WOW again. That really fits.
Which ties back to @Qadgop_the_Mercotan’s comment upthread about feeling like perpetual summer vacation from grade school.
I really try to keep that same kidlike sense of excited discovery of not much actually amazing. There’s always more to see and experience even in mundane circumstances.
My wife are getting some experiences/discovery done before we retire while we are in good health. Travel.
Our next trip is from Colorado to Iceland then onto England, Ireland, Scotland and Norway. We have no kids, and you can’t take it with you.
Perfectly said!
Well, i must miss working some… I just accepted a part time temporary assignment. It’s actuarial work. Different from my last time ten years of stuff, but work that I’ve done before, so i (and my employer) hope there’s not too steep a learning curve.
I enjoyed my work. I liked some of the people, too, but i genuinely enjoyed a lot of my work. I retired because i didn’t like working for my boss, and they were adding more administrative annoyances, and i could afford to retire.
I’m hopeful that this job will be just the work, with minimal administrative overhead, other than needing to fill out a time sheet.
Anyway, it’s short term. Either party can end it with little notice. They are just looking for some stopgap labor while they recruit a suitable full-time employee. They expect that to take 3-6 months. And it’s only 15-20 hours a week, so i can keep up my volunteer work.
I’m kinda terrified about needing to adult again, but also looking forward to it.
I retired on the last day of 1999. I hadn’t expected to but they made a universal buyout package for anyone over 60. Of which the most important item was that they were going to change, on Jan. 1, 2000, to new acturial tables that took into account the people, but especially professors, were living much longer than expected. They announced this 6 months in advance to encourage people to retire. (I might mention that from a retirement fund worth $960,000, I have now drawn over $2,000,000.)
Professors have a three-pronged job: teaching, administration, research. I enjoyed teaching a lot. Administration (which I avoided as much as possible): meh. But I really, really enjoyed research. And I was still getting small research grants until about 2015. And invited a collaborator here for 6 weeks every spring. We met every day with the third, local, mathematician and worked intensively and published about a paper a year until the pandemic came and he had to cancel. I have no publication dated this decade.
So what else do I do. Life changed a lot during the pandemic. I no longer get out much. I read the Times, Scientific American, American Scientist, MIT’s Technology Review, play the Times’ Spelling Bee, do the early week crosswords, read SDMB and sometimes respond, do a bit of cooking. Days fill.
I talk to my still-working coworker friends a couple to few years younger. I have little interest in putting up with the crap up with which they put.
Then again, sometimes I see a shiny jet arcing across a blue sky & think that’d be fun for a few hours w somebody else paying the lease & the fuel.
My last job was terrible. Don’t miss it. But I enjoyed editing and teaching high school, two earlier jobs. Have considered dabbling in those areas again.
But there’s so much reading to do, and vegetables to grow, and exercising and helping people and political stuff to accomplish and baking and ….
Well, I miss being “normal” which, for me, included working. I don’t miss the drama, but I miss the friendships and the work itself. I don’t miss having to get up to be at work at 8 AM, but I miss feeling a sense of purpose.
I retired at age 30 – 22 years ago – due to disability, so ymmv.
I missed doing up the seasonal flyers for Macs - I had 37 years of doing them and for the first while after retirement missed the creative fun.
Get a mild fix flipping motorcycles and selling bits and bobs on FB and Gumtree.
I look at the speed of advance of the technology tho, especially my Apple Watch and think myself well out of it.
I wonder if any of the comments here would be illuminating to those participating in the “Possibility of ending the need to work for a living” thread in Great Debates.
Five years retired now and I can find endless ways to amuse myself. I do work a very light number of hours at an easy job but I will miss it no more than I do the grind of having to be somewhere five days a week.