Retirement

March 31, 2017. After The Company offered a one-year severance buyout, I walked away after 35 years. My title was Business Manager. In a LinkedIn sense I guess I was in technical sales support. What I actually did was pull together written proposals for large broadband wireless networks for governments. The writing part, for me, was easy; the challenging part was demonstrating how our technology met the customer’s requirements, which were often ambiguously stated. After seven years of doing this, it was getting monotonous and I’d use my break time to write fiction. Between 2014 and 2017 I’d finished six short stories and I felt ready to tackle the novel I’d been thinking about for thirty years but hadn’t been actually writing. At my retirement party, a former co-worker told me that he ran a weekly writing workshop in nearby Barrington and he invited me to join. By October I’d written thirteen of an estimated 36 chapters and I got involved in the workshop, which gave me valuable feedback to improve my writing, but also caused no small amount of newbie second-guessing on my part, leading to a few wrong turns, but I digress.

My point here is that one shouldn’t approach the occupation of retirement without having a job in mind. That job might be honing one’s golf game, volunteering at the hospital, or even charging the windmill of the Great American Novel. There should be something that gets you out of bed in the morning and that thing should have been considered (and ideally started) before you walk out the door and collect that gold watch.

Here’s a typical day (without much difference between the weekdays and the weekend):

Waking up: My 12 AM to 8AM pre-retirement sleep cycle has slipped to my typical weekend 1:30AM to 9:30AM, the sleep cycle I was born to have.

After breakfast, we settle down to our laptops—me to write, catch up with social, or plan events, my wife practicing her singing, doing CASA work, or wrestling with health insurance.

Note: CASA stands for Court Appointed Special Advocate, a volunteer who engages with the cases of children who are wards of the state, to help speak for them at court proceedings. In our case, this entails watches over two teenagers who are estranged from their douchebag parents and files regular reports of her visits to their foster situations.

The afternoons are typically my wife going to play pickleball (kind of like ping pong played on a smaller tennis court), and me going to the gym or practicing guitar or piano. Dinner is when we check in with our youngest son, who is a contractor doing quality assurance for a pharmaceutical company and is still living with us, which we love because he’s funny and doesn’t mind hanging out with us.

The evenings are for watching Rachel Maddow and getting triggered by the latest political shenanigans, venting on Facebook, and catching a few episodes of a TV series (lately, either Sneaky Pete or The Komensky Method). We also violently recommend you catch up with Black Mirror or Russian Doll when you get a chance.

Then—flossing, brushing, dropping some melatonin, and reading in bed before lights out. The glamor never ends.

Basically, what we’ve done is replace one routine for another, except this routine doesn’t pay. With the ongoing prospect of being obliged to do nothing and the vast range of “what-to-dos” there is a fair share of boredom and/or anxiety about an open future. One advantage to me, though, is that I’ve the time and wherewithal to cultivate enthusiasms. If I want to write, I do it. If, in the middle of writing I want to research genome mapping, I do it. I’ve let the flow of interests lead me to become a travel planner and back to being a piano player. The flip side is this—without a driving imperative like having to make a living from it, my motivation to be a good writer or a good piano player is entirely self-driven, in a situation where diversions are everywhere. Retired people problems, right?