BOOKS by Andi Simon, PhD Rethink Retirement It’s Not the End—It’s the Beginning of What’s Next Ask most men and women what retirement means, and you’ll hear one of two things: either a sigh of relief—“finally, freedom!”—or a knot of quiet anxiety: “But who am I without my work?” Both reactions are completely valid. And both point to something our culture rarely prepares us for: retirement is not a financial event. It is a profound personal transformation. I’ve spent my career as a corporate anthropologist, helping organizations see themselves differently so they can change. When my husband Andy sold his business and we began navigating this next chapter together, I realized the same lens I’d applied to companies needed to be turned on ourselves. What I found— through our own experience and dozens of interviews with people at every stage of this transition—is that retirement is filled with myths that mislead, confuse, and sometimes quietly break our spirit. This book is about dismantling those myths and replacing them with something more honest, more exciting, and far more useful. “Retirement isn’t a finish line. It is a moment of transformation— an invitation to ask not just ‘What will I do?’ but ‘Who will I be?” Myth #1: Work is who you are From the time we were children, our culture sent a single, relentless message: you are what you do. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is never really about being—it’s about doing, and more specifically, about earning. We spend decades building an identity around a title, a company, a role. And then one day, the business card disappears. The calendar goes silent. And the question that used to be so easy to answer—“What do you do?”—suddenly has no clean answer at all. I watched this happen to Laura Rotter, a former Wall Street analyst who spent nearly three decades mastering the interplay of markets, policy, and human behavior. When Citigroup sold her division, Laura didn’t just lose a job—she lost the story she’d been telling herself about who she was. She drifted. Then she made a bold move: yoga teacher training. What began as personal exploration became a doorway to a new identity. Eventually she launched her own wealth advisory practice, weaving financial expertise with a life philosophy centered on meaning and ease. “Retirement is unique,” she told me. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach.” The research confirms what Laura discovered intuitively: people who cultivate multiple personal identities before retirement—artist, volunteer, community member, learner—navigate the transition far more gracefully than those whose entire sense of self is anchored in a professional role. Identity isn’t a title. It’s a tapestry. And retirement is the moment you finally have time to see the whole of it. Myth #2: Money is enough The financial industry has sold us a seductive story: save enough, and happiness will follow. And while financial security is absolutely essential—it buys choices, reduces anxiety, and enables care—no retirement account can answer the questions that really keep people up at night: Who will I spend my days with? What will give my mornings meaning? How do I matter now? Scot Hunsaker sold his family engineering business at forty-nine— younger than most people even start thinking about retirement. He had built it from a modest swim club management company into a fifty-person firm with five offices and projects of 72 enterprising Women
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