(photo credit: Brett Jordan via Unsplash)

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By Jack Calhoun

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In his viral 2021 Ted Talk, author Bruce Feiler speaks about the secrets to navigating life’s biggest transitions.

I’ve watched a lot of Ted Talks, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one as profound as this one.

In it, Feiler talks about the findings of his 2020 best-selling book, “Life is in the Transitions.”

For his research, Feiler traveled across the country interviewing hundreds of people from all walks of life to learn about the major life challenges they experienced and how they navigated them.

What he found is that all of us go through dozens of disruptors over the course of our lives, and about one in ten of those becomes what Feiler calls a lifequake; a massive change that leads to a life transition.

According to Feiler, the average length of a lifequake is five years, and we spend about half our lives in these unsettling, transitional states.

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The “ABC’s” of meaning

Despite the wide variety of people he interviewed for his book, Feiler found a common trait in every single person who had successfully navigated a lifequake:

They created meaning from it.

No matter how disruptive the event was to their lives, or how hard it was to endure, people who came through these major life disruptions didn’t just endure the experience.

Instead, they accepted the reality of their circumstances, found a way to create meaning from the experience and went on to forge a new, fulfilling chapter in their lives.

So how do we create meaning in the midst of a major life disruption? In "Life is in the Transitions," Feiler lays out three key elements — what he calls the “ABC’s of Meaning” – that we must have to create meaning from an experience:

• Agency: Our belief that we have control over our circumstances, which gives us confidence in our ability to create the life we want to live.
• Belonging: Our social connections and sense of being a part of a thriving, engaged community.
• Cause: Our feeling that we are part of a mission or cause that is greater than ourselves and that we believe in. This gives us the sense of purpose that keeps us forging ahead.

Looking at the above, it’s not hard to see why so many people feel lost when they retire.

Retirement in the conventional sense means the end of work. When we stop working and have no plan for the future beyond “endless leisure,” we lose all three of those ABC’s:

• We have less agency because, with no more income coming in, we are vulnerable to outside forces like the stock market, government policy, health crises, etc.
• We struggle with our sense of belonging because so much of our identity and social engagement was tied up in our work relationships.
• And, we lose our cause which was the work itself.

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Make meaning a priority in your post-career life

When we leave our career behind, we all look forward to having the freedom to do the things we’ve been wanting to do but never had the time for. Travel, recreation, hobbies, etc.

Those are all fun things to be sure, but they don’t check the boxes for the ABC’s of meaning. And without that, the fun stuff loses its flavor after a while, and we feel devoid of the things that used to inspire us and get us out of bed in the morning.

It’s not a binary choice, though. You can have both – a post-career life that’s full of both joy and meaning. Fun, freedom and purpose.

But it won’t just happen if you do what most people do and default to a “do-nothing retirement.”

You have to be proactive and intentional about it. You need to have a process you believe in, and you need to embrace it.

When you do that, you’ll find that the next chapter of your life may be the most meaningful one you’ve ever experienced. And it may just be the most fun, too.

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