Anecdotally I have heard of similar phenomena among retired professional athletes (no longer on the road for a good part of every year) and soldiers returning home after extended tours of duty (e.g. post-Iraq and Afghanistan). Obviously each of these is different in important ways, but perhaps not entirely different.
There is also evidence to show that we retain 25% of the same personality traits that we had as 20 year olds, as we age. I think David Epstein's book, Range, references this. So we really do become a different person.
I think they used the well-established and well-researched personality methodology called OCEAN. This has been well documented as being able to identify the big five traits (OPENNESS, CONSCIENTIOUSNESS, EXTRAVERSION, AGREEABLENESS, NEUROTICISM) and its sub traits.
This framework was then used by Aleksandr Kogan to profile and harvest facebook users - who then sold it to Cambridge Analytica..etc. By relying somewhat on self-selection Aleksandr's firm was able to profile facebook users. Since there was no second-guessing by the subject of the test as what a "question might say about them" I think it was pretty robust methodology. And then when you look at the impact of his work, you can see it was effective.
I've taken one of those big 5 tests, it's based on self reported answers to survey questions. While I would not call it snake oil, if self reports are not a reliable method of understanding people, it's fancy nonsense. (Like most psychology, it seems it may or may not be B.S.)
I googled the Cambridge thing you mentioned and the first article that came up said it wasn't particularly accurate and was mostly just profiling based on demographics. (Shrug).
There's a long tradition of psychologists making grandiose claims that are short on facts. B.F. skinner claimed "Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything."
Not sure why you would assume the Cambridge thing did what someone selling it said it could do.
> By relying somewhat on self-selection Aleksandr's firm was able to profile facebook users. Since there was no second-guessing by the subject of the test as what a "question might say about them" I think it was pretty robust methodology.
Having worked in adtech, and as a psychologist who's attempted to use OCEAN for said adtech, I never found it to work better than standard approaches.
Additionally, Costa and McCrae created the Big 5, found it didn't replicate in confirmatory factor analysis, so they created a new method of CFA which did replicate it.
Like, E O and N are probably real, but the overall structure does not replicate and should not be taken very seriously.
> This has been well documented as being able to identify the big five traits (OPENNESS, CONSCIENTIOUSNESS, EXTRAVERSION, AGREEABLENESS, NEUROTICISM) and its sub traits.
It's just a simplified model to put personalities in a certain bucket, typical PCA-style. This has limitations just like everything else that uses self-reporting to make a judgment/categorization. it's not like we are able to observe the structure of someone's brain and confirm that with actual facts. In other words, that's not even remotely what you call Science.
Some authors simply don't understand the importance of factual statistics. I see a lot of it in psychology. Your choice as a reader is to close the book, or change your frame of reference with regards to the statistics in the entire book. In this case, the author is probably trying to convey that for a lot of people their personalities will change over the course of 30 years such that at the 20 and 50 year mark a minority of ones personality is still present.
Don't get me wrong, I hate fake stats, but at least changing _my_ expectations allows me to enjoy more books without zeroing in on what could be a minor issue in a much larger and interesting point.
It's hardly surprising that people change over time.
What surprises me is the extent to which I have become like my father, as I have aged. When I was 20, I despised my father.
I haven't adopted my father's political or social attitudes; but I'm pretty horrified at the extent to which I've become like him in my personal attitudes and dealings.
I haven't read anything else by the self-help author it's attributed to, but I've seen this quote multiple times recently: "To love someone long term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be".
Which seems like a healthy thing to acknowledge - people constantly change in small ways, which add up to big changes over the years. It's also healthy to expect and not be disappointed by such changes in one's self.
That is a perspicacious remark! You change, and your lover changes, and that is all good and natural. So you both adapt to one-another, or you have to move on.
I for one do not expect the road to be free of potholes and bumps. If it were always smooth and flat, the journey would become dull.
> the woman was to be not only a homemaker but also to show a level of adoration for her salaryman husband as reward for his bringing in the money she used to look after their children and socialize with her friends.
I don't get it. What kind of reward for the husband is the fact that she socializes with her friends?
I don't know if you're serious but I do think that it might be better if one of the two stays home and does shit.
It just seems simpler. Not saying it has to be a women, but it's ultra stressful when both people are working full-time, especially if one or both partners aren't open to the idea of hiring cleaners etc. Where is the leisure time?
In this way you basically destroy her professional career, make her 100% dependable on you financially and severely impair her life choices. Who would like to live a life like that today?
It's keeping the family part of the community. One can think of it as the actual social network. Through friendly interactions with the other housewife's around, relevant knowledge about the going on in the community is shared. It helps with finding reliable tradespeople and doctors and other things of this nature. And just from an empathic point of view:
If I was a worker who was away from home 12 hours a day, I would want for my partner to have a good life with happyness and joy while I am away. Of course it's better to come home to a person who feels she is living a fulfilled life, rather than someone who has been lonley the whole day. Makes you feel as if the long hours are actually making a difference.
