The human’s life

The human’s life starts like a pendulum. The first stage is a highly dysfunctional stage – that of a child. It is a total available to take care of the dysfunctional dependents and to make the child more and more functional.

The functionality of the child is improved thereafter through training and education. The human being is ready for the next stage i.e. becoming productive. He/She starts on a job or a profession. He/She may keep on improving his/her productivity and may reach the stage of maximum productivity around the time of his/her retirement. Thereafter, he still tries to be productive by taking anther career. If he/she is successful in that career, his/her productivity remains fairly high – or even can go on increasing. However, for a majority of people the productivity from the other career may not be significant and may decline over a period. Thereafter, he may have just a functional life which allows him to have day to day living without depending on others. Financial or health problems can push a person to the end of this pendulum, where he has a dysfunctional life – depending on others.

However, the disfunctionality of the old person is looked upon differently by people around him, compare to the disfunctionality of the child. The child has the mother and family members who often find it a pleasure to help the child to become functional. The child is bound to become functional over a period of time and ultimately will reach the productive stage. However, a retired person who becomes dysfunctional does not give an assurance to move to the functional and to the productive stage. If he can somehow get to the functional stage, others around him are ready to tolerate him.

Pain and pleasure: Every person, all through his life, gives some pleasure and some pain to others. When he is a child, even the pain is deemed as pleasure and every child, even in the dysfunctional stage, is well accepted as a source of pleasure. However, the retired man given more and more pain and less pleasure as first his productivity and then his functionality decreases. So, one of the important aspects of the life after retirement is effort to remain productive – or at least functional.

Planning for retirement:

This is unlikely to happen without planning of career and finance. If the person is prepared for a change of career and he able to be busy in the new career, there is a good chance of his remaining functional and productive. However, this success is not guaranteed. The matter is complicated by the fact that most people do not really do planning for retirement – they only do day – dreaming. As drucker puts it, “planning for tomorrow is using today’s resources to tackle the expected problems of tomorrow”. So, we have to see how a person before retirement can be use his most important resource – that is his time to acquire a transfer value – the ability to get into a new career. In effect, he has to do a SWOT analysis (of his strengths, weakness, opportunities, threats) to see how he can utilize his strengths to remain productive, protect against his weakness, take advantage of opportunities and guard against the threats. If the exercise is not carried out periodically and action is not taken to correct the course of navigation, the person can loose his productivity very quickly. If he has changed from the career before retirement into another career immediately after retirement, he has to look at the horizons of the new career and plan for another change – if required.