Retired for 17 months.
The other day I was going through old photos and ran across some from a work function. I felt a knot in my stomach and thought, “how in the hell did I do that every workday for 36 years?”
mmm
I threw out everything related to my employment with one exception. It’s a lava lamp. Every quarter two lava lamps were awarded. It’s a peer award having nothing to do with Corporate.
wait until you start getting the phone calls …
I should be retiring in a few months (early next year), but I’m keeping the few special anniversary gifts I still have (typically granted every 5 years). They were lovingly selected from a moderate-sized selection of mostly crap based on a ratio of the most utility to me relative to comparable Amazon price point I could find. So I have a medium-sized leather duffle bag from my 20th, a medium-sized spinner suitcase from my 25th and a decent enough small faux-Tiffany-art-glass-shade table lamp from my 30th. God willing, I won’t be making the 35th.
The pre-20th anniversary stuff was so disposable I can’t even remember what it was (the 5th and 10th might have just been pot metal lapel pins and a plastic plaque). Oh and I am keeping my 20th anniversary “Old Timers” award which is basically a carved plaque on a stand but made in our carpentry shop from salvaged wood from some job. Gotta respect that someone at work made that with their own hands as opposed to getting a contract for cheap, mass-produced junk.
Amusingly the gift vendor was changed between my 25th and 30th anniversary gifts. As I was able to confirm the new vendor offered cheaper crap relative to anniversary date than the old one. Got to cut budgets where you can 
.
^^Concerning anniversary gifts. My “legacy” employer offered gifts from a catalog at five-year anniversaries.
Five years was a tie clasp, which was the best thing in the catalog for five years, and I never used.
Ten years was a small clock, again the best thing in the catalog for ten years.
15 years was a ship clock.
20 was my first piece of luggage. Yay, me!
25 was two more pieces of larger luggage.
30 was some kind of audio system. Never unpackaged it! I wavered between it an what would have been my first hd tv (19") Shoulda taken the tv.
35 my first hd tv 23"
40 My second hd tv 32"
Between 40 and 45 my employer was acquired by another company, which simply sends you a check for a couple hundred bucks for your time, so no more catalogs.
Assuming I’m still alive in four years (which would be my 50th), I’ll either be a) still working, or b) put out to pasture due to a corporate decision.
Not quite a year for me, but this hits it exactly. There are aspects of being there and doing my thing that I miss. The totality of it all? Nope.
sorry if I am being nosy … but did you fly ever since retirement? (fly=cockpit, not back in the cabin) …
do your fingers twitch when you see a (smaller) plane - or is that no longer a thing?
I’m planning on retiring next year at some point. Probably June. I am getting huge flutters of anxiety even thinking about it.
I had hoped I would die before I needed to do this lol.
I am currently in therapy to help me move on with this decision. It’s helping a bit.
Have done some research but my medical situation changed drastically last year so I will have to start all over looking at options.
The worst will be the social isolation. Work has always been my connection to others since I lost everyone in my family except for some close cousins.
I travel a good bit but that isn’t something I can do constantly. I’m looking at volunteer opportunities, exploring a new living situation, and getting rid of stuff but it’s a slow slog.
It’s exhausting.
I
The last time I piloted a lightplane was about 1997. Then I sold it. I rode in one with my GF on a sunset air tour around Miami a couple months ago. Enjoyed the ride, the sights, and yakking afterwards with the young pilot just starting out on his adventure. The rest of the experience was nostalgic, but not worth the hassle to get and stay current. And frankly, riding or flying a lightplane now feels a lot like trying to drive a golf cart on the freeway in a snowstorm. You are soo underequipped for the mission you’re doing.
If I needed the money I could go get a job driving bizjets. After making an unreimbursed 6-figure investment in aircraft-specific training. I don’t need that.
When I hear a plane I still look up, be it a Cherokee or a Boeing.
Like you, I have no family.
The one thing I’ll suggest, energy and health permitting, is that the time to make new connections is while you’re still working. No, you can’t arrange to volunteer 20 hours midweek midday while still working. But you can sure join social events or retiree-friendly entertainment that meets evenings and weekends.
