Ralph Carlson Blog

Life is a process of accumulating.

Image by Keith Sergeant via Flickr

The longer you live, the more you accumulate. We grow up valuing possessions and approvals (badges) and once we work so hard to earn them, it is hard to let them go. They represent effort and commitment and much of the time we depend on them to define our value whether it makes sense or not. Those things seem to define our worth and tell others who we really are.

Each stage in life is like a stair tread. Each one is a platform for moving to the next. Each step is important but only until we move to the next one. High school is a staging area for college which is a staging area for a career. Throughout a career, we learn to build a resume of experience with more complex mastery of skills. It all seems reasonable at the time. It is true that each step in the process has an entry price to get you in the game but once you reach a new level do you ever need that experience again. I never did.  Did you?

Still we cling to the resume and our past glory. I think that we have seriously damaged our education system by confusing vocational training with education. I won’t get on my soapbox but I ask you why a kid who wants to be an accountant needs to spend four years and $100,000 to study book keeping from people who don’t keep books for a living? It’s crazy? It is financial lunacy in the first place but it also devalues real education.

Still, we define ourselves with college degrees and the perceived value of the institution that awarded it when the degree itself tell nothing about the individual. I’m getting off the original idea which was that we continue to cling to things which have perceived value long past the time when they matter.

What is the value of a college degree when you retire? What does it tell people about who you really are?

It is meaningless.

Image by tim ellis via Flickr

Look at two people sitting on their porches in retirement. One has a PhD in Sociology and has taught in a college all his life. The other didn’t go to college and was an auto mechanic for his whole life, Bot lived responsible lives and retired in good health. Now, in retirement, does that college degree really matter? Does one have an advantage over the other when it comes to creating a rich and satisfying retirement lifestyle? I don’t think so.

I think both men (or women) will restrict their options about how to live their retirement lifestyle based upon what they did before and who they think they are. In truth they were both employees, dependent on somebody else to define their role and decide how much they were worth. They both face the same obstacles in taking control of their life. Education might have taught them their own worth and given them a life objective but both men only received vocational training- one formal and the other on the job. What they learned about life they learned somewhere else.

Society is going to value the man with the degree higher than the one without.

My point is not to complain about education. Just to observe that in retirement, degrees don’t matter. Nothing that you did before makes you an automatic success in retirement. It is a new ballgame with new rules and infinite possibilities if you allow yourself to see them. You can do something that you have always loved but never had time to peruse while working. You can do something entirely new that is totally unrelated to anything you did in your life. Or you can try to live off your past.

Retirement success requires that you be willing to let go of anything that blocks your thinking or your direction. Question anything that limits who you think you are. If it blocks your path to what you would like to be then drop it. You are free to change and do anything. You aren’t your profession. You aren’t your community organizations. You aren’t your church. You aren’t your neighborhood. You aren’t even your family. That is unless you want them to define you.

So let go of the mental baggage that is irrelevant to the life you want to live.