The part of retirement that catches high achievers off guard is not the money. It’s the loss of standing that came with the job. And it seems to hit exactly the people who spent decades earning that standing in the first place.

That is the strange result buried in a Dutch study of retirement, and it upends a common assumption about who copes well when work ends. We tend to picture the ambitious career climber as the one who will struggle least: a bigger pension, more savings, more of a financial cushion. On the money side, that assumption holds. On standing, it flips.

We are not psychologists, clinicians, or financial advisors, and nothing here is advice about your own retirement. What follows is our reading of one piece of research. The findings show a pattern across a group, not a rule that will hold for any one person, and they come from a single Dutch sample that doesn’t represent everyone.

Two different things retirees miss

The finding comes from a 2015 paper in The Gerontologist, “Missing Work After Retirement: The Role of Life Histories in the Retirement Adjustment Process,” by Marleen Damman, Kène Henkens, and Matthijs Kalmijn. Its main idea is simple but useful. Instead of treating “missing work” as one lump, the authors split it into separate things a person might miss.

They landed on three: the money the job paid, the social contacts it provided, and the status it gave, the self-esteem and prestige of holding the role. Splitting it this way is what makes the career-path question worth asking, because you can see how the same person reacts differently to losing different parts of a job.

When the researchers looked at people who had climbed steeply through their careers, the pattern split. The authors report that “a steep upward career path is associated with fewer financial adjustment difficulties but with more difficulties adjusting to the loss of status.” Same people, opposite directions, depending on which part of the job you ask about.

What the study actually measured

The sample was 1,004 Dutch retirees who were working when the study began and had fully retired by the time it ended. The data came in three rounds, in 2001, 2006-2007, and 2011, which let the researchers connect what people said about missing work with how their earlier careers had actually gone.

They sorted people into rough groups based on how they described their careers between ages 40 and 50: no upward movement, gradual movement, or a steep climb. The steep climbers were a small slice of the sample. And the study captures the early years after retirement, not the picture decades on.

One limitation to keep in mind: this is one study of one group that doesn’t represent everyone. It shows a link, not a cause. And the setting matters, as we’ll get to, because the Netherlands is an unusually cushioned place to stop working.

Why the climbers miss income less

The money side is the easier half to understand. People who climb steeply tend to end their careers earning more, and in a system that ties pensions to earnings, that means a more comfortable retirement income. The financial question was largely answered before they ever handed back their pass. There’s simply less of a gap to feel.

Here the Dutch setting matters. The Netherlands leans heavily on collective, earnings-based workplace pensions, which soften the income drop at retirement for most workers. In a country where pensions replace so much of your old pay, the money finding may be weaker than it would be somewhere with thinner pensions, like the United States. So we’d read the income half as the part that depends most on where you live.

Why status doesn’t come with them

The status half is the one that lingers. Money is something you can bank. Status is not. It lives inside the role, and it tends to stay with the role when you leave.

Retirees who had climbed steeply were less likely to miss income, no more likely to miss social contacts, and more likely to miss status than those who hadn’t moved up. The social side barely moves. It’s specifically the prestige that goes missing.

Why would that be? The authors offer an explanation, and they’re careful to call it a hypothesis, not a proven mechanism. People on steep career paths, they suggest, may have been so absorbed in their jobs that they had fewer chances to build other roles and identities along the way. The same climb that built the status crowded out everything else a person might have leaned on afterward. When the job goes, the standing goes with it, and there’s less waiting to take its place.

The part people plan for, and the part they don’t

Perhaps the most useful thing this study surfaces is a gap in what people prepare for. The money side of retirement gets attention for decades: pension statements, savings targets, calculators, advisors. The status side gets almost none, and for the people who climbed hardest, it may be the piece that stings the most.

What we take from all of it is modest and practical. If you or someone you know is heading toward the end of a long, ambitious career, the financial question is probably the one already being handled. The quieter one, worth raising before the last day rather than after, is what standing and identity looked like inside the role, and where any of it might live once the role is gone.

If the loss of role and identity around leaving work feels heavy, whether for you or someone close to you, a qualified counsellor or therapist is a good person to talk it through with.