold it to Cambridge Analytica..etc. By relying somewhat on self-selection Aleksandr's firm was able to profile facebook users. Since there was no second-guessing by the subject of the test as what a "question might say about them" I think it was pretty robust methodology. And then when you look at the impact of his work, you can see it was effective.
Not sure there is any snake oil to be found here.
I googled the Cambridge thing you mentioned and the first article that came up said it wasn't particularly accurate and was mostly just profiling based on demographics. (Shrug).
There's a long tradition of psychologists making grandiose claims that are short on facts. B.F. skinner claimed "Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything."
Not sure why you would assume the Cambridge thing did what someone selling it said it could do.
Having worked in adtech, and as a psychologist who's attempted to use OCEAN for said adtech, I never found it to work better than standard approaches.
Additionally, Costa and McCrae created the Big 5, found it didn't replicate in confirmatory factor analysis, so they created a new method of CFA which did replicate it.
Like, E O and N are probably real, but the overall structure does not replicate and should not be taken very seriously.
It's just a simplified model to put personalities in a certain bucket, typical PCA-style. This has limitations just like everything else that uses self-reporting to make a judgment/categorization. it's not like we are able to observe the structure of someone's brain and confirm that with actual facts. In other words, that's not even remotely what you call Science.
Don't get me wrong, I hate fake stats, but at least changing _my_ expectations allows me to enjoy more books without zeroing in on what could be a minor issue in a much larger and interesting point.
What surprises me is the extent to which I have become like my father, as I have aged. When I was 20, I despised my father.
I haven't adopted my father's political or social attitudes; but I'm pretty horrified at the extent to which I've become like him in my personal attitudes and dealings.
Which seems like a healthy thing to acknowledge - people constantly change in small ways, which add up to big changes over the years. It's also healthy to expect and not be disappointed by such changes in one's self.
That is a perspicacious remark! You change, and your lover changes, and that is all good and natural. So you both adapt to one-another, or you have to move on.
I for one do not expect the road to be free of potholes and bumps. If it were always smooth and flat, the journey would become dull.
Smart man. I'll be following his example.
I don't get it. What kind of reward for the husband is the fact that she socializes with her friends?
> reward (for his bringing in the money she used to look after their children) and [that she] socialize[d] with her friends.
(err.. or something, not sure exactly how you read it)
but:
> reward for his bringing in the money she used to (look after their children and socialize with her friends).
It just seems simpler. Not saying it has to be a women, but it's ultra stressful when both people are working full-time, especially if one or both partners aren't open to the idea of hiring cleaners etc. Where is the leisure time?
> but it's ultra stressful when both people are working full-time
If I was a worker who was away from home 12 hours a day, I would want for my partner to have a good life with happyness and joy while I am away. Of course it's better to come home to a person who feels she is living a fulfilled life, rather than someone who has been lonley the whole day. Makes you feel as if the long hours are actually making a difference.
Dynamic is very interesting and is not at all limited to boomer generation. Most of the time neither spouse has any concept of what the other actually does day to day. You can ask a wife and she will say that he works for EPSON and is engineer, further question as to what sort of engineer or what is he working on or anything else will be just blank stare.
It is like separation of concern principle but applies to marriage and family. Works great some times and some times not so much
Not sure who said it first.
You would think in well aligned couples this would be the opportunity to go and tour the world together or get divorced a find new partners.
How does that feel for them?
I'm 1000% positive that there's heaps of research on this, just google "study on male retirees"
Imagine if there's an article about what the psychological effects are if you have a family member in deep coma for many years. You're complaining that that article isn't talking about the effects of being in deep coma for many years on a person. They're different subjects!
I don't believe "RHS" exists as a real medical condition. It sounds just like girlies being girly, with teddy-bears and social circles and so on; and blokes being blokey and controlling the remote. This is just people being people.
It might be worth linking the two together at the bottom of the Retired Husband Syndrome article.
This requires the finances to do it, the health to handle it, and a lack of responsibilities to others. Then there is the desire which a lot of people don't have. Only a limited number of people can realistically do this. To assume it's open to everyone, I think, misses the contexts most people live with.
Change is hard. Retirement doesn't just affect the person retiring. It also affects their spouse, if they have one. It's totally ok to put some focus on that.
Japanese culture isn't like western culture. There are differences and I think some of that may be lost on a western crowd.
> or get divorced a find new partners
You can love someone and still be stressed about them being around all the time or a change. It's not just a change for them but for the spouse.
Change IS hard. But my original point is that this change is hard also for men and this is not addressed in the article -- its very one sided.
You're surprised an article about wives is "very one sided"?
No - it shouldn't be criticized for being "one-sided"
It's completely and 100% fine to have an article that only addresses a single issue - trying to wedge everything in everywhere is moronic
This article is specifically about the way this affects the wife. I don't know if there's a related article about the husband's experience, but the male perspective isn't particularly relevant to this article.
Well, the latter certainly does happen, a lot. The world is a different place from when our grandparents were young. Nowadays, people tend to keep their options open, and when divorce happens it's usually the women (especially in black communities) that initiate the divorce because they think they can "do better". Doesn't help that family courts still financially and emotionally rape the man since women see this as incentive for divorce.
If you wanted to raise that issue here that's fine, it's arguably on topic here to ask if there's a complementary syndrome affecting husbands and what that is and to discuss issues around it. That's fine, but this isn't an appropriate criticism of the article.
I tried it after our second kid was born. Highly not recommended. Get back to work and make the $$
Only in the western world.
It's a lot easier to make the argument for the Philippines, but you get what I am saying probably.