She Had a Name for What Was Happening to Her
🟢 She lay awake at night, staring at her wheelchair, telling herself: “If only I could walk to the bathroom. Such a simple thing.”
Jean is someone I have recently connected with, and her perspective on retirement is really insightful.
Jean spent her career in long-term care. She knew the research. She had seen the patterns play out in others for decades. She had the clinical language to name what can happen to people when a major life chapter ends without sufficient design.
And then she broke her leg and found herself living those patterns from the inside.
🧭 Three words that belong in retirement, too
In long-term care, there is a framework known as the Eden philosophy. It identifies three conditions as the primary threats to quality of life in older adults: loneliness, helplessness, and boredom.
Jean knew these well. She had spent her career fighting them for other people.
What the broken leg gave her, unexpectedly and all at once, was an involuntary taste of all three. Lying at home, immobile, dependent, with months of recovery stretching ahead, she experienced what her clients had been trying to describe all along.
And what struck her was how familiar it felt. Not because she was helpless or bored in her everyday life. But because she recognized, in her own body and her own days, how quickly those three conditions can arrive when the structures that hold a life together are suddenly removed.
Work, it turns out, had been doing a great deal of that holding. Through connection, challenge, daily structure, a sense of learning and growth, and the ongoing experience of contributing to something beyond herself. When all of that disappeared, even temporarily, the three threats arrived quickly.
She had also watched this happen to her husband. After he retired, the daily structure faded, the relationships built around work gradually fell away, and the steady sense of purpose he had drawn from his role began to erode. She watched him lose his sense of who he was. He became, in her words, a different person. And he eventually died.
🌱 What we assume when work ends
Most of us assume that after decades of contribution, the absence of obligation will feel like relief. And often, in the early weeks, it does.
What is harder to anticipate is that work was never only a source of obligation. It was also the engine behind connection, structure, daily challenge, intellectual growth, and the steady sense of being needed. Those things don’t transfer automatically to the next chapter. They have to be intentionally rebuilt.
Loneliness signals that the Connection and Relationships dimension of life needs deliberate attention. Boredom points to gaps in Creativity and Play, Growth and Learning, and Service and Contribution. Helplessness often reflects the absence of meaningful agency, the sense that what you do each day actually matters.
None of these dimensions sustain themselves on their own after a major transition. They require design.
💡 This chapter is yours to design
In my book Designing Your Second Act, I introduce a framework called the Life Design Purpose Wheel. It organizes the six dimensions of a fulfilling second act: Health and Vitality, Service and Contribution, Creativity and Play, Connection and Relationships, Growth and Learning, and Financial Stability.
Most retirement planning addresses only one of these in any depth. The others are left to sort themselves out.
Jean’s experience, and her husband’s, show what happens when they are left to chance.
You have spent your career planning, designing, executing, and getting things done, most often for other people. For companies. For teams. For projects that mattered. For family.
This chapter is the first one, maybe the only one, that is purely for you to design. With intention. With care. With honesty about who you actually are and what you actually want.
That is where the design work begins.
✍️ A question for you:
Of the three — loneliness, helplessness, and boredom — which one concerns you most when you imagine your own transition?
If this reflection resonates, I share more thinking like this here and through my writing and coaching by clicking here.
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