The Japanese version can assume some knowledge about the functioning of Japanese business life on the part of the reader which the English article must explain before the actual phenomenon can be explained understandably.
Living with other people, even with one's spouse or children really doesn't mean they want to seeing each other every minute of their lives.
There needs to be an healthy amount of time that is both enjoyable, which is not too much to be invasive of one's privacy nor too less to make the other person feel lonely.
I know a few retired business execs or owners who got bought out and for the most part they are miserable. No good hobbies, no schedule.
For the most part they just boss around their families, driving them nuts.
I think we're lucky in that for most of us our hobbies and work intersect, at least to some degree, such that even in retirement, if we're truly idle, we can still write software.
The menial work generally associated with volunteering is less satisfying than commanding your enterprise or just developing software. Though that itself, to an extent, can be volunteered. Can always start or join a non-profit that tackles problems of interest.
You’re entirely missing the value of volunteering.
If you don’t take joy, pride, humility, and reward in the feeling of genuinely doing good work for entirely no benefit to yourself, volunteering isn’t for you.
You could tell me that washing dishes for a crowd would cure cancer and it would not fill me with joy, pride, humility or reward. That doesn't mean I never find reward in helping others in-person or otherwise, and in some instances there's a sense of moral duty. Ultimately most people favor volunteer work that suits them, even if they don't admit it. An easy way to confirm this is that there are usually more effective ways to be charitable qua saving lives than chosen avenues; that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful, but there is a selfish element. I would also consider those aforementioned emotions you listed as personal benefit. Those aren't elicited through mere rationalization, but human contact, which releases Oxytocin. They scale not with real-world impact (which can feel too abstracted) but social contact. That's why charities struggle.
Find something that hurts you about the world, and find a way to make that better for other people. That is the overarching thesis around volunteering.
I teach ESL as a volunteer one night a week. I'm willing to hear that someone would find this less satisfying than some other activity. However, I don't see that it qualifies as menial. (I am not retired, for what it's worth.)
Humans are inherently social creatures. We live for other people, mostly. Take that away and life gets damn pointless. Depression that eventually becomes catatonia, ultimately resulting in death from self-neglect in the extreme case, is a typical human response to complete long-term isolation.
They are genuinely miserable. They are grumpy, irritable, and micromanage everything they can get their hands on. The only thing that keeps them happy is renovating stuff or travelling, and it's hard to do both constantly.
It highlight the need for hobbies. I find it somewhat odd that in my own culture, hobbies has become less prioritized in the image of an well adapted healthy individual. It might be part of urbanization where the focus is on the job and less on side activities like growing things for fun, taking care of animals, hunting, fishing, walking in the forest and so on.
I get that sense, and also an urgency that every hobby needs to be monetized as a side gig. I'm not sure if this severity loosens with age but it's as though people want to telegraph they are hustling all the way to the grave.
There's a real freedom in fun or interest for its own sake and not needing to rationalize its usefulness. One way to accomplish this is to deal with those externalities in some other fashion, like through effective altruism, e.g. donating to favorite charities, and periodically (not constantly) being informed on what the big issues are.
> an urgency that every hobby needs to be monetized as a side gig
I noticed this effect most prominently when moving from Pittsburgh to NYC. In Pittsburgh my circle of friends generally had noncommercial side projects, weird art installations, and hobbies that had nothing to do with their day jobs and no commercial potential. In NYC my circle of friends spent a lot more time discussing how much their rent cost (more than 2-3x the cost of comparable units in Pittsburgh) and it felt like people spent a lot more time "hustling", trying to monetize their side projects, or advancing their (or their children's) chances at earning more.
I have no way of knowing if these two circles were representative, but I suspect the fact that NYC salaries are generally only ~1.5x higher than Pittsburgh salaries meant that many people had to devote more of their mental and financial resources to the cost of living.
One thing I recall is that when NYC first became a national hub for artists, the rent was relatively cheap. It explains in part why they flocked there in the first place. I'm not sure if there's any appropriate area for an exodus at this point. People seem to go for Boston, or Austin.
Urbanization could be a huge part of it. In my rural area, it's pretty standard that retired men universally convert into avid hunters. I'm learning that no matter the time of year there's always something tasty you're allowed to go out and kill.
My grandad and grandma on my mother's side are like this. They retired 5 years ago, at 60. Now, they do literally nothing all day, apart from read the paper, watch TV, and become increasingly embittered. They both really do seem pretty miserable and depressed, like they've settled in their chairs to wait for death, despite their relatively young age and relatively good health.
5 years on, they still just do nothing, all day, every day. I'd they were actually happy doing that, fair enough, but as it is, I really don't understand their attitude.
Personally, health permitting, I won't struggle for stuff to do when I retire, and I'll certainly be doing it!
