THE VICIOUS CYCLE OF SELF-CONCERN
Life is difficult. It doesn’t get easier. On the contrary, life gets harder, more complex, arbitrary, and capricious. Although many believe retirement will reduce life's difficulties, it’s often quite the opposite.?
The devastating speed of change is occurring in every dimension – social, technological, ecological, political, viral, and financial, combined with Western culture’s perception that aging is a problem to be solved, pushes late agers into gaping uncertainty.?
The greater the uncertainty, the greater the self-concern. When self-concern intensifies, it leads to more and more anxiety-producing, scary worrying thoughts about what will happen in the future, which incites even more self-concern. The classic vicious cycle.
A?vicious cycle is a complex chain of events or interpretations that reinforces itself through a feedback loop with detrimental results. It is a system with no tendency toward equilibrium. Each iteration of the cycle reinforces the previous one. Self-perpetuating, self-enhancing, self-prolonging, self-harming.?
Besides imminent mortality, nothing promotes this cycle of self-concern more than money. With fixed incomes being vulnerable, unheralded inflation of goods and services, the anticipated increases in medical and dental expenses, and the unpredictable returns on investments, the vicious cycle of self-concern is easily inflamed.
Add the apprehension that health issues will arise. The likelihood of chronic issues as you age, diabetes, renal disease, dementia, cardiovascular, and cancer, with their increasing comorbidities, add another iteration to the vicious cycle.?
And don’t forget mobility, balance, and cognitive sharpness are no longer on the upswing—another sting affixed to the vicious cycle.
Finally, the piece de resistance, the loss of a routine, identity, relationships, a sense of purpose, and increasing doubt of self-worth, leaving little to hang onto, keeps the vicious cycle going and growing.
Sure, the first few years of retirement might seem like freedom. Still, it has been shown consistently over time that the difficulties just described climb to the point post-retirement where depression, anxiety, and resignation become further dominant, feeding a vicious cycle of self-concern, actually self-defeat.
DISCONTINUING THE VICIOUS CYCLE – ENLIGHTENED SELF INTEREST
The vicious cycle of unchecked self-concern causes harm - mental and physical.?As you get pulled around by the centrifugal force of the cycle, you feel a persistent loss of control and heightened emotional angst.
Elders know how to extricate themselves from their vicious cycle of self-concern. They understand enlightened self-interest pulls them away from the cycle. They understand the difference between enlightened self-interest and simple self-interest.
In our Western culture – our politics, our businesses, our professional lives – self-interest is the lead dog. Self-interest inherently generates competition, resulting in individuals performing at their best to increase personal and professional gain. Individuals only make the team work if they need the team to get their needs met. Self-interest is individually focused, highly self-serving, ego-boosting, and susceptible to envy, jealousy, and greed.
Self-interest, as we are using it here, is a win-lose context. In this context, I- me-my is the center of thinking and actions. It’s about what can people and circumstances do for “me.”
Enlightened self-interest?is different than this kind of self-focused interest.?Enlightened self-interest is a way of being that contributes to others without a return required.?
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My corporate relations with companies that have enlightened self-interest - Schein, Colgate, DentaQuest – allowed me to see the impact on culture, recruitment, and retention, board directors, down to the shop floor. Corporate enlightened self-interest impacted who people were, not only at work but at home.
Enlightened self-interest draws on the stakeholder theory as a process to achieve a single company objective, namely, long-term value creation. It unites and builds value both for the company and the stakeholders. It directly builds financial, reputational, and social capital.
Enlightened self-interest, or as one of my corporate clients likes to call it; enlightened value maximization is a way of bridging stakeholder values to enable the company to deliver on its corporate purpose and mission more effectively. It gets the stakeholders emotionally behind the success of the company.
The model of enlightened self-interest works to reinforce a virtuous cycle. A virtuous cycle is?a recurring cycle of events. The result of each one increases the beneficial effect of the next. A virtuous cycle directly extricates from the vicious cycle.?
Keeping yourself in the virtuous cycle is the discipline and practice of elders. If you’re helping someone and expecting something in return, you’re doing business, not kindness.
HOORAY!
The Red Mountain Contemporary Elder Retreat in October is sold out.?We now have a bit of a waiting list. What was once only a possibility is now an in-the-world reality.?
This accomplishment tells us that we have found something very much special, something wanted and needed that makes a profound difference in the late lives of many professionals.?
Our participants in the elder retreat and now those enrolled in our Departing Program, are late-age senior executives or tenured healthcare providers – late fifties to mid-seventies – who understand they still have the last third of their lives yet to live but also realize they have no fundamental understanding of how to live into this last phase.?
When we began this mission, transforming “older to elder,” we were highly aware that senior professionals departing their successful careers, those who had mastered their professional existence, had forged their identities, and sharpened their egos to succeed in these environs.?
Unfortunately, past identities and lauded accomplishments are useless against the uncertainty, indecision, isolation, insecurity, anxiety, and self-doubt which awaits late age. Unattended and unexamined, they can grow like corn in the night. Elders know how to harvest this crop.
At this time, we are beginning to receive opening invitations to speak at some professional conferences and inhouse corporate settings. This further adds validation to this work on eldering.?
Might be the working title of my presentation, “Death by Retirement,” might be grabbing their attention.