Let me tell you about a physician I know.
She spent four decades as an internist. Not just a doctor, but the doctor. The kind whose patients called the office and asked specifically for her, who knew three generations of the same family, who remembered what you’d said two years ago about your mother’s health and asked about her before you did. Her residents sought her out before making any decision that mattered. Her presence in a room full of specialists shifted the dynamic before she said a word. Medicine was not what she did. It was who she was. When she retired, her colleagues threw her a dinner, her patients sent letters, and she was profoundly, quietly lost within six months.
She is not alone. In the last few years, I have watched a version of this story unfold among lawyers who were the case, rabbis who were the congregation, politicians who were the office, tech executives who were the company, and academics who were the department. The details change. The architecture of the loss does not.
I know this territory not only because I have spent more than four decades coaching executives through it, but also because I have been through it myself. More on that shortly.
What Nobody Warned Any of Us About
There is a peculiar silence about what happens to accomplished people when the work ends. We talk endlessly about how to get to the top. How to lead, how to manage, how to build. We have almost nothing useful to say about how to leave.
Not the logistics of leaving. The identity part.
Who are you when you are no longer the person everyone calls? When the calendar that once ran your life empties? When the daily proof that you matter, the decisions, consultations, deference, and consequences, disappear?
A 2022 Edward Jones survey found that 61 percent of adults in their first two years of retirement still want to work. Not because they need the money. Because the work was doing something for them that no one had ever named out loud. The work was their identity. It was answering, every single day, the question of who they were.
Strip it away, and the question reopens, possibly for the first time in some people’s adult lives.
The Grief Most People Skip
Bill Bridges, whose work on transitions remains the clearest framework I know, drew a distinction worth sitting with. Change is external. The job ends, the role concludes, the title disappears. Transition is internal. It is the psychological passage from who you were to who you become next.
Bridges called the first phase of transition “Ending.” Not a beginning. An Ending. He was unsparing about what it actually requires: you cannot begin something new until you have genuinely let go of who you were. Not the title. Not the office. The self built around them. The self that had a social world, a daily structure, and a reason to get up, with a clear sense of purpose.
Letting go of that self is not an administrative task. It is grief. Most people, especially those who have spent decades being competent at everything they attempted, have no idea how to do it.
So they skip it. They fill the calendar. They say yes to everything. They keep moving.
I know this because I did just that.
My Own Version of the Story
In 2022, I transitioned to Professor Emeritus at Parsons School of Design and The New School. The title change was clean and professional, but what happened internally was messier.
I scaled my consulting practice. Way up. A ton of new clients, many of them referred, not all of them well-vetted, and more revenue than I had generated in years. I told myself I was thriving. What I was actually doing was staying so busy that I did not have to wrestle with the questions beneath it all: Who do I want to be in this next chapter, and what comes next?
The busyness worked, for a while, the way it always does. It filled the space where the harder thinking was supposed to happen. Eventually, I had to reckon with the fact that the kind of consulting I was doing was not how I truly wanted to use what I know and what I have spent a career building.
I was performing productivity rather than practicing purpose.
I reoriented. Fewer clients, better fit, more intentional. I moved into board leadership at several nonprofits, which proved not only rewarding but also challenging in all the right ways. I made time for more writing. I took the idea of farming more seriously. And I entered psychotherapy, which I wrote about earlier and recommend without reservation to anyone in this territory, regardless of age or whether you think you need it.
I will not pretend the shift was clean or that I have fully resolved it. What I can say is that wrestling honestly with the question, rather than outrunning it, turned out to be the only thing that actually helped.
What Erikson Knew That Most Executives Don’t
Erik Erikson identified the central tension of later adulthood as generativity versus stagnation: the drive to contribute something lasting, set against the dread of becoming irrelevant. It is a real tension, and it does not resolve itself just because you have had a successful career.
Here is the part that rarely gets said plainly: for people whose work was their identity for three or four decades, the institution was already answering Erikson’s question for them, every day. The work was the generativity. The role was proof of consequence. The institution was, without anyone quite naming it, doing a significant share of their psychological heavy lifting.
Take it away, and the question that remains is not what to do next. It is who to be. That is a different question entirely, and most accomplished people have not had to answer it since their twenties.
The physician had to answer it. So did the rabbi who built a congregation over four decades and found that it had been his entire social world as well as his calling. So did the politician who left office and found that the phones stopped ringing sooner than he had expected. So did I.
