What an Oscar-nominated short film can teach us about retirement
Spoiler alert: It has nothing to do with money.
“Wait, what? A film about retirement was nominated for an Oscar?”
In the end, the film didn’t take home the Oscar, but it did win the top prize at several film festivals. And I was certainly moved by it. As the cliché goes, I laughed and I cried, literally. I watched Retirement Plan a second time and then shared it with friends and family members who are in various states of retirement or retirement preparation.
Here are my key takeaways.
Experiment
The overall tone of the film—the music, narration, and substance—is melancholic. One positive message, though, is that retirement is a wonderful life stage for dabbling, for trying activities that you were too busy or shy to try while you were working. As the main character’s retirement unfolds, he pursues bird-watching, writing poetry, and even questionable activities like microdosing. Some of the experiences are transcendent, like having the time to notice which spring flowers bloom first. Other activities, such as paragliding and camping, are less successful. But the point is that Ray tries, and research shows that trying new activities is conducive to healthy aging. It’s a reminder to not get stuck with a mental ledger with two columns: “Things I Do” and a much longer list of “Things I Don’t Do.”
Prioritise human connection
On a less positive note, one of the most striking aspects of the film was Ray’s solitude. Watching him pursue so many activities on his own, and ultimately age and die alone, brings a sense of despair to the proceedings. There are no dinners or hikes with friends, no partner or buddy to clink glasses with before savoring that exquisitely prepared Italian dinner. Despite Ray’s commitment to using retirement to become the best possible version of himself, there’s no one there to help him laugh off his failures or cheer his successes. And indeed, studies of what contributes to a healthy, successful life point to a single deciding factor: relationships, whom you love and who loves you back. Not only are lonely people less happy than people with meaningful relationships, but they also have worse health outcomes. Those human connections can also provide an ongoing sense of purpose and “mattering” in the world, another key to successful aging.
The good news for the less extroverted among us is that you don’t have to have a broad social network to benefit from human connection. Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which measured the physical and mental well-being of adults over many decades, says having even one solid relationship can have a big impact on physical and mental health. And comfortingly, it’s never too late to build and burnish relationships. “What we find in following thousands of people is that many people who thought it was too late for them, who thought, ‘I’m no good at relationships,’ found relationships at a time when they didn’t expect to,” he says.
Know that money doesn’t equal a retirement plan
In the circles that I move in, and certainly here on Morningstar.com, we often equate a retirement plan with money: Do you have enough, how will you invest it, how will you spend it, who will get your money when you’re gone? But one of the most surprising aspects of Retirement Plan is that, despite its title, it barely touches on money matters. Instead, its major preoccupation is time: How will you fill it, and how quickly it can slip through your fingers, even if you’ve pursued a lot of activities that seemed important at the beginning of retirement. I love and agree with its implicit point that our time-on-earth allocations are more important than our portfolio allocations.
Don’t wait
Finally, for me, the most important and urgent message from the film was to not save up a million “to-dos” for retirement. Ray comes into retirement with a long list of activities that he didn’t have time to pursue while he was working, everything from organizing his photos to getting in shape to traveling the world. But as the film unfolds, we see that time is not his friend: He goes from being a robust early senior to an elderly man in the blink of an eye.
The message is that even though retirement is a wonderful life stage to pursue passions, have fun, and tackle jobs you haven’t had time to do, it’s a mistake to delay those activities. You just don’t know what the future holds. We probably all know someone who came into retirement with big aspirations only to be felled by health issues shortly thereafter. That’s why I’m increasingly convinced that the best model for retirement isn’t a hard stop but rather a gentle glide path, where you’re stepping back from work very gradually and giving yourself more leeway to pursue your passions earlier. The film is a reminder that there’s nothing more precious than time.
