The Retirement Hustle: Is Volunteering Really Helping You?

So, you’re hitting retirement. Congratulations. You’ve got time on your hands, maybe more cash than you used to. The conventional wisdom? Go volunteer! Give back! It’ll boost your well-being, make you happy, maybe even help you live longer. It’s pitched like some kind of public health miracle cure for older folks. Sounds simple, right? Turns out, like most things in life, it’s a bit more complicated than the brochure suggests.

Researchers have been poking at this idea for a while. Sure, cross-sectional studies – snapshots in time – often show that people who volunteer tend to be happier. But that’s like saying people who drive Ferraris are happier. Are they happy because of the Ferrari, or are the kind of driven, successful people who get Ferraris just generally happier to begin with? See the problem? Correlation isn’t causation. Even randomized trials trying to make people volunteer haven’t reliably shown a boost in well-being. Plus, making people volunteer kind of misses the point of voluntary work, doesn’t it?

What Happens When You Hang Up the Boots

Listen up. A 2021 study conducted by Bjälkebring  and colleagues looked at over 1,100 people in Sweden as they transition into retirement, tracking them over four years. It’s a natural setting, not some weird lab experiment. And guess what? As people retire, they do tend to increase their volunteering. Makes sense. More free time. Life satisfaction also trended up over time in this group. So far, so good.

But … This study used a fancy model that can look at how changes in one thing (like volunteering) relate to subsequent changes in another thing (like life satisfaction), and vice versa. Think of it like asking, “Did volunteering cause the happiness, or did happiness cause the volunteering?”.

It Goes Both Ways, and Not How You Might Think

Here’s the surprising part, straight from the data: Higher levels of life satisfaction were followed by increases in volunteering. That’s right. Being happier might actually make you more likely to volunteer later on. The researchers suggest maybe happier people have more “energy” or see others’ suffering in a different light. This effect even got slightly stronger after retirement.

But hold on to your hats, because here’s the twist that challenges the conventional wisdom: Higher levels of volunteering were followed by decreases in life satisfaction. Read that again. More volunteering was associated with lower subsequent life satisfaction.

This isn’t some statistical fluke. The study found strong support for this. It directly challenges the idea that simply doing more volunteering automatically makes everyone happier. It suggests there might be a point where increasing your volunteer hours starts to negatively impact your well-being. Maybe it disrupts your personal balance of costs and benefits. Maybe volunteering too much feels like a burden, even if you have free time.

So, What’s the Takeaway?

Listen, this study wasn’t saying volunteering is bad. There’s plenty of evidence linking it to benefits, and lots of people do it for genuinely altruistic reasons, not just to get a personal boost. And in this study, people did volunteer more, and life satisfaction did increase overall during retirement.

But the causal story isn’t the simple “volunteer more, be happier” one we often hear. This study, using longitudinal data to look at how things change within people over time, found that while being happier might lead you to volunteer more, jacking up your volunteering levels might actually start to chip away at your life satisfaction.

Think of it like typing speed and errors. Faster typists make fewer errors (between-person correlation). But forcing a slow typist to go faster increases their errors (within-person effect). The relationships can be different. Just because people who volunteer more might be happier overall doesn’t mean you will become happier simply by volunteering more. In fact, the data here suggests the opposite might be true for increases in volunteering.

The real story? It seems like your level of life satisfaction might be a predictor of how much you volunteer, rather than the other way around, especially when you crank up the volume on your volunteering. And if you push it too hard, you might find you’re helping others out, but potentially not helping yourself in the happiness department. The sweet spot, or even the point where it becomes detrimental, is likely different for everyone.

So, if you’re retiring and thinking of volunteering, go for it. It’s valuable work. But maybe don’t expect it to be a magic pill for happiness, and pay attention to whether the “helping out” starts to feel like too much of a burden. The data hints that there’s a balance, and crossing the line might mean your life satisfaction takes a hit.

Reference

Bjälkebring, P., Henning, G., Västfjäll, D., Dickert, S., Brehmer, Y., Buratti, S., … & Johansson, B. (2021). Helping out or helping yourself? Volunteering and life satisfaction across the retirement transition. Psychology and Aging, 36(1), 119. https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2020-69744-001