Retirement Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be. Now What?
Once you pinpoint that feeling, you’ll be better prepared to find a healthy course of action
Q: It’s been my goal for the last 10 years of my life to retire early. I’ve pulled every string to make this possible, saved feverishly, and made a lot of sacrifices when it comes to not just MY lifestyle, but my family’s lifestyle.
I’m now 6 months into my early retirement and am having some buyer’s remorse. I don’t just sit around, I have hobbies and keep busy with them. I spend more time with my family than I did when I was working, but something is off. For as much as I wanted to retire, I did enjoy work and feeling like a productive member of society. I guess that might be what’s missing. It seems foolish to go back, though. I do think my life is better now overall, just not what I expected.
A: Let’s start by just observing the story surrounding retirement.
Not all, but most people have this singular view of retirement being a period of extreme relief. As is the case with you, asker, this relief is made into a huge goal for many. And it seems like the appeal of this goal is usually something along the lines of, “I can finally have my time back, I can do what I want to do, I can be more self-serving and just live my life on my own terms without having to answer to anybody or necessarily give to anybody but myself. I’ll finally escape from under the thumb of the world.”
Surely there are other opinions about retirement out there, but I feel confident in saying that this is the consensus — surely in the West.
What this narrative does is vilify the idea of work, and put the idea of relief upon a pedestal. And with how arduous and long of a process it is to reach retirement, these ideas are pushed further into their respective corners, making it increasingly difficult to challenge them or see them anew.
But if we could challenge them or see them anew, we might realize that relief from work isn’t necessarily what we all need or all hold valuable. Should this be the case, all the fuss we put into reaching that goal of retirement isn’t going to change that.
You mention taking pride in not sitting around. You mention enjoying work and feeling productive because of it. It’s possible to want relief from work, yet not want to eradicate productivity or contribution from one’s life. This is the case for many people who arrive at retirement with some vertigo. If you have a strong desire to give and felt as though that desire was a benchmark of your work life, that desire is not just going to disappear and get washed away by the luxury of retirement.
Though this might not be what you bargained for, know that this is a good thing. You may have worked tooth and nail to achieve retirement, but it’s still a good thing to have done that and be dissatisfied by a perceived sense of selfishness; still wanting to give back, still wanting to make a difference and have a purpose (though I do think it’s important to do this mindfully, and not chalk our worth up only to our amount of output). Otherwise, the climb to get here was more transactional, void of seeing how joyous it can be to know that you’re providing something to this world rather than just collecting a paycheck.
Those who feel particularly called to contribute to this world or find value in being productive in some way cannot expect the relief of retirement or the accomplishing of a goal so lofty as early retirement to necessarily be enough for them.
So just because you’ve decided to retire early, and now that you’re here, aren’t so jazzed about it, doesn’t mean that you’ve made the wrong decision, or that this decision can’t be modified or reversed if you end up feeling that’s right. But I think that to better accept this decision or alter it in a way that’s more agreeable for you, we continue to challenge what early retirement really has to offer, and thus challenge what your initial feelings about it are founded upon.
I would probably start by reflecting on why it feels foolish to go back. Are you humiliated about going back on something you were so certain of? Do you not want to be as busy as you once were? Do you not want to have a schedule to commit to? Will you feel like you’ve wasted these past 10 years and it’s kind of a sunk cost fallacy situation?
Once you pinpoint that feeling, you’ll be better prepared to find a healthy course of action. Maybe it’s going back part-time, maybe it’s volunteering, maybe it’s starting your own business, maybe it’s something else.
In pinpointing that feeling, you position yourself to bridge the gap between the upsides of your life before retirement, and the disappointments in your life after retirement — thereby seeing this retirement in a new dimension and opening yourself to seeing more opportunities that can come from this choice you’ve made.
Because at 6 months in, you certainly haven’t been retired long enough to grasp the full landscape of what you can do with this time or how it can benefit your life beyond just not having to work if you don’t want to. There’s more to it than that, and it’s my hope that all people who are retired or who nearing retirement can see that the sense of professional relief is only one piece of the puzzle.
