I retired a year and a half ago. It has been great for the most part, after a couple of hiccups re IRMAA and changing our minds about moving.
The last couple of years of working were starting to become too much for me. The massive piles of filing and scanning were getting nightmarish, and remembering all the little complex details of our big commercial real estate transactions got harder with every passing year. I was glad to give it up.
But I do miss the camaraderie and the feeling of accomplishment when we closed a big transaction. Also the challenge of tackling a thorny technical computer problem for my attorney bosses, and getting it straightened out for them (though I was a legal secretary, I had a knack for ironing out Microsoft Word and Outlook issues).
So I do miss that, but I know if I tried to work again I just wouldn’t be up to the task.
Any other retirees miss certain aspects of their job, or even working in general?
ETA: sheesh, I just remembered. Had I stuck out working for awhile longer, today would have been my twenty-fifth anniversary with that law firm.
I liked lots of aspects of the work. But that nice part comes with all the vexations too. Screw that.
I miss the camaraderie. I don’t miss late nights in strange hotels.
Mostly I like that nobody tells me how to spend my day or week.
The only way I’d go back is under extreme economic duress. And in my case the one thing I know is that by law I can’t go back to that work. So it’d have to be some other sort of work. Double Uggh!
I retired a year and a half ago, like the OP. Or more precisely stopped working (I had about 6 weeks of vacation to use up before my official retirement date).
I do not miss working. And I had a very pleasant and interesting job. I’m a physicist and worked in industry for 42 years (plus 8 years technical work before studying physics).
I figured I would miss the technical work and would probably take up fun projects of a scientific or technical nature, including learning new programming languages. To my surprise, I haven’t felt much inclination – though that may well change.
I do miss some of the people, but I’ve also maintained relationships with many of them. I actually struggle to find enough time to spend with them!
My favorite losses: having to work with extremely vexatious software; getting coached on improving my productivity; presenting to groups which always made me feel anxious leading up to the events.
I’m not retired but, I already expect I’ll miss working and often think about jobs I could see myself doing when the time comes. I used to really enjoy retail but maybe could bartend? Appliance repair seems easy enough but little freelance jobs in my technical career field also have some appeal. No hurry, I’ve got about twenty (edit: hopeful?) years before then.
I retired 2 1/2 years ago. I was a masters prepared medical librarian for 41 years, the last 21 years at a hospital. I liked my job, but I was just tired of working. Since retirement I have never, not one day or one minute, said to myself I wish I were still working. I am friends with one person that currently works there. However, I have friends from the job that have either retired or moved on. But do I miss working? Hell no.
I worked in an auto parts plant for GenMot. On an assembly line, I could make 6000 tail lights in a shift, and when I left, everything looked the same as when I started. When I was a janitor in the same plant, when I walked in, everything was dirty, and maybe smelled bad. When I was finished, the effects of my work were obvious.
I miss teaching. I miss the feeling of confidence and competence that came from knowing that I could walk into my classroom and handle whatever came up. I miss my students…well, 99.9% of them: their rapt expressions, their funny remarks, and, for the frosh, their wild waving of hands and “Oo! Oo! Oo!” when they knew an answer,
What I don’t miss: Grading. So. Much. Grading. Planning period meetings. Inservices that inevitably meant more work. Incompetent admins. (I miss the best principal, though. He was incredible.) Right wingers filing hundreds and hundreds of complaints about textbooks and teachers.
And the absolute worst: students’ funerals. The biggest immediate relief on retirement was that I’d never have to attend another kid’s funeral (I hope).
I couldn’t go back to teaching, at least not in a red state. People arguing white kids feel guilty because some white people 100 years ago did horrible stuff is so bizarre. I already had parents who angrily told me I was teaching US History wrong because their kids weren’t as racist as they had been.
I’m retired for about 2.5 years now, and I miss almost nothing about it. I do miss spending time with patients a bit, but that’s really it. I’ve stayed in touch with the co-workers I really care most about, and my life has been nearly stress-free (other than medical issues with myself and family, mostly resolved now) in a way it’s not been since I was about 5 years old. I’m really groovin’ on that.
Nope, not a bit. I’ve been retired since 2009. My last job was extremely stressful and since the project was three months behind, the pressure from the Corps of Engineers to catch up was unrelenting.
Things I don’t miss:
Driving to and from work
Meetings
Meeting deadlines
Devoting 99% of my time to the 1% of workers who couldn’t keep their shit straight
Having to listen to a boss tell me how my job should be done, regardless of his/her lack of experience in the field
Although I do now find that the occasional burst of required adulting is more of a PITA than it used to be. Not difficult in the sense that I’m too physically feeble or mentally senile to perform the task, but just “Sigh. I don’ wanna and you (almost) can’t make me. Sulk.”