Retirement is not for everyone. One thing (financial) retirement sometimes does, is removing the hunger/drive for becoming better. So many just end up as dilettantes in whatever hobbies or projects they're taking on. To become really good at something, most need to push themselves as though it's a full-time job.
On the other hand, some people thrive doing nothing, or barely nothing - just tending to their hobbies in short bursts, and living a chill lifestyle. You really don't know before you're in that position.
I'm saying this, because I've seen many people that took out early retirement, only to fall into those traps. They envisioned a grand life of hobbies, travel, and just fun times - then 1 month went by, 6 months, a year, etc. and they hadn't done jack sh!t. And it also hit them that 90% of their socialization came through work, and that their friends that still work, need to prioritize their own spare time.
>And it also hit them that 90% of their socialization came through work, and that their friends that still work, need to prioritize their own spare time.
When Covid hit and I was WFH, I was hit with this fact. I HAD to learn new ways to socialize.
>>One thing (financial) retirement sometimes does, is removing the hunger/drive for becoming better.
Put in other way humans need to score a win every now and then to keep moving forward, else you don't have anything to look forward to. You dread waking up in the morning because you need to carry around yourself the whole day without a purpose.
This is more in the bracket of anything in life in general and not just retirement.
For that matter continually failing at things in life without scoring a win for long has the same effect, even if you are not retired.
I could write a few pages here and hope maybe they can help someone.
Leaving the industry has been a hard adjustment (years) - but folks can get through it. I've been thinking about this a lot, so here goes.
Ok, so, my theory is that when leaving a profession our brains have been hardwired for being really good at to the point where we dream about code - it's likely a large number of our brain cells don't know
what to do with each other. Yet, if you get successful enough, you may also decide that you hate all the corporate drudgery and politics, and the reward of success is getting out, so you're out. And you have to adapt.
It's important to remember why you left. Yes, remember those bad things. There is a reason you aren't there.
But how to do you fill in and appease all those brain cells still grabbing on to the desire they want to do this thing, this thing that, especially when you were just starting, you really loved?
Can you still program for fun? Yes ... but you'll miss many levels of social interaction, especially if you had a really big thing before. You have to be able to enjoy building things that people don't
see or appreciate. This is very hard. You may struggle from not having the user interactions or interactions with other developers you worked with. After starting many things that you can't get an audience
for, this can become pretty isolating.
It does help to cultivate a degree of mindfulness - and ability to reframe negative thinking - and of course to cultivate hobbies. Everyone can do that now. But I would look at it not as a quest for
"what's next" or a repeated success as this may be frustrating, but a chance for reinventing yourself (slowly) and enjoying various things in life with a bit more attention and interest.
Maybe the addiction to the success was the problem. Maybe there's something about the Buddhist definition of "attachment".
Still, I want to fix this - though I'm not working to anymore. I feel we feel the promise of open source in corporate settings but really the whole "anybody can make something and get lots of users to have fun with" isn't true really. There's too much noise. There is lost opportunity. In trying to do programming for fun, I ended up questioning all of my religion about open source communities. A weird experience.
It's not really as real as I thought.
We could fix this by making ways for people to discover projects around really niche interests - smaller forums, not sites that scroll by in a minutes.
But I think success in adapting here is by letting those parts go and realizing you can reinvent yourself. If someday they want to code something different, they won't have the same inclinations and it will be more like when
I wrote my very first programs - there was almost no one to show them to, but it was still fun.
My advice I think is to be ok with letting that software part of your brain atrophy, because those pathways are likely attached to a lot of other things, and they are going to ... fight.
There's a few people I've encountered where stockbrokers became potters or whatever. I don't really know if I want to do that. But I also know if I'm looking, I kind of feel desperate or something, and it's better to not be.
I could start another company, but I want to avoid the whole VC game - and it's difficult finding people that have lots of time that CAN work for free, but I also know the huge opportunity cost - and once successful, it might create the thing I was happy to escape from. Do I even want to spend that many hours in front of a computer?
It's a process. (twitter DM info in profile if useful)
>>For the most part they just boss around their families, driving them nuts.
Not exactly a business exec or even a rich man. I know an uncle in my extended family who retired in late 40s-ish. We are in India, he used to work abroad in the middle east. Retired, returned and turned very grumpy, holier-than-thou and bitter towards kids. Add to this a range of business failures, and ensuing financial troubles.
Eventually the problem just became too extreme and he would make things difficult for every one just for the heck of it(Just to show them he was still in control). You could visit them and see the whole home felt like every one was just walking around with dread, despair and depression just wanting an escape from all this. He also turned to religion and would lawyer his arguments from that perspective too. He eventually morphed into a very bitter, always-angry, jealous and envious man, hating anyone with a good life around him. That included people in extended family too.
Eventually kids left for good.
There is something wrong that comes to happen when a person begins to live without a purpose, work or hobbies.
