Thoughts on Riley Moynes' "The Four Phases of Retirement"

All those years of sitting in on mind-numbing meetings in stuffy conference rooms thinking I'd rather be juggling chain saws or dreaming of beach vacations...well, here I am.

I've been variously exploring and working hard at cracking the retirement code, a topic I touched on in Stoic Meditation 7 - The Silent Career of Retirement. In that post, I described how I got to a better descriptor of the effort: Restoration. This word won't set right with many retirees, I expect. Especially those who had a long and satisfying career. In my case, while I can broadly state I had a career in technology spanning 40 years, there were, in fact, four distinct careers nestled within that time: Degrees in biochemistry and biology and worked as a chemist for one of the pharmaceutical giants (low pay), software development (burned out), technical management (burned out), and finally coaching and training (phased out). During that time I've survived more than a dozen layoffs and was caught in three. Job security, let alone career stability, is unknown to me. I had to prove my worth and value virtually every day.

So I'm not one to follow patterns. Moynes' four phases of retirement is no exception. I'm sure such a framework appeals to and works well for the kind of people who need or want clear definitions to how life unfolds. They're probably the same type of people who rely on similar approaches to grief resolution, career development, addiction recovery, or even creativity. While I can grant that there is value in consider the stages to a particular process, this approach has never work well for me in the long run. Using the four stages of retirement as an example, the entire process is presented in a linear fashion:

There's nothing wrong with any of these phases and Moynes give a fair description of what happens during each phase. But if you're paying attention, life isn't linear like this. If someone lives long enough or experiences enough of the rough and tumble of life, they at the very least intuitively grasp this reality. My experience of the four phases of retirement has been more like:

This is the picture if I just consider my experience bounded by Moynes' four phases. It gets even crazier when I factor in my own set of "phases," themes, and milestones. In my view, future and present retirees would do better to consider each of Moynes' phases as nodes, places they may be at any given particular moment from which they might consider where to go next. They might also find themselves on one of these nodes ahead of Moynes' scheduled phases or skip them altogether.

Myself and others I've met seemed to have started out on "reinvent and repurpose." Having finished out a particularly grueling and cutthroat career, the idea of pointing our mental and physical energies in an entirely different direction was an easy and welcome idea. Better to spend a little time on the "repurpose" node, thinking about what you might want to do and then go to "trial and error" and get first-hand experience if your idea is a good fit or within reasonable reach of your capabilities. Spending a lot of time in trial and error to see if something sticks could waste a lot of valuable time. Get a compass reading first, then head in a direction. You'll find your way to reinvention and repurpose much faster. Maybe one reason only 20% of the retirees Moynes interview ever made it to his "reinvent and repurpose" phase is because everyone else got stuck in one of the other nodes.

As for the "vacation" node, I've spent time there throughout the entire experience thus far. Not vacation all the time, as Moynes implies. Every vacation doesn't have to include four weeks of international travel. Taking time to enjoy things we didn't have time to enjoy during our careers can be as simple as an afternoon beer at a local microbrewery or a mid-day hike in the mountains.

"Thoughts on Riley Moynes' "The Four Phases of Retirement"" last updated on 2025.04.11.

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