Retirement: ending employment means losing a special kind of recognition

Just back from Poland, with another experience of approaching retirement giving me cause to think.

For the past four years, I have had a contract as a visiting professor with Opole University in southern Poland, mainly for teaching and decorating their department with a social work academic who is well-known internationally. My second contract comes to an end soon, and it’s all change at the university, so it is not going to be renewed. So it will end shortly after I retire from my main job next month. So I’ll probably never go to that place that I’ve got to know quite well, or meet those people that I’ve met regularly for several years again. This has happened several times in my life, but it feels a bit different this time, and I’m wondering why.

It’s giving me a pre-retirement experience of giving up something that has gone on for a while, when there is no replacement of it in sight, and I have to say it doesn’t feel good. However, that feeling of 'not good' is quite irrational.

My experience of various of the visiting posts I’ve had in European countries over the years is that they lose interest in you after about four or five years, and whatever contribution you made in the early years has dissipated. Also, for myself, I find heavy teaching a bit 'not-me'; I’m not sure it ever has been me, and it’s certainly not now. There was some prospect of its being renewed, and I was feeling it was a bit of a burden, so it’s a bit of a relief that it will not go on, and it will leave me freer to do some things that I plan to do over the next few years. So my rational mind is aware of the positives of this ending

My experience of leaving all jobs is that you disappear from people’s radar very quickly. Whatever nice or barbed things they say at the time you leave, the water closes over your head, the minor ripples quickly fade away, and they never speak to you again. People at St Christopher’s, my main job in the UK, are saying things like: ‘what are we going to do about this when you leave?’, when they ask me to do something. But they will move on with never a backward glance to whoever takes on the things that I’m doing now: mainly they already have.

And in the past, I’ve left whole areas of practice behind. For a while in the 1970s and 80s, I was quite involved in mental health practice and services; now my expertise is very distant. No doubt it will soon be the same with palliative care, which I was never much interested in anyway. It has its place, but it’s not my main interest in the care services.

So why does it feel a bit different, now I’m coming towards retirement. I’ve been mulling this over and I think it must be because these areas of activity not being replaced by anything, or at least by anything with a job title and the assumed status that goes with it. I’ve got writing contracts coming out of my ears for a couple of years or so, and projects in the planning that I’m aching to get at as soon as I have more time.

But there is something particular about an organisation deciding to employ you and actually paying you regularly to do something they need to have done.

I’ve known for many years that other people’s recognition is an important motivator for me; you don’t get that in quite the same way when you’re not working.