As someone who has experienced retirement firsthand, I know that retirement is not as good as we would like. We aspire to be free from the shackles of work, to enjoy a free retirement, and to receive a pension as financial support. However, reality often has a clear gap with fantasy. Nowadays, I find myself stuck in some retirement-related dilemmas, and here are a few of the aspects I have experienced.
First of all, despite my expectation of letting go of the burden of work and receiving a monthly pension, I found myself having to look for a job to fill the emptiness in my heart. Although not all retirees fall into this state, there are still a lot of elderly people around me who continue to work after retirement. Do they really love their work so much? Do they really feel uneasy when they don't work every day?
This is not the case. I found that they had to look for jobs simply because they were under financial pressure. Not every elderly person over the age of 60 has enough pension, especially a rural farmer friend like me, who has no source of pension. Even if there is a pension, the amount can be high or low.
The financial pressure on the family has increased, and many of the children do not have a high income, only a few thousand yuan a month, especially those new families with two only children. Not only do they have to raise their own children, but they also have to bear the living expenses of multiple elderly people.
Because of this, I have found that many elderly people are retired and have to find a job to earn extra income to support their families.
Another problem is that there are elderly people who, although ostensibly retired, have actually become free babysitters for their children. We often say that raising children to prevent old age, but why does this concept seem to be a little unreliable nowadays?
The reason is simple, because we raise our children and expect them to raise us when they grow up. But when we retire and need care, we find that we don't have the support of our children.
I have a lot of retired seniors around me, and they are busier after retirement than they were before they didn't. Not only do I have to pick up my grandson to and from school, but I also sometimes have to help my grandson with his homework and take on household chores, such as laundry and cooking, without interruption. It looks like a nanny, but the nanny at least gets paid, but she doesn't get paid to take care of the children, and sometimes even needs to take out her own money to support the children's small family.
We long to be together as a family and enjoy more family companionship, but at the same time, family conflicts will also increase. In terms of average life expectancy, people live to be in their 70s. If a person retires at the age of 60, then the remaining days are estimated to be only a dozen years.
Plus many people are always obsessed with what they are about to lose. Therefore, after retirement, many people want to be accompanied by more children and prefer to live together as a family.
However, the problem is that when a family lives together for a long time, various family conflicts will appear frequently, and quarrels will occur from time to time. Especially the conflict between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, no matter how old they are, it seems that they cannot be avoided. As long as the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law live under the same roof, the conflict between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law is easy to arise.
Importantly, the conflict between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is often not the fault of the mother-in-law or daughter-in-law, but the difference in the life concept of the two generations, even if they treat the same thing, they will have different views. This makes people feel conflicted, they want to live together as a family, but after being together, there are more conflicts, which makes people feel annoyed.
To sum up, retirement is not what we want it to be. We expect freedom and enjoyment, but financial pressures and family conflicts present us with challenges. Many retired seniors need to continue working to support their families, not out of love for their work. At the same time, living together as a family can also lead to more family conflicts. We should face up to these problems and find solutions to create a more harmonious and happy retirement.