Now they give syndromes for every problem happening under the sun? That's entertaining. Is there also a "I am tired with school so I do stress eating Syndrome"?
"Western" is a messy and relative concept. I can see how you could make an argument that Japan is a "Western" nation in some sense. They are technically a First World country, which is usually used as shorthand for Western countries.
It's a lot easier to make the argument for the Philippines, but you get what I am saying probably.
The article talks only about how stressful it is for the woman -- and nothing about how the man feels. Seems incrediably like "I used to party with my friends, but now my husband is around alot. So boring!"
You would think in well aligned couples this would be the opportunity to go and tour the world together or get divorced a find new partners.
It highlights how she’s expected to be his servant, AND if she dares to leave she’s not entitled to any pension leaving her with no income options. Who sounds trapped in this scenario?
But the subject of the wiki page is the observed effects on wives (specifically in Japanese culture), not husbands. There's surely plenty of literature out there on how retired people feel.
The men don't suffer from RHS though, so it's less relevant on an article about RHS. Perhaps there is another article that could be written about them.
Because the number of retirement age Japanese couples where the man stayed at home and the woman worked full-time late into the evenings for her entire career is probably in the hundreds.
No my point was more -- there must be a male experience of "I'm not working any more suddenly -- now that I've just retired-- and have to hang around at home all the time with nothing to do and my wife seems angry about it."
Again I'm just confused as to why you're mad about this when you haven't even googled anything. Why are you putting the burden on me when you are the one complaining they don't exist while spending 0 effort to see if there are any?
I'm 1000% positive that there's heaps of research on this, just google "study on male retirees"
I'm sorry -- I can see you are deeply affected by this for some reason. So I apologize. The problem is with me obviously. I had some questions about about the POV of the article and none of those questions reflect negatively on you. It's true I don't know who you are-- but that is not important. I hope we can make your opinion and experience feel respected and whatever I said about this topic was really just me bantering on a personal level. Let's just accept our differences and move on to have a great day :)
Of course there is, but that's not the subject of this Wikipedia article...
Imagine if there's an article about what the psychological effects are if you have a family member in deep coma for many years. You're complaining that that article isn't talking about the effects of being in deep coma for many years on a person. They're different subjects!
Well, that's not surprising; RHS is defined as a condition of women. Men can't get it.
I don't believe "RHS" exists as a real medical condition. It sounds just like girlies being girly, with teddy-bears and social circles and so on; and blokes being blokey and controlling the remote. This is just people being people.
It is important to note that wikpedia articles is limited to what exist in sources, and if the sources don't consider alternative perspectives than the article can't do it. The article do link to Salaryman, and from there Karoshi, which is one observed effect when people has lost their jobs, which in turn is not identical to retirement but has common aspects to it. Both Karoshi and Retired Husband Syndrome are defined as psychosomatic stress-related illness caused by the model breadwinner. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi)
It might be worth linking the two together at the bottom of the Retired Husband Syndrome article.
> You would think in well aligned couples this would be the opportunity to go and tour the world together
This requires the finances to do it, the health to handle it, and a lack of responsibilities to others. Then there is the desire which a lot of people don't have. Only a limited number of people can realistically do this. To assume it's open to everyone, I think, misses the contexts most people live with.
Change is hard. Retirement doesn't just affect the person retiring. It also affects their spouse, if they have one. It's totally ok to put some focus on that.
Japanese culture isn't like western culture. There are differences and I think some of that may be lost on a western crowd.
> or get divorced a find new partners
You can love someone and still be stressed about them being around all the time or a change. It's not just a change for them but for the spouse.
That's absolutely not true. I've lived in Japan and had Japanese girlfriends. They are super westernized and can travel if they want to. But you can substitute "travel" for any other activity including participating in "robot sumo" or golfing. If an older couple want to make their twilight years good then they absolutely can. But if you read the article it seems...quite different.
Change IS hard. But my original point is that this change is hard also for men and this is not addressed in the article -- its very one sided.
No, there is this idea of a balanced perspective-- even in an editorially hostile environment like Wikipedia. So even just a passing mention of other points of view are on point. Movie reviews and summaries of scientific theories on Wikipedia-- for example-- are usually written with this in mind.
I think the point is that these are not well-aligned couples. They barely see each other for 40 years and then they're stuck together 24/7.
This article is specifically about the way this affects the wife. I don't know if there's a related article about the husband's experience, but the male perspective isn't particularly relevant to this article.
You would think in well aligned couples this would be the opportunity to go and tour the world together or get divorced a find new partners.
Well, the latter certainly does happen, a lot. The world is a different place from when our grandparents were young. Nowadays, people tend to keep their options open, and when divorce happens it's usually the women (especially in black communities) that initiate the divorce because they think they can "do better". Doesn't help that family courts still financially and emotionally rape the man since women see this as incentive for divorce.
