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In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general released an advisory on a public health issue unrelated to diet, obesity or chronic illness. It also had no connection to opioids, cancer or cardiovascular problems.
The subject was loneliness.
Vivek Murthy, the nation’s leading health official, declared social isolation and loneliness a public health crisis, affecting about half of American adults and having health effects similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
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That comparison comes from Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, whose 2010 meta-analysis of 148 studies found that people with strong social connections have a 50% higher chance of survival than those who are isolated.
Most retirement plans don’t include a line item for this.
The risk your financial plan ignores
Kiplinger readers understand risk well: Inflation, sequence of returns, health care costs and longevity. These are the main factors shaping retirement-planning discussions for good reason. Getting the numbers wrong can cause serious consequences.
But research increasingly highlights a variable that financial planning models often overlook — one that could influence both your lifespan and quality of life more than the size of your portfolio.
Harvard’s Study of Adult Development is the longest-running longitudinal study of human flourishing in history, having followed participants for more than 80 years. Its main conclusion, as stated by psychiatrist George Vaillant and more recently by director Robert Waldinger, is clear: The quality of your relationships, not your money or professional achievements, is the strongest predictor of health and happiness in later life.
This isn’t just a factor. It’s THE factor.
Work was doing the work for you
Here’s the part most pre-retirees don’t see coming.
For 30 or 40 years, the workplace acted as your social infrastructure, and you probably didn’t realize it. The morning chats, team lunches, shared problems, casual hallway conversations, professional identity and the feeling of contributing to something greater than yourself: These experiences quietly and automatically built social capital for you every workday.
Retirement removes that infrastructure in just one morning.
Most people carefully plan for the financial changes that occur on retirement day. Almost no one prepares for the social changes. The result is an increasing number of retirees who are financially secure yet deeply isolated, not because they lack relationships, but because the passive social system that supported those connections no longer exists.
Connection is not a luxury; it is a biological necessity. Research published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior by Debra Umberson and Jennifer Montez shows that social isolation is linked to higher cortisol levels, weakened immune function, increased risk of heart disease and faster cognitive decline. The body perceives its absence as a chronic stressor.
Freedom without intention becomes drift
I often revisit a phrase in retirement psychology: Freedom without intention leads to drift.
The early months of retirement can feel like freedom — no alarm clock, no commute, no obligations. Many new retirees describe it as a kind of extended vacation.
However, without intentional planning, that freedom gradually diminishes. Social interactions that once happened automatically now require conscious effort, and making new friends in your 60s is more challenging than it seems.
The factors that made friendship easy during our working years — proximity, repetition and shared purpose — must be rebuilt from scratch in retirement. This isn’t a personal failure; it’s a structural issue. The social fabric of adulthood was centered around the workplace, and retirement dismantles it.
The question isn’t whether you’ll face this transition, but whether you’ll plan for it or only recognize it after the drift has begun.
Here’s what makes this transition more urgent than most realize: It doesn’t start at retirement. It begins the moment any major part of your identity falls away.
The social portfolio
A golf buddy of mine, Nick, recently shared a painful situation in his marriage. His wife approached him, frustrated and longing, about a gap she had recently noticed. Her social life felt shallow, disconnected and increasingly silent. His social life, however, is anything but.
Nick’s social calendar is impressive. He has two groups of golf friends — one local and one college buddies who gather each year for their golf trip. He also has friends in pickleball, softball, baseball, poker and UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championships). He and his wife are in their 50s, empty nesters with two grandchildren, and by any financial measure, they are financially secure.
His wife built her social life around a role, and that role evolved. She remains a mother, and now she’s a grandmother. These identities are genuine and significant. However, they’re no longer part of her daily routines. The relational world that once organized her days quietly changed, and she hasn’t replaced it with anything new.
What Nick has done, probably without realizing it, is spent years building a diverse social network. He didn’t wait for connections to come to him; he actively created opportunities across many communities and situations. His wife had invested heavily in a single asset. When it matured and changed, there was nothing else in the portfolio.
This isn’t a story about Nick or his wife specifically. It’s an example of a pattern that happens in households across the country, both in the years before retirement and during the transition itself.
Final thoughts
Retirement planning has become more sophisticated in modeling financial capital. However, it has not yet kept pace with social capital, the network of relationships that influences the quality of life after retirement.
A helpful way to think about social relationships is like a thoughtful investor managing a portfolio with purpose, variety and regular check-ins.
Close relationships form the foundation; strong friendships built on mutual trust surround them; community connections organized around shared goals, faith or activities extend beyond that. At the outer edge are casual, low-stakes connections — such as the neighbor or the regular at Tuesday morning coffee — that research shows are surprisingly good for daily well-being.
Most retirees realize, often too late, that their portfolio was concentrated entirely in one asset class: Professional relationships or parental ones. When that role ends, the portfolio collapses.
The time to diversify is before retirement, not after.
It’s the investment that doesn’t show up on a statement
Here’s the paradox that retirement psychology keeps returning to: The assets most vital to a successful retirement are the ones that no financial statement will ever reflect.
Money builds the structure of retirement; relationships fill it with life. These truths are complementary, not competing. A portfolio strong in one and absent in the other is not diversified; it’s exposed.
The surgeon general was right to describe what he saw as an epidemic. The remedy isn’t a medical intervention. It’s based on the same principle that guides any smart investment: You can’t wait until you need it to start building it.
To learn more, pick up my new book, Your Encore Years: The Psychology of Retirement.
