I have four standing weekly appointments:
Sunday morning: Watch CBS Sunday Morning and fill my medicine dispenser for the week
Tuesday afternoon: cocktails and snacks with fellow retirees from my former place of employment
Thursday evening: take the trash out
Friday afternoon: beer and cards with a few old friends
As long as I can remember these four commitments, I can generally recall what day of the week it is when I get up in the morning. I know, every week is tough and stress-filled.
OK. Why? What does it matter?
I only need to know for calling my friends. So I call on the weekend and not when they are at work. That’s all I can think of.
I am newly retired and am as busy as I’ve ever been. I got a lot of stuff to do.
Ok, yeah. Tuesday morning I take the trash out. Often at about 5am in a robe and slippers. Hey, I’m retired (still odd to say, and get off my lawn).
We get up crazy early still.
I’m gonna back off. My wife and I are thinking about taking some Gardening classes. And Senior Yoga.
Huh. I’m thinking about Fencing. The sword type, not the wood type (that I know). Also looking at ‘Beginner TIG Welding’ I’ve done arc, gas and wire feed, never TIG though. Donno what I would use it for. A friend of mine does it for art work. I don’t think I need that any more. The tractor is gone.
Also thinking introduction to pastels. My mom and I used to draw a lot. I still have her pastels that are at least 75 years old.
Days of the week. …
The last time I had a 9-5 M-F schedule I was in college. At age 25, so >40 years ago, I often joked that I have no idea what day of the week it is without looking at my wristwatch.
That’s still gloriously true except now I don’t wear a watch so I have to consult my big rectangular pocket watch = mobile phone / super computer.
Days of the week are waay overrated.
It seems relevant to repeat part of the OP:
And thank you @enipla for demonstrating with statements like this one:
For my part I understand why some people look forward to retirement, and that they feel they are living life fully doing what they do, enjoying not knowing what day of the week it is, (heck maybe lose track of the month year and what city they are in) … again it is what most working people hope to get to.
And I appreciate that some of those people cannot understand why some of us others feel differently.
The proselytizing though, and we hear it in real life too, gets a bit much.
@enipla what you describe does not sound as appealing to me as what I currently do, and what I currently do as “work” is not stopping me from doing things I enjoy outside of work. And the fears expressed by @Ellecram are very real. Dismissing the fear of what the loss of connections at work will look like, and worries over a loss of sense of purpose, particularly in context of physical limitations and pain with
is I think a bit … glib.
FWIW I don’t know what the right answer is for her either. If it was me and I could no longer work and was otherwise alone I might consider moving into a Senior community which would eventually transition to assisted living, but where social activities are built in. I dunno. I do know that retiring because medical issues have forced it upon you, to live alone, and with physical limitations, is a serious issue. It can get very isolating and very lonely fast.
OK. Noted.
While I like and respected the people that I worked with. I had zero interaction with them outside of work. My Wife is different and has made life long friends at work that are also my friends.
A large reason for that is that I’m about half deaf. I cannot handle any kind of crowds or groups.
The noise in my ears/head right now sounds like a constant high E. With a variety of C’s and G’s. It’s analog mixed in with a constant pitch. So - Up down and up down.
Anyway I’m learning the piano! (Bought a nice Yamaha) I’m starting to recognize the noise in my head.
Tinnitus really, really sucks. I was talking to someone about it once and they said “Yeah I know someone that commit suicide becase of it”
“Thanks. Thanks for that information.”
If it doesn’t matter to you, that’s great. It matters to me. I don’t want to be too cut off from the outside world.
There are no affordable senior living options in my local rural area. I make too much money to be eligible for some places and others are way over my ability to pay.
My options are to move about 30 - 45 minutes from where I currently reside to even begin to find something.
If I am going to to sell my house and move I would rather move to Winchester, Virginia where I have a lot of close extended family.
I am still managing fine for now physically although some days are worse than others.
The thoughts of staying in my house for days on end with no purpose and no where to be intimidate me.