The article is an Encyclopaedia entry about a specific thing. It's not an article about the general issues around retirements in Japan. it's about this one specific syndrome. It is not reasonable for it to discuss different topics that might have different causes, effects, etc.
If you wanted to raise that issue here that's fine, it's arguably on topic here to ask if there's a complementary syndrome affecting husbands and what that is and to discuss issues around it. That's fine, but this isn't an appropriate criticism of the article.
Of course it is. There are no rules on HN commenting -- aside from the GENERAL rules -- just because it's a Wikipedia link. I'm not sure where you get that idea from. Open discussion is open discussion.
hah, after being all my time working in a office from early till evening, after the pandemics hit in, we ( as couple ) have quite the same issue. Wife very stressed just by me being/working at home all the time and not feelling "free".
Source of $$ is now at home what to do what to do..
Dynamic is very interesting and is not at all limited to boomer generation. Most of the time neither spouse has any concept of what the other actually does day to day. You can ask a wife and she will say that he works for EPSON and is engineer, further question as to what sort of engineer or what is he working on or anything else will be just blank stare.
It is like separation of concern principle but applies to marriage and family. Works great some times and some times not so much
Military brats dread their father's retirement like it's the end of the world because they feel he'll completely mess up the vibe being more present when they've only had a punctuated interaction with him for years.
The retired adjust with varying levels of success. Everyone adjusts.
No they don’t. Maybe you did but this is classic projection. My fathers retirement has been awesome, we game together more than we ever did and he’s now able to be super active in his grandchildren’s lives the way he wasn’t in mine.
That was a generalization based on how frequently I have observed this in "military families"; so frequently that I used that generalization because: "But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions" - Scott Adams.
>Maybe you did but this is classic projection.
I didn't say I did. I didn't say I didn't. Who knows.
>My fathers retirement has been awesome, we game together more than we ever did and he’s now able to be super active in his grandchildren’s lives the way he wasn’t in mine.
This is great. I'm happy for you. I wish I were wrong and everyone lived it the way it went down for you. This is really cool.
Have other kids you knew had a similar experience to yours? If so, there may be something your father and their fathers are doing right, and families preparing well, and some preparation from their organizations, whether at the branch level or other. It'd be interesting to compare in case there's something that can be learned.
My dad sometimes talks about ow my grandfather used to have a picture framing business after he retired. Very rarely made anything past the bills, but he was on government pension and just needed to get out of the house. This reminds me of that.
We still have some things that he framed (certificate of family name origin, some pictures and the like). It instantly bring classiness level up a ton, but man is it expensive.
>It instantly bring classiness level up a ton, but man is it expensive.
We have the final sale bill from when the family farm was auctioned off. I thought it would be neat to frame it for my dad, as a memento (it was a retirement, not a loss). Holy shit is custom framing expensive. I was shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, to hear that it was going to be ~$300 for the right glass and frame that size.
I decided then that my woodworking needed to focus on framing if I ever wanted to make money. (and cutting boards/charcuterie boards)
I really am fascinated by the premium. The work itself is a little specialized by not particularly difficult (especially now in the age of miter saws and widely available glass-cutting equipment). Maybe it's just the cost of materials? I assume most places don't make the more interesting frame designs in-house, but rather just order a catalog to have on hand, so that's money, but it's still rather surprising
> The results suggest the limited relevance of the “retired husband syndrome” among middle-aged Japanese couples. The effects of a husband’s retirement on the wife’s mental health depended heavily on her prior behavior.
This thread just seems to be revealing that Japanese culture is up there with the Taleban and Saudi Arabia when it comes to enlightened attitudes to women.
> A failure of a smooth transition of the husband’s daily lifestyle may also increase his physical demand for his wife’s homemaking tasks
This isn't limited merely to Japan - just about everyone I know who's retired (either per force (eg due to injury or aging-out of their job), or by choice) HAS to go out and do something ... or they go [sometimes literally] crazy
But the Japanese syndrome is about the spouse of the retiree, not the retiree himself. I saw this with my parents - mom retired a few years before dad. When he eventually retired, he drove her nuts for a while. After 9 months or so, they found a new rhythm.
But I agree - the retiree needs a hobby for their own sanity. My parents took up nature photography. My father-in-law got serious about bowling.
It affects the spouse, too - you get used to one way of living (eg - spouse is gone from the house 50-60h per week), and when that suddenly changes ... it takes serious adjustment by all parties
The article is sexist pseudoscientific crap. It could maybe be mentioned in an article on Japanese culture but the article in its current form shouldn’t be on EN wikipedia.
I edited the introduction accordingly on Wikipedia, although I suspect it should be deleted entirely.
> Some women deal with RHS by focusing their energy on obsessions such as collecting teddy bears, or following a celebrity,[2] which they say can help them psychologically.
Many people in here are not even clicking on the article and seem to just want to talk about how retirement can be good or bad for some men depending on if they sit around and do nothing or if they have some type of hobbies/work to keep them busy.
