Most of our efforts surrounding retirement planning involve numbers: life spans, expenses and income. There was even a recent book by Lee Eisenberg on retirement entitled The Number on the idea of a specific money amount-different for each person-required in order to retire with confidence.

Indeed, in recent years and from a variety of influences, the idea of a "number" took hold in the mind of the public.

Retirement, however, is not just about numbers. If we replace the number with "second chapters," it conjures a world of new, qualitative things. And it is these things that planners often neglect to the detriment of their clients. Consider, for example, when a business owner sells her business. If we concentrate primarily on the financial transaction as a liquidity event, we may miss the fact that it is also a transition affecting her purpose in life.

Once the business is gone, the owner has to restructure her daily life without the connections and relationships that formed the essence of her very identity. The same transformation is true for those who retire from a large corporation. When they leave one web of meaning in their lives, they must have a replacement, or they risk running out of meaning faster than they do money.

A financial advisor truly must treat the "whole" of his client. We need to consider a client's presumed or proposed web of meaning as much as the sources of a secure and lasting cash flow. Identity, relationships and purpose help create lifestyle, and, in turn, lifestyle determines consumption.

In the current circumstances, in fact, where people are changing their consumption patterns, becoming far less conspicuous and far more meaningful and thrifty, those issues of lifestyle will matter even more.

If sustainability is the new governing concept concerning consumption-using our resources to best meet the needs of our families-it also reflects the qualitative dimension. Recalling famed psychologist Abraham Maslow's famous pyramid, once we have secured what we need for our safety and basic living, the real issue concerns relationships and self-actualization, or the web of meaning in our lives.

That lies at the crux of the idea of sustainability. Our role as advisors, then, is continually to probe and engage clients in deep discovery. We aren't therapists, but we can counsel clients if we believe they have paid insufficient attention to these areas of emotion and meaning and the ability to sustain them. The real problem, beyond recognizing our obligation to focus on the qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of our clients' lives, is that retirement is a poor word to explain what many Americans will experience-and even want to experience-in the later stages of their lives.

Through most of the 20th century, average male retirement ages steadily declined. But this trend reversed several decades ago and is increasing toward a later retirement beyond age 65.

Several major factors contribute to this, including lower rates of retiree health insurance offers from employers, lower rates of defined benefit pension coverage, self-employment and education.

That is, studies show that the self-employed and better educated among the baby boomers intend to work much longer. In fact, such people outnumber even those who are retiring later simply because they need more money.

If you couple this trend with recent economic events that have negatively impacted investment portfolios, including declining defined contribution accounts and housing values, you have a recipe for working longer.

Add to that the fact that baby boomers will continue to volunteer with non-profit organizations, with the number of 65-and-older volunteers projected to increase 50% by 2020 and 100% by 2036. Interestingly, the longer boomers work, the more likely they are to volunteer simply because people who work have large networks, which makes them more likely to be asked.

With all of these issues at work, retirement is definitely about new chapters, contradicting the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who declared that there were no second acts in America. New chapters in a changed world demand that we focus as hard on lifestyle as we do on generating and protecting income.

Just as we need better calculators and tools for illustrating and projecting cash flow from multiple sources, we need betterstandards for approaching issues of lifestyle and risk management-whether one is retired in the original sense or simply progressing through life's stages and embarking on a second act.

Robert Seaberg is managing director, global wealth planning, in the Global Wealth Advisory Services business at Citigroup.