Posted by Canadian Dream on October 22, 2009
So if you recall towards the start of this month I mentioned I was looking for a blogger to help me out on the blog. I had some interesting applications, for example one fellow was from the US. In general most of the people that applied on a pure academic background are more qualified to write this blog than I am.
The good news is the search is almost done. Next week I will feature guest posts from the top two candidates. I’m looking for your feedback to help me make a decision. To keep things fair I’m going to pick the order of who gets posted first from a hat.
If everything goes well I hope to have the new blogger on board by early November just in time for this blog’s third birthday. Yikes I can’t believe it’s been almost three years now.
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Posted by Canadian Dream on October 21, 2009
I’m a bit strange. I rather like this time of year because after Thanksgiving my family stops buying stuff for ourselves. By the virtue of a well placed birthday in November and Christmas in December we have gotten in the habit of buying nothing that we want during this time. No DVD’s, no books, no CD’s, no tools, no toys for ourselves.
So once this time starts I know I won’t be buying anything I can just enjoy life without the pressure of stuff. After writing up my wish list I basically don’t think about stuff for myself for two months. Yes we buy things for others, but that’s more fun since we save in advance for that. Our oldest boy has even got into the habit and has stopped pointing out toys and saying “Can I have?” instead its “We’ll see, Daddy” or “Christmas” to indicate he would like that item to go on his wish list. He still looks, but he know gets we won’t be buying him anything till after Christmas.
In the mean time its a quieter pace of life, the chaos of Christmas is still too far in advance to do much, so instead we clean up things in the yard and spend time together as a family. In these moments I recall how little I really need in life and how somethings stuff gets in the way of the important things in life. I don’t need much to have a conversation with someone. I don’t need much to play silly games with my boys that results in giggles. Life can be simple if you let it be.
So how about you? Do you have a season of not buying? If so, when does it start?
Posted by Canadian Dream on October 20, 2009
I was reading something the other day that I thought had a great way to explain why so many people fail at being happy in retirement. It partly has to do with how we view happiness. People often assume happiness is solely related to activities that bring pleasure: golf, a good meal, or a entertaining movie. The problem is that pleasure usually only lasts as long as the activity itself and the happiness from that activity diminishes if you do it too often (ie: The classic case is you eat steak every day. After a week it would still taste good after a month it would cease to be anything enjoyable).
So when you are working and very busy you typically get most of your non-work happiness from pleasure activities, which is fine. Since during your work life the pleasure activties balances out well from your working life. Yet when you retire you can’t contiue to get all your happiness from pleasure activities, because you end up doing them too much and diminish the amount of happiness you get from those activities. What’s missing is what happiness you could have been partly getting from your job and didn’t realize it.
Happiness from pleasure is easy to understand. Expanding that out to what else makes us happy is a bit trickier. The other two ways we typically get happy is engagement and meaning.
Engagement is a weird one to explain since everyone has done it, but likely at work than at home. Engagement is doing something that is a good match to your skills and that provides a bit of a challenge. The result is the hours stream by in seconds to you as you are so engaged in what you are doing. The end result is you are happy from completing your task and beating that challenge. Too little of a challenge and your bored, too much and you get frustrated. So some balance is required. To help you separate this from pleasure consider this example, watching a sport may be pleasure for you, playing it could be engaging.
Meaning is being in service to something greater than yourself, which sounds a lot like religion, but it isn’t. Religion can provide some meaning, but it isn’t a requirement. Meaning flows from the pride of contributing to something greater than you. It can be helping others via a charity, volunteering your time at a community event or helping raise funds for a project. People don’t often realize, but your day job might be giving you some meaning as well. Did you get that big project off the ground and see it done? Did you help create a new program that really helped your customers? Regardless of how obvious it is you are liking getting some meaning from your job.
So in the end the issue with our retirement planning is it often ignores what happiness we were getting from our job in term of engagement and meaning. To truly retire well you need to have plans in place to provide all three parts of happiness: pleasure, engagement and meaning. It won’t be easy and you might even find a bit of ‘work’ might be useful in your plans. Just don’t get hung up on being paid a lot for doing it and you should be happy in your retirement in every possible way.