The Fog Is Real, and It Is Not a Character Flaw
Almost forty years ago, Jeff Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor and confidant to many CEOs, mapped how senior leaders depart: the monarchs who cling, the generals who leave but plot a return, and the ambassadors who exit gracefully. What he did not map was the 18-month fog that follows even a graceful departure.
Mo Wang and Junqi Shi’s research explains why: the stronger the identification with a professional role, the harder the psychological landing when that role ends. Holmes and Rahe’s Social Readjustment Rating Scale, which has held up for more than fifty years, ranks retirement among the top five most stressful life events a person can experience. That ranking is higher than many of the crises these same people once navigated at work without breaking a sweat.
The fog is not a weakness. It is the price of caring that much. It is proportional to how much the work meant. For those who gave their work everything, it can be considerable.
The mistake is treating it as a problem to outrun rather than a passage to move through.
What Coming Through It Actually Looks Like
Anastasiia Fadeeva and colleagues published research in 2025 showing that successful identity reconstruction after role loss requires one of two things: consciously replacing the lost role with something new or reactivating interests the career had crowded out for years. Busyness by itself, they found, predicts nothing good. Motion is not the same as direction.
What coming through it looks like varies considerably. Board service with genuine stakes, not placeholder titles, can work. Mentorship with real responsibility can work. A pivot into territory that was always adjacent but never fully explored can work. For some, it looks surprisingly similar to the work they just left, but chosen now on their own terms rather than conferred by an institution. That difference, chosen versus conferred, turns out to matter more than anyone expects.
What it almost never looks like is the cultural image of retirement. Golf. Grandchildren. The well-earned rest. That image fits almost no one for whom work was their identity. Martin Pinquart’s meta-analysis was clear: purpose in life is not a luxury for this population. It is a health variable.
And therapy, for what it is worth, is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that something important enough to examine has arrived.
The Conversation Worth Having
I recently published a shorter version of this in Psychology Today. The editors trimmed it to fit their format, which is their job. But some of the personal honesty was trimmed, which is why this version exists.
The people I am describing are not fragile. They are not failing. In many cases, they are among the most capable I have ever known. What they are is unprepared for the one transition nobody put on the agenda.
The exit is not the ending most people think it is. It is the beginning of a long-overdue conversation about who you are when you are no longer defined by what you did. That conversation is uncomfortable, occasionally disorienting, and, in my experience on both sides of it, entirely worth having.
If you are in this territory, approaching it, or watching someone you care about navigate it, the fog lifts. The question has answers. But you have to be willing to sit with it long enough to find them, which means resisting the urge to fill every hour with activity that feels like progress but is really just noise.
That is harder than it sounds. Ask anyone who has tried it.
Ask me.
To learn more, or to fact-check me:
Bridges, W. (1991). Managing transitions: Making the most of change. Addison-Wesley.
Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. Norton.
Fadeeva, A., Simmons, J., Thomas, L. B., Baker, K., & Ling, F. C. M. (2025). Retirement adjustment framework: Understanding the interplay between individual and contextual factors. Work, Aging and Retirement. https://doi.org/10.1177/26320770241279737
Holmes, T. H., & Rahe, R. H. (1967). The social readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11(2), 213-218.
Kenny, L., Doherty, N., Doherty, A. S., Lawlor, B., O’Sullivan, R., & Leavey, G. (2025). The relationship between retirement, social isolation and loneliness: A longitudinal analysis using the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-025-24472-8
Loretto, W., & Vickerstaff, S. (2012). The domestic and gendered context for retirement. Human Relations, 66(1), 65-86.
Pew Research Center. (2023). Older workers are growing in number and earning higher wages.
Pinquart, M. (2002). Creating and maintaining purpose in life in old age: A meta-analysis. Ageing International, 27(2), 90-114.
Sonnenfeld, J. (1988). The hero’s farewell: What happens when CEOs retire. Oxford University Press.
Wang, M., & Shi, J. (2014). Psychological research on retirement. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 209-233. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115131
Glad to hear the piece was helpful, Pam.
Mark, you’ve raised so many thoughtful points here. I’ll add one more. For me, the uncertainty of how and when my death will happen takes up a lot space in my head. I am not focused on staying alive as long as possible, but I wish someone could assure me that my death will come on quickly and will not be preceded by intense, prolonged interaction with our current healthcare or long-term care systems. In the meantime, I am motivated to stay here on earth long enough to see a Democrat in the Oval Office again (this same wish enabled my dad to live to 90 years old; he died in 2021).