All I have to say is I know a lot of retired men who get very very into woodworking. Me and the nice handmade end-tables I have are not complaining.
This is not a Japanese specialty; lots of couples break up after the kids have flown the nest, and both partners have to put-up with one-another all day and all night. It's hardly surprising.
My father became the maintenance man for an inner-city homeless mission after he retired. It was a great choice that gave him a purpose and got him out of the house. When he finally decided that it was time to quit (at 78), the manager told him he had to give two weeks' notice. Dad replied that he was a volunteer.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadGood luck quantifying that without too much snake oil.
This framework was then used by Aleksandr Kogan to profile and harvest facebook users - who then sold it to Cambridge Analytica..etc. By relying somewhat on self-selection Aleksandr's firm was able to profile facebook users. Since there was no second-guessing by the subject of the test as what a "question might say about them" I think it was pretty robust methodology. And then when you look at the impact of his work, you can see it was effective.
Not sure there is any snake oil to be found here.
I googled the Cambridge thing you mentioned and the first article that came up said it wasn't particularly accurate and was mostly just profiling based on demographics. (Shrug).
There's a long tradition of psychologists making grandiose claims that are short on facts. B.F. skinner claimed "Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything."
Not sure why you would assume the Cambridge thing did what someone selling it said it could do.
Having worked in adtech, and as a psychologist who's attempted to use OCEAN for said adtech, I never found it to work better than standard approaches.
Additionally, Costa and McCrae created the Big 5, found it didn't replicate in confirmatory factor analysis, so they created a new method of CFA which did replicate it.
Like, E O and N are probably real, but the overall structure does not replicate and should not be taken very seriously.
It's just a simplified model to put personalities in a certain bucket, typical PCA-style. This has limitations just like everything else that uses self-reporting to make a judgment/categorization. it's not like we are able to observe the structure of someone's brain and confirm that with actual facts. In other words, that's not even remotely what you call Science.
Don't get me wrong, I hate fake stats, but at least changing _my_ expectations allows me to enjoy more books without zeroing in on what could be a minor issue in a much larger and interesting point.
What surprises me is the extent to which I have become like my father, as I have aged. When I was 20, I despised my father.
I haven't adopted my father's political or social attitudes; but I'm pretty horrified at the extent to which I've become like him in my personal attitudes and dealings.
Which seems like a healthy thing to acknowledge - people constantly change in small ways, which add up to big changes over the years. It's also healthy to expect and not be disappointed by such changes in one's self.
That is a perspicacious remark! You change, and your lover changes, and that is all good and natural. So you both adapt to one-another, or you have to move on.
I for one do not expect the road to be free of potholes and bumps. If it were always smooth and flat, the journey would become dull.
I don't get it. What kind of reward for the husband is the fact that she socializes with her friends?
> reward (for his bringing in the money she used to look after their children) and [that she] socialize[d] with her friends.
(err.. or something, not sure exactly how you read it)
but:
> reward for his bringing in the money she used to (look after their children and socialize with her friends).
It just seems simpler. Not saying it has to be a women, but it's ultra stressful when both people are working full-time, especially if one or both partners aren't open to the idea of hiring cleaners etc. Where is the leisure time?
> but it's ultra stressful when both people are working full-time
If I was a worker who was away from home 12 hours a day, I would want for my partner to have a good life with happyness and joy while I am away. Of course it's better to come home to a person who feels she is living a fulfilled life, rather than someone who has been lonley the whole day. Makes you feel as if the long hours are actually making a difference.
A common thing I heard in the break-room was "If I worked a normal job I would be divorced by now".
There needs to be an healthy amount of time that is both enjoyable, which is not too much to be invasive of one's privacy nor too less to make the other person feel lonely.
For the most part they just boss around their families, driving them nuts.
I think we're lucky in that for most of us our hobbies and work intersect, at least to some degree, such that even in retirement, if we're truly idle, we can still write software.
If you don’t take joy, pride, humility, and reward in the feeling of genuinely doing good work for entirely no benefit to yourself, volunteering isn’t for you.
There's a real freedom in fun or interest for its own sake and not needing to rationalize its usefulness. One way to accomplish this is to deal with those externalities in some other fashion, like through effective altruism, e.g. donating to favorite charities, and periodically (not constantly) being informed on what the big issues are.
Of course it needs to be monetized. This is America - if you are good at it, it must make money
BTW, this is SOLID sarcasm.
I noticed this effect most prominently when moving from Pittsburgh to NYC. In Pittsburgh my circle of friends generally had noncommercial side projects, weird art installations, and hobbies that had nothing to do with their day jobs and no commercial potential. In NYC my circle of friends spent a lot more time discussing how much their rent cost (more than 2-3x the cost of comparable units in Pittsburgh) and it felt like people spent a lot more time "hustling", trying to monetize their side projects, or advancing their (or their children's) chances at earning more.
