While checking my calendar to see what’s happening later this month, I saw this for March 28: “Tentatively The Day!” And it came back to me: That was my original, vague, long-range plan for when I thought I might retire.
My idea was to work through this winter earning one more round of income, and end my career just in time for spring 2025 to start. Instead, I unexpectedly decided last Memorial Day weekend that I was ready to end my career right then. And, much to my own surprise, I retired two months later.
I don’t regret it at all.
A year ago I’d also planned to do a lot of decluttering this winter during what I thought would be my final months working full-time. The goal was to start my retirement in a more peaceful, junk-reduced environment.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
That didn’t happen.
I hope to have more to say about decluttering efforts in a future column. Because I haven’t made much headway on that yet this winter, even though I have a lot more time now.
The basic problem is that, simultaneously: 1) I don’t want to hang onto a bunch of stuff that no longer fits who I am now. Plus, uncluttered space makes me much happier and more relaxed than living in an environment with stuff jammed in everywhere. I want a revamped environment! Yet 2) It can still be hard for me to let go of things that have memories.
Ironically I was doing a lot more decluttering while I was still working and had way less time.
In mulling why, I think it may be harder for me to admit the finality of “that part of my life is over,” now that a big part of my life actually is over. That’s different from preparing for my Next Chapter while still living a working life that spanned my entire adulthood. Until now.
Meanwhile, I console myself by thinking that “winter cleaning” isn’t nearly as much of a thing as “spring cleaning”. So I hope to get serious about purging unneeded space-and-serenity-stealing stuff soon.
Another reason I thought I’d wait to retire was the rise of generative AI and large language models. They made some of my work interesting in new and exciting ways. But it turns out I can come up with my own projects to learn about them and build things that I find interesting and fun – and even still write about them in occasional freelance articles.
Also holding me back, as I’ve mentioned before, was my fear of losing my professional persona. That turned out to be less tough than I expected.
Everyone is different, of course, and my experience is mine alone. I’ve certainly read about people who’ve retired and regretted it (note that I’m talking about emotionally, not financially, which is a completely separate issue.) But among people I know, I can’t think of anyone who’s left the full-time workforce voluntarily and been sorry.
Some people do part-time work, and that’s enough to scratch the itch. Others feel like they were happy to have had the careers they did, but now they’re done and are glad to fully decide how they spend their time.
I think there’s a middle ground between fearing retirement and glorifying it. It’s definitely a big change, and it helps to be prepared emotionally as well as financially. But I think if you already have interests outside of work – whether close ties with family and friends, hobbies, volunteer work, activities, personal enrichment plans, or any combination – and a view of who you are outside of work, you should do fine.
As much as I speak about vibrant aging and the many benefits of maturity, there also are a lot of challenges in getting older. Good grief there are some weeks when I feel like medical appointments are as frequent as my work meetings used to be! OK, not exactly. (But close 😅.) However, for those of us lucky enough to be able to, retiring is definitely one of the upsides of age.
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