It was Memorial Day weekend last year when I started pondering how I might want to restructure my job. A couple of days later, I’d decided something quite different: to leave full-time work altogether. I was as surprised as my boss that following Tuesday when I told him I planned to retire!
Looking back, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t do it a year earlier. I was probably ready to move on to my next chapter in 2023, but too fearful to take the plunge.
What was I afraid of?
Finances. That’s a real challenge for many. But in my case, since my husband unexpectedly started consulting part-time after his retirement, I think my worries were more about not contributing enough to our joint income. I’ve viewed earning a paycheck as a lot more than a way to pay my bills. It’s also been things like having financial independence, being a productive adult, and knowing that what I do has “value” out there in the real world.
In other words, a lot of my financial fears were about ego.
Boredom. Some people whose lives revolve around the structure of a full-time job wonder: What am I going to do with all that extra time? The answer: Fill it with all the things you didn’t have time for when working 40+ hours a week!
Almost everyone I know who’s stopped working full time is exhilarated to be able to do more of what they want, relieved to have more time and energy for caregiving and/or their own health issues, or both. I know there are people out there who get bored when they stop working, but my retired friends are much more likely to wonder how they ever fit working 40+ hours a week into their lives.
The key is to have a life outside your job before you retire, even if you don’t have enough time to tend to all those other things while you’re working. Family and friends you want to see more of, hobbies you want to spend more time on, skills you want to improve, places you want to travel to and enjoy . . . As long as you have some of these things in your life while you’re working – or even thoughts about them that you wish you could do – it’s not very hard for them to expand into newly vacant time slots.
Lack of fulfillment. I enjoyed solving problems at work and helping people do their jobs with less drudgery. It was gratifying to hear from readers who said my articles helped them in their careers. But it can also be rewarding to do those things outside of a job, even if the scale is smaller.
I’ve coded hobby public-service apps that people say help them, such as searching local government meeting agendas and minutes. No one’s paying me for that. The advantage is, I choose projects I want and work at my own pace. And I get to prioritize my to-do list.
And while I’m not writing regularly for a large audience, I still do write regularly. I have this blog, which I find personally rewarding. I run a little neighborhood blog and email list. When I have a tech idea I think deserves a wider audience, I pitch a freelance idea where I used to work.
I don’t want paid full-time employment to be the only way I can feel creatively fulfilled.
Isolation. I started working from home before the pandemic, so I was ahead in one aspect of readying to retire – going into an office was no longer a big chunk of my social life the last seven years or so of working. And I believe that helped. Nevertheless, I still had regular contact with my colleagues virtually, and that’s all but gone.
Still, if your work friends are real friends, you find a way to stay in touch, if less frequently. If a relationship withers when you’re no longer working together, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t meaningful at the time! It just means those particular ties needed shared experiences for nourishment.
That kind of friendship was at risk from job change, too, not only retirement. It wasn’t meant to last a lifetime. And that’s OK.
It’s possible to develop other relationships like that, without a job -– with neighbors, by joining clubs, through volunteering. They take more effort and may not seem as intense as your transient work friendships were, but likely that’s because you’re not spending 40 hours a week together.
Losing who I am. This is a big one. If you’re a person whose identity is wrapped up in your work, it’s can be tough to imagine a new life without one. My career was a huge part of my self image. Who would I be if I wasn’t a journalist? What would I be like without professional ambitions?
I’ve just started exploring this in my first 10 months of retirement. And I see now that however scary it is to re-imagine and re-invent myself, it’s also a gift.
I have the luxury of examining my ‘Type A’ personality with fresh eyes. I’ve got more mental and emotional space to come to terms with being older, without layering on working in an industry that doesn’t exactly see decades of experience as a positive.
I still stress about a lot of things. I retired, I didn’t get a personality transplant! 😂 But I’m working on that too.
Losing the prestige of having a professional persona. I’ve written about this before, but it’s been less challenging than I imagined to craft a revised self image based more on who I am and less on what I do.
But I’ll be honest here: I still get pangs at times. Remembering this time last year, when co-workers were telling me how they’d miss me (and my work), makes me a little sad. Feeling like I mattered to my co-workers felt good. Now I know that they’ve long since moved on from needing me doing what I used to do. No one is irreplaceable – especially at my level!
But would feeling needed like that be worth working 40+ hours a week again? For me, the answer is no. I’m happy to leave the back-to-back-to-back meetings behind.
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