If you wait until after your work has permanently ended to begin building at least the foundations of your new social life, well, it’s easy to get to feeling lonely and depressed which makes it that much harder to fix.
Good luck.
Right you are. I wish I didn’t know from experience. @Ellecram, this would be excellent advice to consider seriously.
Thank you both for your advice. I hope to be able to get to that phase of exploration sometime this fall.
Welp, here we are, 4½ months post retirement. A coworker and buddy of mine retired the same day, after a couple of years of shooting the breeze/shite about the US political situation (we both retired from a Canadian company
([quote=“mnemosyne, post:42, topic:1002418”]
I’ve had the opportunity to visit CAE during an open house event. [/quote]) and we spent a lot of time on MS Teams talking about this.)
We just talked again this evening and, little did we know how south things would go.
“Out there”, as it were, I’ve seen tons of angst-ridden things about peoples’ existential retirement crises. I, however, am not experiencing such a crisis. After 40-some years of getting up between 0500 and 0530, I’m getting up at 0800-ish and just plugging away at watching Meidas Touch and Bulwark videos, running errands, noodling on my guitars, and going for bike rides.
Shortly after my formal retirement date I was contacted by a recruiting company, which resulted in an interview. That was quite interesting and enticing; I told my contact that I wouldn’t be available until the new year.
Now, approaching the new year, my decision remains to be seen. I suspect that I won’t take on their work as it would probably be too reminiscent as my actual work, and as serious. At the same time, I could sort of see conducting my specialty in a very limited vein on a part time basis.
So, we’ll see…
That’s one of the holy Grails for lots of retirees.
The problem is very few companies want work nowadays performed at a pace of 5-10 hours a week. Whatever you do, whatever they want they want it yesterday.
Sigh.
I retired feeling pretty confident that I would return and work just 8 hours a week. My boss/company was totally on board with that.
When push came to shove, though, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
mmm
Funny, that. After I retired I did an eight-month consulting gig, and it was kinda fun, but the next time someone reached out to me I said I was done.
I think that’s one of the things that very much depends on what you do. There’s no way I could do my former job one day a week , even if I wanted to. Not just because my employer wouldn’t allow it, but because it doesn’t make sense for the job. My husband is in sales. He could definitely work one or two days a week if he wanted to - he would just have fewer accounts. His company wouldn’t hire someone to work a day or two a week but they allow people to do it all the time in lieu of fully retiring.
I’ve worked for a bunch of companies over the years and seen a lot of people try to go to part time in lieu of immediate retirement. And in one company job sharing for parents who wanted to work part time.
Problem is that corporate work has been “always on” for 20+ years now. People are expected to respond to emails, texts, instant messages not just from 9-5 but pretty much 16X7. It’s very hard to work with someone who only responds from 9-1, M-F. Someone else ends up doing the work. You have to create roles where urgent issues don’t pop-up. Which isn’t very easy to do.
Yep, totally dependent on what your job entails. In my case I could have pretty much wrote my own ticket as far as which days to work, how many hours, etc. The work is there whether I am or not, and whomever is present on a given day takes care of it.
When I was full time, I was on call 24/7 for a week at a time - this happened about once every couple of months - and I did have to make myself available on some weekends, about one every six weekends. I made it clear that if I returned post-retirement I would be doing none of that, and manager and co-workers were all cool with it.
mmm
When I was a 30-something and 40-something I would get very annoyed when a 60 year old got some arrangement where they went down to 15 or 20 hours per week and were able to pick and choose what they would do, while the rest of us had to pick up the grunt work. Because the old farts running the company were buddies with the not-quite-retired.
Or even worse consulting gigs where someone would get paid the equivalent of their annual salary for a few weeks of work during “peak periods” which were totally ineffective because they weren’t grounded in what had happened in the last 9-10 months. And the “peak period” would be defined as whenever the retiree was not in their Florida/Arizona/Colorado retirement home, but instead back in our fair city to spend time with their grandkids.
I resolved not to ever be that guy. And never to convince myself that my situation is somehow different.