Tribes

A common retirement theme is the danger of loneliness. It makes sense that leaving a busy work environment where you are forced to interact with coworkers, customers and bosses is going to instantly remove most of the people you talk to on a daily basis from your life. Replacing nine hours a day of human contact with…what? Television and the internet are not the best solutions. My recommendation is to join a few tribes.

I’m no expert at living life, in my late sixties and eight years into retirement I’m still learning as I go. But one of the lessons I have learned is I need social contact with others. Preferably time with others spent trying to achieve common goals. And that is where joining tribes makes all the difference.

Some of these tribes feel noble, because they are focused on helping others. The people I volunteer with serving on the local college board are like that. We get zero pay and devote a lot of hours each year steering the mission and vision of the college. I’ve watched our school give a young Mexican immigrant the tools to climb from a minimum wage housekeeping job to obtaining four nursing degrees and making a large six figure income as a PhD level Advanced Practice Registered Nurse. Watching someone change their stars, that’s magical.

That tribe is quite diverse and includes many I would have never met otherwise. But we are bonded by a common goal of changing lives through education and we have become friends in the process.

The foundation board is an entirely different group of people. But one also focused on helping others, primarily in improving healthcare in our county. We manage the foundation endowment, decide which programs should be funded and what new missions we should undertake. Most of our effort over the last year has been in funding and building a new nonprofit organization to buy and run the local hospital.

Being a part of that project landed me on the board of the reinvented local medical center with a group of committed business leaders and medical professionals. We have had to become hospital experts starting from scratch, with most of us having no prior experience in that business, and it has been a wild ride to get to where we are today.

Both the foundation and the hospital are nonprofit corporations whose mission is improving the health and saving the lives of people regardless of their ability to pay. There is no pay for the hours donated to helping these organizations fulfill their missions, but when you see the results first hand the emotional rewards are priceless.

All three of these boards have provided me with many hours of social interaction, lots of laughter and acquaintances who are now fast friends. I also mentor university students at my alma mater and am involved at our church in various ministries. And I’ve made new friends at both.

But lest it appear that all tribes involve hard work and hours of meetings that’s not at all the case. In fact my favorite tribes are all about fun. It’s the people I play tennis with several times a week. Both my local tennis buddies and the two tennis teams I compete on. Then there is a group of around 40 pickleball players who meet at the courts three times a week. I haven’t met all of them yet, but I have become friends with many. There is the running group I’ve been in for over twenty years who meet at 5:30 AM three mornings each week. There are my fishing buddies who are constantly swapping texts and photos of what we’ve been catching. The same for our off roading friends, cyclists, hiking pals and kayakers. I’m also one of eight mostly retired guys who take baseball and football trips each year, Cardinals and Saints games. We’ve been doing this for years and we love the time spent together.

I’m a member of two tribes who are not local. One is an alumni group of chemical engineers of all ages who graduated from our state university. That group sponsors the tutoring I mentioned earlier but also helps the department in other ways. We get together once a year for a mass meetup and it’s a lot of fun.

The other is the Millionaire Money Mentors forum. I’ve been a mentor in that group for several years but just attended their annual meet up in Florida for the first time. It was so interesting to put faces with the pen names I had corresponded and swapped forum comments with. I’m on the upper age end of the bell curve for that group but I never felt left out. They were the warmest and kindest group of folks. I will be going back next year for sure.

So what is the point of all these tribes? The point is I’m not lonely because my life is filled with social interaction. Even on a slow day, like today, when my wife is out of town, I’ll see plenty of people. I skipped the group run and slept in, because my knee is pretty sore. But I’ll still ride my bike and play tennis this afternoon. I’ll see a number of people since I’ll ride a bike trail that also has a lot of walkers on it, many of them old friends. I have a lunch meeting with an advisory group that oversees a low income medical clinic, that’s one I failed to include above. And I have a zoom call to go over some medical education scholarship requests with the foundation committee.

And I’ll still have plenty of time to post this. All in all it should be a very good day, and a very typical one in my retired life. I’m not advising everyone to take up volunteerism. But I am suggesting that if your retired life has too much empty space in it, consider joining a tribe or two that you share common interests with. It certainly has added much to my retirement. And if you can find one or more that is centered on serving others you might be surprised at how good that feels.

What about you, what are some of your favorite tribes?

I’m on the outskirts of a small town of under 20,000 people. Do you think finding tribes to add value to your life is easier in small town America or in an metro setting?