I have no way of knowing if these two circles were representative, but I suspect the fact that NYC salaries are generally only ~1.5x higher than Pittsburgh salaries meant that many people had to devote more of their mental and financial resources to the cost of living.
5 years on, they still just do nothing, all day, every day. I'd they were actually happy doing that, fair enough, but as it is, I really don't understand their attitude.
Personally, health permitting, I won't struggle for stuff to do when I retire, and I'll certainly be doing it!
I think you found the cause. Corporate media.
On the other hand, some people thrive doing nothing, or barely nothing - just tending to their hobbies in short bursts, and living a chill lifestyle. You really don't know before you're in that position.
I'm saying this, because I've seen many people that took out early retirement, only to fall into those traps. They envisioned a grand life of hobbies, travel, and just fun times - then 1 month went by, 6 months, a year, etc. and they hadn't done jack sh!t. And it also hit them that 90% of their socialization came through work, and that their friends that still work, need to prioritize their own spare time.
When Covid hit and I was WFH, I was hit with this fact. I HAD to learn new ways to socialize.
Best of luck to anyone who needs to learn this.
Put in other way humans need to score a win every now and then to keep moving forward, else you don't have anything to look forward to. You dread waking up in the morning because you need to carry around yourself the whole day without a purpose.
This is more in the bracket of anything in life in general and not just retirement.
For that matter continually failing at things in life without scoring a win for long has the same effect, even if you are not retired.
Leaving the industry has been a hard adjustment (years) - but folks can get through it. I've been thinking about this a lot, so here goes.
Ok, so, my theory is that when leaving a profession our brains have been hardwired for being really good at to the point where we dream about code - it's likely a large number of our brain cells don't know what to do with each other. Yet, if you get successful enough, you may also decide that you hate all the corporate drudgery and politics, and the reward of success is getting out, so you're out. And you have to adapt.
It's important to remember why you left. Yes, remember those bad things. There is a reason you aren't there.
But how to do you fill in and appease all those brain cells still grabbing on to the desire they want to do this thing, this thing that, especially when you were just starting, you really loved?
Can you still program for fun? Yes ... but you'll miss many levels of social interaction, especially if you had a really big thing before. You have to be able to enjoy building things that people don't see or appreciate. This is very hard. You may struggle from not having the user interactions or interactions with other developers you worked with. After starting many things that you can't get an audience for, this can become pretty isolating.
It does help to cultivate a degree of mindfulness - and ability to reframe negative thinking - and of course to cultivate hobbies. Everyone can do that now. But I would look at it not as a quest for "what's next" or a repeated success as this may be frustrating, but a chance for reinventing yourself (slowly) and enjoying various things in life with a bit more attention and interest.
Maybe the addiction to the success was the problem. Maybe there's something about the Buddhist definition of "attachment".
Still, I want to fix this - though I'm not working to anymore. I feel we feel the promise of open source in corporate settings but really the whole "anybody can make something and get lots of users to have fun with" isn't true really. There's too much noise. There is lost opportunity. In trying to do programming for fun, I ended up questioning all of my religion about open source communities. A weird experience.
It's not really as real as I thought.
We could fix this by making ways for people to discover projects around really niche interests - smaller forums, not sites that scroll by in a minutes.
But I think success in adapting here is by letting those parts go and realizing you can reinvent yourself. If someday they want to code something different, they won't have the same inclinations and it will be more like when I wrote my very first programs - there was almost no one to show them to, but it was still fun.
My advice I think is to be ok with letting that software part of your brain atrophy, because those pathways are likely attached to a lot of other things, and they are going to ... fight.
There's a few people I've encountered where stockbrokers became potters or whatever. I don't really know if I want to do that. But I also know if I'm looking, I kind of feel desperate or something, and it's better to not be.
I could start another company, but I want to avoid the whole VC game - and it's difficult finding people that have lots of time that CAN work for free, but I also know the huge opportunity cost - and once successful, it might create the thing I was happy to escape from. Do I even want to spend that many hours in front of a computer?
It's a process. (twitter DM info in profile if useful)
Not exactly a business exec or even a rich man. I know an uncle in my extended family who retired in late 40s-ish. We are in India, he used to work abroad in the middle east. Retired, returned and turned very grumpy, holier-than-thou and bitter towards kids. Add to this a range of business failures, and ensuing financial troubles.
Eventually the problem just became too extreme and he would make things difficult for every one just for the heck of it(Just to show them he was still in control). You could visit them and see the whole home felt like every one was just walking around with dread, despair and depression just wanting an escape from all this. He also turned to religion and would lawyer his arguments from that perspective too. He eventually morphed into a very bitter, always-angry, jealous and envious man, hating anyone with a good life around him. That included people in extended family too.
Eventually kids left for good.
There is something wrong that comes to happen when a person begins to live without a purpose, work or hobbies.
