11 Things I Got Wrong About Retirement
I have spent a year telling people that retirement is the hard part.
I meant it. I still do. But after a year of writing about the loss, the silence, the sudden absence of being needed by Tuesday lunchtime, I have had to admit something inconvenient.
Some of the things I thought I knew were only half true.
This began on The Old Grey Thinker:
https://theoldgreythinker.substack.com/p/11-things-i-got-wrong-about-retirement
I thought I would miss the money.
Mostly I missed the certainty. Not the number. The bit where the money arrived on the same day every month and I did not have to think about it. The thinking is new, and I resent it more than I expected to.
I thought I would miss the status.
I did, briefly. Then I realised the status was never really mine. It belonged to the job, and I had been borrowing it. That is both freeing and mildly insulting, which is a surprisingly common combination in retirement.
I thought the first year would be the hardest.
It was not. The first year had a shape. There was admin and novelty and the strange holiday feeling. The harder bit came when the novelty had gone and nothing had replaced it and the calendar was still looking at me with an empty face.
I thought freedom would feel like relief.
It often feels like a blank page. Relief means something was lifted. A blank page means something was removed and now you have to decide what belongs in the space.
I thought I would read more.
I did. What I did not expect was the guilt. Forty minutes with a book used to be a reward for finishing something. Now there is often nothing to finish, so the reward has nowhere to sit.
I thought I would keep the friendships.
Some of the ones built on shared complaint went first. They could not survive the complaint being removed. The ones that lasted were the ones that never needed much of a reason to exist.
I thought being needed would stop mattering.
It did not stop mattering. It stopped happening. Those are different situations, and I confused them for longer than I care to admit.
That is the sentence I keep coming back to.
For decades, other people's need draws your outline. A call, a problem, a meeting, a question. Someone asks. Someone waits. Someone assumes you know.
Then the world finds another route.
The inbox forgets you quickly. The chair is reassigned. Tuesday arrives without plans.
This is both reassuring and offensive. I do not want civilisation to collapse because I have stopped attending meetings. I am not a monster. Still, there is a private humiliation in discovering how efficiently everything continues.
I thought I needed a project.
Some projects are simply jobs with worse hours and no pay.
What helped was smaller. A fixed Tuesday morning. A standing arrangement. No agenda. The only reason it works is that neither of us has to decide whether it is happening. It is Tuesday. It is ten. The structure carries us both.
I thought the silence would get easier.
It gets more familiar. That is not the same thing.
And I thought I would have worked out what I am for.
I have not. What I have instead is a set of hours I am no longer fighting, and on the good days that has been enough.
The thing underneath all of it is this.
The retirement everybody describes is the loss. It is real. It is the part that hurts and it is the part I have written about most.
It is not the whole picture.
There is another half, quieter and harder to sell. Nobody markets it because there is nothing obvious to buy. A book read without earning it. A friendship that survives without a shared grievance. A morning that does not need to justify itself.
Both halves are in the same chair. Mine, usually, with the tea going cold on the table next to it.
This piece began on The Old Grey Thinker.
If it made you laugh, nod, mutter "unfortunately yes," or stare into the middle distance for a worrying length of time, you can support the work here:
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