Recently, for example, my wife and I were sitting around with a brilliant woman who had retired from a job she’d held for many years. We asked her a simple question: How do you hope to spend the years ahead? All sorts of stuff spilled out: How she was coping with losing the identity that her job had given her. How, for so long, people came to her asking for things, but now she was forced to humble herself and approach others for favors. She told us she had already come to realize that she was a poor predictor of what made her happy.
