My Next Chapter: A Retirement Journey - Retirement at the One-Month Mark

It’s been a about a month now since I retired, the longest I’ve been not at work since the ’80s. A few thoughts on how things are going so far:

Retirement has mostly been pretty awesome. I’m surprised my the lack of second thoughts over ending my paid career. I don’t miss my title as much as I thought I would. And having control over my own schedule isn’t scary at all, it’s exhilarating. Yes I miss some of my work friends and colleagues, but it’s a lot easier to keep in touch these days than before email and social media.
I spoke at my first professional event as a retiree, a Posit (formerly RStudio) weekly data science hangout. My topic: unexpected career paths. They’d invited me while I was still working. I told them I’d be retired by the time it happened, but they still wanted me to come anyway.

I was less worried about “not having a title” than I thought I’d be. Like many other things post-retirement, it turned out to be low stress and fun, as I was basically just answering interesting questions from webinar attendees. People can be really nice online if you find a good community, and many R folks are awesome (as I believe many Pythonistas are as well). Timing for me was great, as this was a nice way to look back on my own career and try to give a little advice that could help mentor others.
As I’ve written before, retiring in the summer was a great choice for me. Having an extended “vacation” to enjoy the nice weather before deciding how I want to craft my next chapter going forward has worked out well for me so far. Summer is an excellent time to be unstructured.
I like having more time and energy to do hobby writing, both on my retirement blog and at my little neighborhood website. I’m thinking about a project or two to add to that neighborhood site, which has largely been events listings.
I’m starting to get eager to take live online courses and code some more hobby projects, but I also don’t want to spend the few weeks of good weather that are left this year indoors. I expect the rhythm of my days will change by late autumn, but not yet. Meanwhile, I have been watching some on-demand vidoes to learn a new generative AI framework, and it’s been fun.
I had a pang when I wanted to sign up for a gen AI beta software waiting list and it asked for my “work email” and my “title”. I have no work email anymore, and my only title is either a former title or “retired.” Instead of likely being among the first to get access to the new tool because I’m a tech journalist, I’m guessing I’ll be among the last as “retiree.” But the pang passed. I don’t need to be first anymore.
Last Sunday evening after dinner with friends, I got home and had the instinctive Sunday tension about shifting gears and getting ready for the work week ahead . . . and then realized nothing was on the schedule for Monday except meeting another friend! Seriously, this rocks so far. How I’ll feel in the dark dismal days of winter or after a few more months may be another story, but for now things are better than I expected.

This relaxed, unstructured way of living is very, very new for me. I was a classic Type A would-be overachiever, who sometimes even had trouble relaxing for a single vacation week in a place that didn’t have a lot to do. Yet I don’t regret my former life. I was largely happy in my career and often proud of what I created. Yes, I wish I’d stressed about things less, but there is such a thing as good stress, too. You don’t stress if you don’t care. Writing big stories on deadline is something I wouldn’t have wanted to give up for a mellower life. Stress at spending hours puzzling over a coding problem at work often led to immense satisfaction if I came up with an answer.

I still occasionally feel guilty about not “producing” anything of late, in the classic capitalist sense of “production.” Which is kind of terrible. To be honest, employed me didn’t think all that highly about adults who passed their days like I’m doing now, spending way more time than I used to being “unproductive.”

And it’s not even that I’ve done absolutely nothing “useful”. I’ve coded a couple of apps using public data, including one I shared with a few work colleagues which they said was helpful. I still post interesting tech items on Mastodon (where I have more than 2,800 followers) and LinkedIn (where I have around 2,000) hoping to still help people who work with technologies like R and generative AI. I’ve gotten involved in a local neighborhood issue in favor of better bike and pedestrian infrastructure. I’m learning new tech and practicing my basic American Sign Language skills. I committed to writing postcards to voters for the November election. But the time balance is way different now.

I spend more time now on what I think of as “maintenance”: things like exercise, yoga, and meditation. Exercise especially becomes super important as you get older, when lack of it can lead to physical deterioration and increased risks of a lot of poor health outcomes. I don’t want to finally reach this stage of life only to ruin it with bad choices. Of course, “good choices” don’t guarantee a good outcome, but I want to at least do what I can to improve my odds.

Even with more maintenance, though, I now have a much larger chunk of time with the primary focus: “What do I want to do?”

I’m still in the process of re-thinking “value”. When I feel guilty over what might be seen as self indulgence, it helps to remind myself that I was “producing” for almost 45 years. I’ve more than earned this next chapter! It also helps to talk to (and read about) other retirees who are very happy with their choices.

If that doesn’t work, I sometimes think of my days as a local news reporter in the town of Concord, Mass., writing about Walden Pond and Henry David Thoreau, admiring some of his work, and . . . duh.

“Some are ‘industrious,’ and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say,” Thoreau wrote in Walden, several years before the US Civil War. “Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do—work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers.”