I understand. I took care of my mother for 10 years or so. I had to drive 100 miles each way to do it. It was rough on me. I lost every other weekend of my life.
That’s part of the reason we moved to where we are now. Absolutly no health care at our previous area. Shit, you’d be lucky to get an ampulance in the winter. Our new house has enough room to actually have a live in care taker. A guest bedroom with an in suite bathroom. Who knows, but that might end up an option for us.
The thought of having nothing to do enjoys me. I’m signing up for a class in pastels. Both my parents where artits and I have a knack. I’ve got a piano that is just waiting to be played. These are just some of the things that I want to do that I can’t carve out time for.
Today I hope to finish the handrail for the landing for the stairs. But I’m also still waiting on some stuff I ordered. So it won’t be completely done for a few more days. There is always something to do. A day of not having anything to do would be a small miracle.
Welp, 6am. Off to the garage to get moving on this.
My mother had a live in care taker for her last several months. It didn’t cost a ton more than a nice retirement community.
For now it sounds like you can continue to work if that is what you want to do. But definitely having a parachute, even it is more bronze than golden, is something to plan out. Even if that means moving as the plan?
Zooming out I see a more generalizable thought:
The goal is to have free choice.
I recognize that I am … lucky? privileged? … enough that I can choose. I get to work in a job that gives me lots. I have enough that I can afford to retire if I wanted to. My health and physical condition are fine. I could retire and set any of a variety of goals and enjoy them. Including ways to contribute to the general good.
I don’t have to work. And I don’t have to stop working. If somehow the work circumstance changes (and it could with our next “equity event”) and work becomes aggravation instead of validation easy for me to just say buh-bye. Retirement would not be an abyss for me, it just is not as appealing as working currently is.
Not everyone gets to be in that position.
I have known so many people either retired or on the crest of retirement and you have summed it up very well in that the “goal is to have free choice.”
You are indeed fortunate to be in such a position where you can guide the lines of your future life. Having work that enriches you is also a plus.
As you stated, not everyone has this luxury.
I am a social worker so my job does not involve physical activity.
I’ve always felt that my work was a great fit for me, hence, my 31+ years of employment.
But, like you, if it starts to get more aggravating than satisfying, I will definitely leave.
I can see that day coming actually.
Probably within the next year or so.
The agency I work for has cancelled our health insurance and required everyone over 65 to go on Medicare. I spent December and the early part of January sorting this out. Now I will slowly try to see how it all works in real life.
Once that feels comfortable I am pretty much ready to bow out.
For me? Retirement isn’t about money. I have plenty to see me through whatever I decide.
It’s about the timing and how I will keep myself occupied.
That’s a future me problem and one that I am sure I will figure out somehow. 
I think maybe the “stay connected to people/the world through work” might have been a lot of big talk. I just received a new job offer (possibly a second) and while I am excited about the opportunity to make money again, I’ve come to the conclusion that I typically don’t give two fucks about work or the people in it.
I think it would be different if I ran my own business or spend decades working at a company or something or ran something I felt passionate about. But the offer is so shitty and after being fucked over at my last company (which I mostly enjoyed working at), I’d be fine if I never had to work another day in my life. Particularly in modern distributed, remote, highly mobile work culture where people change jobs constantly and the idea of “after work” activities with coworkers is mostly dead anyway.
I can’t speak for the others, but I think it’s the “calling on friends / family” bit that I would be concerned about in retirement. I imagine everyone is excited for the first months and years after not having to go to work. I had the summer off after I graduated business school and before my new job was scheduled to start. It was great. I’d go to the gym, hang out with friends after work, take up random activities like kayaking down the Charles River or karate lessons. But to be honest by the end of the summer I was ready to start work. It started feeling very isolating to just be indulging in hobbies by myself while the rest of the world was at work.
And that’s in a major city (fist Boston, then New York) where there are actually people around during the day.
More recently, when I was laid off over the summer and spending the time at our house, it felt very isolating. When my wife would go to the office and the kids are at camp, there’s no one around and no where really to go.
