I always said I would never retire. I loved working, loved my job and worked in my field for 42 yrs, and loved the people I worked with. Suddenly there was an upper management change, and EVERYTHING changed. There were layoffs, unreachable deadlines, nothing was ever good enough. After about a year of waiting for things to settle down, I woke up one morning and thought “I don’t want to go to work”. I called sick for the first time in 20+ years. I used that day to write my resignation and set up for my retirement. I had worked 5 years past my full retirement age. I traveled some, redecorated, museums, book club, lunch dates, Friends over for Scrabble and card games. Covid stopped all that. i do wish I retired sooner and left on a happy note, instead of “let me out of here.”
I retired at 66 in 2016. I think people need some reason to get up and do something to be really happy. For me, the answer was to volunteer. I had been volunteering at science fiction cons for decades and Burning Man since 2009. Retiring let me expand on those – expanding the off-playa activities for BM as an example.
Those were intermittent though so in 2019 I volunteered at the Arizona Museum of Natural History and was putting in three hours a week every Friday plus the occasional special event like our Beer 'n Bones fundraiser. I also took courses for the museum – gotta keep up with those seven-year old dino fans and their incessant questions.
All that was swept away for the past year and I really miss it.
I don’t want to be tied down when I retire, but I’ll probably miss working with kids and may look into being a volunteer tutor.
I’m 48, so I have a while to go, but I’ve wondered about this too. What I like the least about working is having to do it at someone else’s beck and call and/or on their schedule, not the actual act of working. I think I’ll probably volunteer a fair amount, when and if I feel like it.
That, to me is the part of retirement that appeals most to me- the freedom to do what I want, when and if I want to do it. No worries about having to have a job to pay the bills, no worries about whether I can take off 2 weeks or just one at Christmas, or any of that kind of bullshit. Just the ability to get up and do what I want every morning without someone else (outside of my wife) having any say about it.
Well…that really depends on what you mean by “retire completely.” It really isn’t healthy to sit in your room for 16 hours a day eating cheese doodles, watching TV and collecting bedsores. That I’ll grant. But it is only certain types of people that need either a goal to accomplish or an active routine to stay healthy.
The most important things to do is get some modicum of moderate physical exercise (however defined and in whatever amount) and keep your mind active. Beyond that I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all for people.
This more than anything else. I never particularly mind going to work, but the fact that I have to is an abstract annoyance. Right now my urge to retire is powerful, but I suspect in part that is because I can’t, not yet. But I’m getting closer and once I reach that minimum age threshold for my job, I suspect that urge to fade a bit because I’ll then have more control. I’ll be able to walk when I want on a day’s notice and that in of itself will be a bit of relaxing freedom.
Cite? Because I’m very healthy at the moment, thanks. I have more time to exercise. I have time to cook better and more healthful meals. I don’t have the enormous amount of stress related to my old job. I’m sleeping better.
I didn’t hate my job. There were parts of it that I liked very much. On a daily basis I was with a lot of people that I very much enjoyed. I miss them. Most of it was just a job though and some of it I really disliked.
My Dad was an extreme workaholic. He loved his work to the exclusion of all else. The way I love live music and sex. He barely knew his family. That’s the other extreme.
I was basically forced into retirement by circumstance (prostate cancer operation) but had a good pension and we moved to a small town which hopefully had less stress than the big city. But I kept busy - built a back porch, put up a fence, did a lot of “honey-do” projects. Now that my wife’s health has declined, I’m pretty much a full time caregiver and house-husband. In my spare time (?) I write poetry, short stories and hope to get back to my comatose novels. Did I retire? Depends (that’s a joke, son).
To be clear, this is just one article citing “a report.” I think that retirement can be find if you find things to do in your spare time. My uncle took up photography, and ended up “un-retiring” by becoming a full-time photographer. Not actually retired but doing whatever the hell he wants – that kind of retirement is actually quite good.
Retirement and traveling while doing yoga? Great retirement.
Retirement, sitting around isolated, wondering if you’re going to have any social contact, wondering if you’re valued and needed by people? Terrible, even if you’re wealthy and relatively healthy on the outside.
