10 Meaning Questions for Your Midlife and Retirement

Source: Gerd Altman/Pixabay

We are the ship that travels our life’s journey, our odyssey. Along the way, we encounter many adventures; some enjoyable, some challenging, some upsetting.

The phase of retirement and our corresponding older years represent a time where we are faced with new challenges. It is up to us to determine how we will embrace this new phase: growing, evolving, and actualizing our potential; or instead, stagnating, complaining, and even ending up further adrift or shipwrecked.

Socrates, an ancient Greek philosopher, taught us the importance of asking questions to raise our awareness of our thinking patterns, to uncover our biases, assumptions, and blocks, and importantly, to see the direction and consequences of our current thinking.

10 "Meaning Questions"

Here are 10 "Meaning Questions," derived from my research in MEANINGology, designed to stimulate your deeper understanding of yourself as you prepare for, hopefully, a happy and very fulfilling future:

1. Our choices are shaped by our inner perception of ourselves. Do you believe you are now too old to change the direction or the circumstances in your life?
2. In what ways do you feel discontent with your life, question your past decisions, or feel that you failed to manifest the life you thought you would have by now?
3. Who will you be without the identity you have adopted from your previous jobs, titles, and trophies; social status; or material possessions?
4. What do you need to do to live more authentically—to stop living by other people’s expectations and instead live a life truly your own?
5. Do you dread the future or do you see a vibrant future, full of hope and possibility?
6. Do you prefer the safety of staying the same and within the current borders of your current life or do you want to embrace the challenges of change and growth?
7. What dreams have you lost along the way? What have you always wanted to learn and experience?
8. How do you plan to build new social friendships so that you will feel alive and connected and to combat potential loneliness in the future?
9. How will you contribute to humanity and help to make the world a better place in this next phase of your life?
10. What is limiting you from moving forward?

Retirement can present a crisis of meaning when we leave the safety of our jobs and find ourselves without the structure of work and without a sense of identity and belonging.

Remember, just because you may have been able to save money for your retirement does not mean you will live a meaningful life during your later years. Life with money but without meaning suggests you are simply surviving, not thriving. As I shared in our book, Prisoners of Our Thoughts¹, the world-renowned psychiatrist and existential philosopher Viktor Frankl so wisely concluded, “Even more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.”

Now is the time to start reflecting and asking these existential questions that will truly make a difference both in the direction and the quality of your life in midlife and beyond. Outside forces may control the external circumstances but you control your internal world. Importantly, your choices create your own unique journey or odyssey in life. It is up to you. You are the captain of your life voyage! Every day is a new day to be enjoyed, not simply endured.