In retirement misplaced blame For the feelings of…

Transcript

As I was transitioning into my new retirement, I started experiencing feelings like my family and friends didn't really like me as much anymore, or they didn't find me as interesting or as funny or as smart. What I was experiencing was the symptoms of a loss of validation. The actual phenomenon that was affecting me was called misattribution of change, and it's a form of cognitive bias. I had to look all this up. So misattribution of change is exactly what it sounds like. It's something changed, and I attributed it to the wrong thing. What changed? I stopped working. So I stopped getting all that validation that I was getting from work. I felt like I was no longer receiving the same amount of validation that I had been in the past, which was true, and I attributed it to my family and friends not validating me as much. And it wasn't that at all. In fact, they were doing their very best to validate me as much as possible, knowing that I was kind of like working through this transition. But there's no amount of validation that your family and friends could do that could ever make up for the lack of validation that you experience when you leave the workplace. Now, you may be someone who didn't really receive validation from the workplace, so this wouldn't apply to you. But if you are someone who was validated, validated constantly by your work, when you retire, that validation disappears immediately. And that feeling of not being validated can easily be misattributed to your spouse, to your family, to your friends. And you just need to be aware that you're going to start feeling like people aren't validating you anymore. And it's not them. It's the loss of all that validation from work.