There’s a big difference between retirement being unhealthy for a minority of retired people and your previous claim. Obviously covid has curtailed things but I have loads of friends and also family who value me (and I them). None of the retired people that I know fall into that category. Obviously I wouldn’t know the ones who did by definition but I doubt that they are representative of the group.
Coming up on the end of my first year of retirement and there still aren’t enough hours in the day.
I’m 37 and I dream of retirement. Of course for me retirement means doing the job I have now but for myself rather than for other people. I’d like a 10 acre orchard and a small brewery/winery/distillery. It’s a lightly physically active job with great enjoyable products. Taking winter off is normal and the spring and summer make it easy to take a day or a week off to go camping, fishing, or work on my house.
I agree that doing the same thing all day every day sounds boring and I can see why the OP would want work to give some variety. I think I can impose enough variability on my life. Of course, this assumes I can successfully fight to keep my hobbies and interests though child rearing. I watched my dad’s hobbies devolve to stuff he talks about enjoying and even now that he’s retired he doesn’t expend the effort to pick them back up and his day is sitting around watching ESPN. He just decided to go back to college to help structure and fill his day which I think is the best thing he’s done since he retired. Watching his retirement scares me.
I was six years old when I exclaimed, to the amusement of a large crowd of relatives, that I wish I was already retired, so I didn’t have to go to work in the future. Now solidly middle-aged but still decades away from retirement age, I’m still of the same persuasion.
I never run out of interesting and rewarding things to do on my own. My free time To Do-list would fill a double-sided A4 in 12 pt. TNR easy. Whenever I’m at work (I work intermittently), I long to be back at my cherished, immensely satisfying personal projects. Being actually retired would be bliss, no question about it.
After a former boss of mine retired, I asked him how he liked it. He said “I wake up in the morning with nothing to do, and I still can’t get it all done by the end of the day.”
I have 1 more year, or so, before I reach full retirement age. I have no health issues beyond one pill for blood pressure. I intend to start collecting social security at FRA and keep working until all bills are paid off. That debt is only about 18k dollars. After that I may decide to quit working. Or maybe not. My wife is only 50yrs old and still working. So once I eliminate a few small debts I should be good to go puttering around in my yard and garden.
You know, I liked my old job, too. But I didn’t like the idea that I had to be there every day. Now, I don’t know how I ever had time to work full time.
Every day is Saturday now.
I’m 60 and was laid off. I need to keep working for financial stability. But I also enjoy using my brain and I like being as useful as possible. As long as I can find work, I’ll keep working because SS isn’t going to pay my bills.
I’m 69, been retired for five years, and haven’t been bored a minute. I’m finally catching up on my reading, I’m writing, I’m doing a critique group, I try to walk for 45 minutes a day.
Plus, I have volunteer work, both for a technical conference and for a local writers’ group. I took over as webmaster for them, and when Covid hit I got everyone up on Zoom so we could still have our meetings. I definitely feel needed since there wasn’t a lot of computer smarts in this group.
My wife works from home and would be retired except that people keep on offering her books to write. That gives us a good balance of alone time and together time.
Plus I cook a lot. And we did a cruise, and we drove around the country, and we visited our grandson.
The great thing is going to the store during the week when it isn’t crowded.
Two best things - no traffic, and no Sunday evening depression when I have to confront all the stuff I was supposed to do over the weekend that I didn’t get to. And I liked my job.
I’m about 21 months away from eligibility to collect my full Social Security benefit, at which point, I intend to add that to what I currently earn with the Post Office. I don’t ever expect my monthly expenses to be less than they are today, so I’ll never be in a position to give up my present income (barring a MegaMillions jackpot).
Oh, yeah – forgot to mention.
When I was working I had the weekday alarm set for 3am since my shift started at 5am (somebody has to take care of the East Coasters). After I retired I kept the alarm just for the sheer deliciousness of being awakened, thinking I don’t have to go to work today!, thumping the alarm off, and sleeping in until 6am.
I kept it up for about two months.
The place where I used to work (until last May) was just acquired by a giant conglomerate. There is no way that this will make it a better place to work. There is a possibility that they will move my entire division to a different location in a year or so. I had a brief thought that, had I held out, I would have gotten a sweet separation package but I quickly realized that I have plenty and even a million dollars wouldn’t have been worth working for an extra year and a half.
Retired? Heck, I think you just described my actual job!