I expected retirement to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I also expected to hate it.
After more than forty years of alarms, deadlines, meetings, projects, conference calls and knowing exactly where I was supposed to be every morning, I wasn’t sure what would happen when all of that disappeared. Then it did.
And the surprising part is that I actually like retirement.
That sounds simple. It isn’t. Retirement is not just the absence of work. It is the sudden absence of structure, obligation and somebody else deciding what counts as a productive day.
The first trap: appointing yourself your new boss
At first I tried to optimize the hell out of retirement. I like systems. I like projects. I finally had time, so naturally I started inventing things to fill it.
Exercise every day. Learn something. Travel. Fix the house. Read all those books. Start new hobbies. Organize everything I own. Become conversational in Italian. Apparently develop the cardiovascular system of a 32-year-old.
Basically, I retired and immediately appointed myself my new boss.
My new boss was kind of an asshole.
So I stopped doing that. I still have things I want to accomplish. I make videos. I do astrophotography — or at least I spend a heroic amount of time trying. I disappear into rabbit holes about asteroid impacts and dying stars. I play golf badly. I travel with my wife. I mess with technology that was supposed to save me time and somehow creates three new problems instead.
The important difference is that I do not have to do any of it.
Doing nothing takes practice
When you have spent most of your adult life measuring a day by what you accomplished, doing nothing feels suspicious. You sit there thinking: shouldn’t I be doing something?
Eventually I realized that sometimes this is the something.
Sitting on the porch. Driving somewhere for no particularly good reason. Getting donuts with my granddaughter. Learning something with absolutely no economic value. Spending three hours trying to photograph an object that has been sitting in the sky for ten billion years and is definitely not going anywhere tonight.
Those are not wasted hours. They are some of the hours I spent decades earning.
I still need something on the horizon
“Not going to work” is exciting for a while. Eventually it becomes normal. I still need things pulling me forward: a trip, a project, a star party, something I want to learn, a place I have not seen, a question I want answered.
I do not need deadlines. I need horizons. There is a difference.
Time belongs to me first now
When you are working, enormous pieces of life already belong to somebody else. Your company gets these hours. Meetings get those. Email gets some. Travel and commuting get some. Whatever survives is yours.
Retirement flips that. The time belongs to me first. I have become much more careful about giving it away.
That does not mean every hour needs to become some profound bucket-list experience. Probably the opposite. The real shift has been getting comfortable with a life that does not have to be constantly productive to be worthwhile.
I am not trying to build a second career. I am not trying to win retirement. The other kids do not care.
I am trying to build days I genuinely enjoy living. Some are productive. Some are ridiculous. Some do not amount to much at all. But they are mine.
So that is the first year. I still have absolutely no idea what I am doing.
Bruce thinks that may be the point.