A midsummer pause, and a different kind of return on investment.
The summer solstice is almost here. The longest day of the year. And as June settles in, we’re going to do something a little different this month at The Habits of Great Investors.
We’re taking a breath.
Our formal mid-year investment review, with a full look at markets, the economic landscape, and our thinking for the second half of 2026, will be coming next month. But right now, as the days are long and summer is asking us to slow down, we want to turn our attention away from portfolios and toward something that, in our experience, matters even more to the quality of a life well-lived.
This month, we’re talking about a different kind of investing entirely. The kind with the highest long-term return of all: investing in your social fitness.
An Article Worth Your Time This Summer
We recently came across a piece that stopped us in our tracks. It was written by Dan Haylett, a financial planner and retirement thinker in the UK, and it is titled “Retirement Is a Relationship Problem.” The subtitle says it all: “And your pension can’t fix it.”
You can read it here: Retirement Is a Relationship Problem. We encourage you to set aside ten minutes and read it in full. It is one of the most honest, grounded, and quietly important pieces of retirement writing we have encountered in years.
Haylett draws on nearly a decade of working with retirees, people who arrived at retirement with beautifully constructed financial plans, paid-off homes, and fully funded portfolios, and watched a worrying number of them struggle anyway. Not because the money ran out. Because the people did.
He points to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an 88-year longitudinal study tracking hundreds of lives from adolescence to death. The finding that kept emerging, decade after decade, was almost embarrassingly simple: the quality of your close relationships at 50 predicts your health, happiness, and lifespan at 80 more reliably than your cholesterol, your income, or your genes. Chronic loneliness, the researchers found, is roughly as damaging to the body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
“The quality of your close relationships at 50 predicts your health, happiness, and lifespan at 80 more reliably than your cholesterol, your income, or your genes.”
Haylett calls this concept “social fitness,” the idea that relationships, like muscles, atrophy without deliberate attention. Work, for most of us, has been quietly providing our social infrastructure for decades: identity, purpose, structure, and people. When it ends, that scaffolding disappears almost overnight. The work friendships that felt solid turn out to have been friendships of proximity, and the people we pushed to the margins while we were building our careers have moved on without us.
He is particularly direct about men, who tend to outsource their entire social lives to their careers and their spouses, and discover, somewhere around 63, that they have almost no independent social network left. His advice is not complicated. Audit your real friendships. Not LinkedIn contacts, but the people you could call at 2 a.m. Ring one of them this week. Have an honest conversation with your spouse about what the next twenty years actually look like. Join something where you have to introduce yourself.
Simple. And, for many people, surprisingly hard to do.
This Is Something We’ve Been Thinking About For a Long Time
Dan Haylett’s article is a beautiful short treatment of ideas that we at Concentus have spent years thinking and writing about ourselves. In fact, everything he covers, the social dimensions of a great retirement, the non-financial ingredients of a life well-lived, the habits and relationships that actually determine whether people thrive in the decades after work, is the subject of a book I wrote called Exploring.
If Haylett’s article resonates with you, Exploring is the full conversation. It goes deeper into the question of how to design a retirement that is genuinely rich, not just financially, but in the ways that actually show up in how you feel about your days. We’d love for you to read it. And we’re happy to send you a complimentary copy.
Enjoy the Long Days
We’ll be back next month with our full mid-year market review. Until then, we hope you’ll take Haylett’s advice to heart, put the financial news down for a few weeks, step outside into the long summer evenings, and invest a little time in the people who matter most to you. That is a return no market can replicate.
In the meantime, if you have a friend, a family member, or a colleague who is thinking seriously about what retirement will actually feel like, not just what it will look like on a spreadsheet, we’d be glad to have that conversation with them. It’s one of our favorite conversations to have. Please send them our way, or invite them to visit us at concentus.com.
Have a wonderful summer.
— Erik Strid and the Concentus Team