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AVOID AWFULIZING YOUR RETIREMENT!

I came across a term the other day that made me stop for a minute and think. The term was “awfulizing retirement.”

What does it mean to “awfulize retirement”? According to the author who coined it, Jonathan Looks, it means to think so much about the things that could go wrong that you’re afraid to move forward. 1

He wrote: When pondering retirement, many people fantasize about, say, life on the beach or having time to write the next great American novel or finally being able to spend more time with our grandchildren. But when action and decision-making are required, fear distorts the picture. Opportunity starts to look like a nightmare. The human brain is an amazing thing, but it doesn’t deal with uncertainty very well.

Retirement is a bet on the future, and no one can anticipate all the unknowns. The data is necessarily incomplete. When confronted with incomplete data, our brains look at the information gaps and fills them with fear. To the brain, anything is better than ambiguity.

In our mind, the worst case scenarios suddenly become the most likely of circumstances. We begin to doubt our calculations. We begin to doubt the experts. At the very time we need to trust our judgment the most, fear gets into our head, distorts our outlook and overwhelms all our assumptions.

Hence the term psychologists use to define

this phenomenon: awfulizing.

1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2017/06/23/how-i-stopped-awfulizing-retirement/#5759c171bafd