Only in the western world.
It's a lot easier to make the argument for the Philippines, but you get what I am saying probably.
I tried it after our second kid was born. Highly not recommended. Get back to work and make the $$
You would think in well aligned couples this would be the opportunity to go and tour the world together or get divorced a find new partners.
How does that feel for them?
I'm 1000% positive that there's heaps of research on this, just google "study on male retirees"
Imagine if there's an article about what the psychological effects are if you have a family member in deep coma for many years. You're complaining that that article isn't talking about the effects of being in deep coma for many years on a person. They're different subjects!
I don't believe "RHS" exists as a real medical condition. It sounds just like girlies being girly, with teddy-bears and social circles and so on; and blokes being blokey and controlling the remote. This is just people being people.
It might be worth linking the two together at the bottom of the Retired Husband Syndrome article.
This requires the finances to do it, the health to handle it, and a lack of responsibilities to others. Then there is the desire which a lot of people don't have. Only a limited number of people can realistically do this. To assume it's open to everyone, I think, misses the contexts most people live with.
Change is hard. Retirement doesn't just affect the person retiring. It also affects their spouse, if they have one. It's totally ok to put some focus on that.
Japanese culture isn't like western culture. There are differences and I think some of that may be lost on a western crowd.
> or get divorced a find new partners
You can love someone and still be stressed about them being around all the time or a change. It's not just a change for them but for the spouse.
Change IS hard. But my original point is that this change is hard also for men and this is not addressed in the article -- its very one sided.
You're surprised an article about wives is "very one sided"?
No - it shouldn't be criticized for being "one-sided"
It's completely and 100% fine to have an article that only addresses a single issue - trying to wedge everything in everywhere is moronic
This article is specifically about the way this affects the wife. I don't know if there's a related article about the husband's experience, but the male perspective isn't particularly relevant to this article.
Well, the latter certainly does happen, a lot. The world is a different place from when our grandparents were young. Nowadays, people tend to keep their options open, and when divorce happens it's usually the women (especially in black communities) that initiate the divorce because they think they can "do better". Doesn't help that family courts still financially and emotionally rape the man since women see this as incentive for divorce.
If you wanted to raise that issue here that's fine, it's arguably on topic here to ask if there's a complementary syndrome affecting husbands and what that is and to discuss issues around it. That's fine, but this isn't an appropriate criticism of the article.
So...very similar to this RHS.
Dynamic is very interesting and is not at all limited to boomer generation. Most of the time neither spouse has any concept of what the other actually does day to day. You can ask a wife and she will say that he works for EPSON and is engineer, further question as to what sort of engineer or what is he working on or anything else will be just blank stare.
It is like separation of concern principle but applies to marriage and family. Works great some times and some times not so much
The retired adjust with varying levels of success. Everyone adjusts.
I've absolutely seen it from military families I know, and it's absolutely a known phenomenon. It's great it wasn't an issue for you, though!
That was a generalization based on how frequently I have observed this in "military families"; so frequently that I used that generalization because: "But Of Course There Are Obvious Exceptions" - Scott Adams.
>Maybe you did but this is classic projection.
I didn't say I did. I didn't say I didn't. Who knows.
>My fathers retirement has been awesome, we game together more than we ever did and he’s now able to be super active in his grandchildren’s lives the way he wasn’t in mine.
This is great. I'm happy for you. I wish I were wrong and everyone lived it the way it went down for you. This is really cool.
Have other kids you knew had a similar experience to yours? If so, there may be something your father and their fathers are doing right, and families preparing well, and some preparation from their organizations, whether at the branch level or other. It'd be interesting to compare in case there's something that can be learned.
We still have some things that he framed (certificate of family name origin, some pictures and the like). It instantly bring classiness level up a ton, but man is it expensive.
We have the final sale bill from when the family farm was auctioned off. I thought it would be neat to frame it for my dad, as a memento (it was a retirement, not a loss). Holy shit is custom framing expensive. I was shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, to hear that it was going to be ~$300 for the right glass and frame that size.
I decided then that my woodworking needed to focus on framing if I ever wanted to make money. (and cutting boards/charcuterie boards)
> Conclusion
> The results suggest the limited relevance of the “retired husband syndrome” among middle-aged Japanese couples. The effects of a husband’s retirement on the wife’s mental health depended heavily on her prior behavior.
> A failure of a smooth transition of the husband’s daily lifestyle may also increase his physical demand for his wife’s homemaking tasks
But I agree - the retiree needs a hobby for their own sanity. My parents took up nature photography. My father-in-law got serious about bowling.
I edited the introduction accordingly on Wikipedia, although I suspect it should be deleted entirely.
Still doubt this is sexist bullshit?
All I have to say is I know a lot of retired men who get very very into woodworking. Me and the nice handmade end-tables I have are not complaining.
Not sure who said it first.
Smart man. I'll be following his example.