Today was paying semi-annual property taxes for some garbage albatross of a property I inherited. At least the cost is minimal. Type in the url, type in my parcel#, give them my credit card details, click [pay]. Took an hour to gird my loins for this oh-so-aversive task. How dare they intrude on my endless summer vacation!!1!
I sorta now get what the 20-somethings mean when they bitch about having to adult. It’s teh suxxors.
I laughed because I’m about to pay our property tax. And I hate it. Although due to Prop 13 I pay considerably less than my later-buying neighbors.
I do not miss work. I had a two year long special project I worked on about 8 years before I retired. It was high stress and technically difficult. That left me with a burnout that I never really recovered from. I don’t miss the work at all, and I don’t miss the 80 mile a day commute. Oh, about about 3 years before I retired, we had a shooting (by an employee) at our facility that kill four people and wounded a couple of others. I knew and liked the deceased and one of the wounded was in my workgroup. That didn’t help my emotional state any.
But funnily I miss being at work. Being with my coworkers – many of whom were cool, funny, interesting, and compassionate – is something I really miss. And I miss the San Gabriel Valley. I grew up and lived all my life on the westside of L.A. and never lived more than six miles from the beach. Going to the eastside everyday for years opened my eyes to more of the county than I had known well before. It’s a different place, but I really liked the whole nature of the area. I miss it. And I miss the restaurants!
My first retirement was in 2011 after 37 years of Federal service. My organization was about to undergo a major restructuring that didn’t appeal to me at all and since I was of age and they were paying a bonus for folks to retire, I took it and never looked back.
Within a year, I was bored, and that began a series of part time and/or temp jobs. I’d been an engineer, but I opted to work as a drafter - I got to see interesting projects but I didn’t have to go to meetings. Most of them just lasted 6 months or so, but the last one was the best, and I was there nearly 4 years, retiring just before COVID hit. By that time, I was ready. It’s been 5 years this month and not only do I not miss it, but I can’t remember half the names of the people I worked with. Then again, I’m old so I forget things.
I retired six years ago, and I don’t miss working, however I do miss some of the people I worked with that were friends, and not just coworkers. I miss the paycheck, and the overseas business trips I took on the company’s dime. I enjoyed the extra time I would spend in Bangkok, Paris, Hong Kong, or really anywhere outside the US.
Now that I’m divorced I have a lot spare time. I moved to a new town where I don’t know anybody and nobody knows me. I’ve made some new friends, and I’m looking for opportunities to volunteer, which I had been doing for many years.
The first year or two after I retired were the toughest. I would get up early in the morning and wonder what I was going to do, and how I was going to pay the bills. Now I don’t worry so much and enjoy the freedom I have to do whatever I want.
I have been doing volunteer work for the same non-profit for the entire 10 years I’ve been retired – I just happened to discover them right before I retired, when a few were working in my neighborhood. I work about 7 hours a week, divided into two mornings. It’s outdoor work*, and sometimes I work with small groups, sometimes with one other person, and sometimes on my own. The paid staff seems to turn over more often than the volunteers, but I have made one good friend with another volunteer.
I can’t recommend this enough, especially if you start to run out of things to occupy you around the house and/or you find yourself with time hanging on your hands. There is volunteer work of many kinds around, for all kinds of interests.
*I do tree care (pruning and hardware adjustments) for young street trees that have been planted fewer than 5 years before. I work on about 500 trees a year. I love it. It has the advantage of being relatively non-controversial, and lots of people stop by while we’re working to thank us for doing it. How often do you get that at a paid job?
I was very, very lucky that I could semi-retire and then keep on working on projects I chose to work on. If I could not have done that (and I continue to work some), then I believe I would indeed have missed it.
What I got rid of: commutes, crappy clients, petty bureaucracy, penny-pinching expense reviews, and similar crap.
What I kept: expense account, interesting and challenging projects, some more reasonable deadlines, opportunities to teach and volunteer, and so forth.
But I definitely would have wanted to stay active in my field.
I retired on the last day of 1999. They made me an offer I could not refuse, include changing to a new actuarial table that would have considerably reduced my pension.
The life a college professor is sometimes described as a 3-legged stool. One leg is teaching, second is administrative, third is research. I do miss teaching. I enjoyed it and I think I was good at it. Not, however, marking papers. I did once volunteer to teach a course, based on a book I was writing. No exams, all A’s. I had taught that course before I retired and the questions one of the students asked led to completely rewrite the book.
Administration (mostly committee work), feh. Don’t miss it in the least.
Finally, research. I don’t miss it because I never stopped doing it. Looking at my CV, I just found 28 papers dated 2000-2019. A few of them (inclduing that book) were based on pre-retirement work, but still nearly 25 since I retired. Now that I have pretty much stopped, I do miss it, but I guess I no longer have the chops. Although there is a minor paper in the works.
