Retirement can be both thrilling and challenging in unexpected ways. This book goes beyond the typical financial and health-related advice on retirement, providing insights to guide you in broader areas of your life.

With lively, engaging writing, the book tells retirement transition stories to explore how retiring involves a reconstruction. You'll gain wisdom on the common themes and the wildly different approaches people take to the four big tasks of retiring: making the retirement decision, detaching from work, building a new life structure, and settling into a relatively stable retirement life. Throughout each chapter, you'll see how the dynamic interplay of self, life structure, and external context affect a retiring person's day-to-day experience—and how life satisfaction depends largely on alignment among the three. At the same time, you'll learn how family, friends, and colleagues, as well as the organization the person is retiring from, can play a crucial role.

This book is for you if you are seeking deep, nuanced insight into the psychological, social, and life-restructuring aspects of retirement that can make all the difference for life satisfaction. It is also for you if you are a family member or friend of a retiring person, a helping professional, or an organizational leader who cares about your older workers.