Idle Hours

When Ta Ja and Alan informed us that they have now retired from their jobs and would look forward to that much expected vacationed life of the retirees, it reminds me of the many occasions when I came across and spoke to my relatives and friends about what they really experience on this new lease of life.

On the bad side, I have come across a couple of friends who were very senior government servants and diplomats who were once ambassadors, who became somewhat disoriented and perhaps disillusioned on their high expectancy of a retired lifestyle. Having been in the positions where they were looked up to by their subordinates and members of the public, when they retired, they found that the new life brought solitude and eventually depression. For those who served locally, the moment they left the service, almost no one contacts them anymore, whilst for the diplomats, they came home to live amongst strangers because most of their friends are not around anymore or busy with their own lives.

All those people who previously looked up to them for consultations or advise are nowhere to be seen and for some, they even came to realize that they were being avoided by their previous subordinates. All these downsides almost all took place after the initial feelings of relief that they were now free men and looking forward to the well deserved holidays of their lifetime. Where previously they spent a few hours of their spare time at home with the families, now they suddenly realized they have too much time with the families to the point of what else could they do to keep mentally busy and not mentally rooting in the quagmire of family matters.

For the wives too, whilst at first they find it pleasant to have their husbands at home to spend their days together, later on they will feel encroached on or even bothered on by the continuos presence of their husbands. The same could be said for the husbands too for their feelings on this new lifestyle. Hence both would have to go through a lot of self adjustment of some kind in this new adaptive life. Call it retired honeymoon ?

Hence the need for improvisations for retirees.

Tunku Farahat

Some time ago, a very close friend of ours, who was once Farahat’s boss in MAS , who left MAS together with her boys to join and ventured to help start the Islamic Art Museum, which they did successfully although all of them eventually quit this new found job for personal reasons of their own, contacted Farahat to set up a new team of “motivators and counselors” for potential retirees.

I had the honor of being invited to be with the team although as yet my terms of reference are to be determined. At this juncture it is premature to expound on this new venture but as a retiree myself, I cannot but feel excited about the whole thing but grossly unfair to let the cat out of the bag when we are not even there yet !

However, this is the kind of thing that retirees should go for - the need to create self-importance so that the brain will not go stale.