My work has always felt useful to me. Not as immediately useful as being a doctor, but still, tending to the financial health of a company that a lot of people rely on when something bad happens to them is a job that needs doing.
I never really wanted to do a lot of after work activities with coworkers, because i have typically either had little kids i had to get home to or had a social life outside of work. (I realized, after the pandemic, when my boss talked about how wonderful it was to see people again, that i had already had that experience, when my dancing started up. And that my primary social contacts were all outside work.) Nonetheless, i appreciate the little social interactions during the work day. My job is cooperative, and i have many short interactions with coworkers.
I consider my self as semi-retired. I retired from a large global company I worked for as a senior executive for about a decade at the end of 2024. But about 3 months into 2025, I found myself missing the regular intellectual stimulation and being part of a team working towards strategic goals.
I have a friend in the city where I live who is a corporate recruiter, that reached out to me about a part-time executive position at a much smaller company, whose CEO, was looking for an executive that could mentor and coach one of his C-suite leaders as well as help in on strategic challenge and advice. After meeting with the CEO and some of their board members, I took this part time role, with benefits, stock grants, and a fairly generous comp package for 20 hours a week.
Unlike when I was a full-time executive, I am pretty rigid about my time commitment here, instead of working to get things done (40-60 hours a week), I keep my boundaries at 20 hours a week, because I don’t want to feel resentful and feeling taken advantage of. I have been very clear about this with the CEO and my team. They all are supportive.
This role will probably be for a couple of years, until the C-suite leader I am mentoring is ready to take on all of the responsibilities.
In addition to this, I serve on the board of directors of two large privately held for profit companies, for which, I am paid a stipend for quarterly board meetings and impromptu meetings with their management teams.
A whole let less stress these days and a lot of flexible hours.
COVID 19 did that for me. Was sent home. I saw the writing on the wall and bought for myself a high end home computer system. I needed to upgrade anyway. I did not ask work for a penny. Many did.
This is, I think, why I was allowed to just continue to work from home. And I admit it was sort of semi-retirement because I worked when I wanted to. Still ~40 hours a week, but on my terms.
Our/my IS team set up ~400 people to work from home in 2 weeks time. There are only 17 of us. It was absolutly incredible work that I am very proud of. I don’t know how in the hell we did that. There was a lot of cooperation from staff. And Many of us like me, did not need any assistance. Just a link.
That’s all over now thankfully. Now I work for me. Just about done with the landing to the garage. Working on the railing now. All oak.
Well, that’s the dream, isn’t it? To get paid a lot of money to not really do much actual work.
It’s that what all these “fractional” C-level jobs are?
It sounds like he does 20 hours a week of actual work.
I’m sure.
The first couple of years at my last job as a management consultant were “real work” too. I go on some sales pitches. Sit on some calls where I advise a client on “best practices” scaling Agile across their organization. Put some pretty PowerPoint decks together. Maybe coach and mentor some junior people how to do their jobs better.
What I don’t want to do is “real fucking work” where I’m spending my entire day getting screamed at by middle managers who are pissed because they realized they have gone as far as their career will take them, putting out a million fires because people can’t do their fucking job properly, and killing myself and my team because someone else decided I’m accountable to meet someone else’s mathematically impossible deadline on some underfunded understaffed ill conceived Kobayashi Maru project.
And the ironic thing is that the work I was doing in the first example was actually more valuable and more necessary. Stuff that actually resulted in real revenue being earned and deals being closed. The other stuff was mostly backoff bullshit that no one seemed to actually care about.
I’m 67, or will be this time tomorrow at any rate. I’m still employed full-time.
I very much enjoy not having the threat of job loss hanging over me — that should I so choose I could retire at any time also means I can’t be tossed to the wolves the way I could have been at pre-retirement-eligibility age. Not that my current supervisor is at all threatening, it’s a very pleasant gig.
Barring sudden changes in my health, I don’t anticipate retiring before 70, at which point I qualify for the maximum social security payment for my generation. I’m definitely open to continuing to work full-time beyond 70.