It’s been one month since I retired, and I have to say that I’m so relaxed! When I drive, I’m not rushed. I typically go the speed limit so I’m usually in the far right lane. It’s an overall relaxed and I can feel myself really unwinding. I’m also eating better and exercising more.
I like this “retired thing”!
It’s indeed delightful- wait until you start not caring about, or even knowing, what day of the week it is!
You know what day it is today? Saturday. You know what day it is tomorrow? Saturday. Everyday is Saturday and you have it off.
I only recently retired but my old boss retired years ago. He told me that he wakes up in the morning with nothing planned to do, and by the end of the day he can’t get it all done.
I’m hoping that when I retire, there will be Tues, Wed, and Thursdays so I can more enjoy busy outdoor activities then and use my Saturdays for less busy activities.
Yeah. It’s really like every day is a Wednesday when you spontaneously decided to take the day off of work.
Yep - I don’t want every day to be Saturday. Saturday was a pain in the ass when I was working. Sure, I didn’t have to get up to go to work - but I couldn’t get to the post office during the week, so I had to get there on Saturday between 9-12 , with all the other working people. If I went to the mall, it was probably on Saturday with a bunch of working people. Now I can do those things on Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon when the working people aren’t there.
Every day being a day I took off from work is much better.
In my next-to-last job Saturday (and frequently Sunday) meant getting up before 6 to babysit one brain-damaged batch process or another to completion. They failed at predictable points, which had been identified to the development team — but they were too busy working up brain-damaged online processes to fix them.
Going from that to my last job felt damn near like retirement.
That’s kinda why I haven’t retired. I’m afraid I won’t get anything done, even thing I want to do.
Yes, this. I also lived in Virginia for a while when the blue laws were still in effect, so if you worked all day M-F, Saturday was the one day you had to do any shopping that wasn’t the grocery or drug store. Those were allowed to be open Sunday but that was about it.
And of course if you needed to patronize any businesses that were only open 8-5 M-F, that was an enormous pain in the ass. The credit union was thankfully open on Saturday mornings and there’d be a line out the door, since in those days you needed to actually go into the bank a lot more often than we do now.
Retirement is a bit over three months away. This weekend a friend asked me if I wanted to join him on a five day fishing trip in Louisiana. The actual trip is two weeks before I retire, and I didn’t hesitate to say “sure!”. I didn’t even need to check my work schedule, I have plenty of unused vacation time. So I will get a bit of a jump start on taking it easy.
Later next summer, my wife and I have a European cruise planned, and she asked when I wanted to return. It felt pretty good to realize that it doesn’t really matter, we can add a week or so if we want to. And I think we will.
Saturday is the day I don’t go out. We do our shopping on Friday, we go to restaurants in the middle of the week.
What I like is that no day is Monday, and I no longer have Sunday nights where I found that I didn’t get half the stuff I needed to do on the weekend done. I didn’t mind going to work, I minded not having time for my own stuff.
My wife has actual Sunday afternoon grief/angst over the return to work on Monday (is there a term for this?). I’m more like you…“dang, I wish I had another couple days to actually finish a project or go for more overnight hikes”.
We hope to retire when I am 60 (7 years) and we are meeting with retirement planners through my work’s retirement plan. They’ve indicated maybe earlier, but we have a follow-up meeting in January. I have long-term work goals that I want to see through (can’t retire until 59 for those projects to complete), but if my wife could retire earlier…great!
This. Very much this. And that stress I had in the pit of my stomach every Sunday night when I went to bed for the last several years before I retired. Now, I know I don’t have to spend every waking minute to get a project done, when I can do it over a couple or more days and not be exhausted when I finished.
I didn’t see this until I posted my reply above, but, yeah, I 'm curious if there’s a name for this syndrome, too.
After a quick search, I see Sunday Scaries coming up the most.
I too had the Sunday Night Anxieties during much of my working years. Happy to bid them good-bye. Monday is a day I look forward to now.
My target is now May 1st. I have some anxiety about money and the soon to be wife thinks I’ll get lazy. But I really can’t wait. The stress never bothered me before but over the last few years it started to bother me a lot. I need to get out.
I always thought about it as “Sixty Minutes Syndrome”. The weekend felt like it ended for me when I heard that damned stopwatch. That was exactly the moment each weekend where I’d remember the homework not done, the tests not studied for, the fun things I didn’t get to.
Good thinking.
I don’t know that the stress is bugging me with 9 months to go, but I do find myself thinking:
I’ve made it this far without a major f***-up and just a couple really exciting incidents. Please, please let’s run out the clock before my luck runs out.
That kind of thought never occurred to me 5 years ago. Not that in my increasingly aged state I’m concerned about my capability to handle whatever comes my way, just that I’d like to avoid all that hassle & adrenaline. Excitement is for 30yos.
Separate topic:
Having also recently gotten married on the cusp of retirement as you are (21 months prior in our case) I can say that unless you’ve been co-habiting for years, no matter how well you know this person, it’s going to be a wrenching change of good and notso-good. And your retirement will be a different wrenching change of good and notso-good.
Even if the notso-good is a mere 5% of the total, it’s still there. And all change is stressful, even good change. My impression is that adapting to getting married the first time at age 30 was easy. Now, at age 63 when we got married, there was a lot more set-in-my-ways emotionally for both of us despite both of us knowing and acknowledging intellectually that we were going to have to adapt.
Be proactive managing all this is the best thing I can say. I do not in any sense regret my decision or my timing. But it has been rather more work than I’d expected at a time when my capacity for said work was less than I’d expected it would be. She has said similar things.
Good luck and congratulations on both your impending changes!
Wow, I never thought my Sunday Scaries (or whatever) were so common. Mine came on about 8 pm as the weekend ran out.
I had zero stress my last few years of work. I was in a position that it would hurt them more than me to fire me. I also had the excellent excuse of doing things with inadequate resources. I told them there would be bugs, so when they showed up it didn’t bother me.
My wife certainly gets them. And I guess I do to a lesser degree: If I’m going to have insomnia due to thinking about work, it will happen on a Sunday night/Monday morning. The frequency revolves around the stress level of the upcoming week. Nothing like starting the working week dead tired because you were up thinking about work.