Is It OK To Miss Work?

 When I was working, pretty much everyone over the age of 50 talked incessantly about their pending retirement. It got to the point where I would cut people off and ask them to stop talking about it. It's one thing to be not fully in the present and anticipate the future. It means a certain loss of focus and appreciation on the moment that we have, and by missing that moment we lose the opportunity to ever experience it again. The future holds other moments but, if we keep looking past them, our life becomes a stream of discontent. I know that we all do this to some degree at some times in our lives. But the focus on retirement for so many people seemed to border on the obsessive. To look forward to not working seems to be the ultimate American dream. And to express doubts about the benefits of not working, the joys it will bring, seems a sort of betrayal to the promise of America that we grew up with.

I've always seen our culture as a weird hybrid between a relentless Calvinist work ethic and the dream of becoming one of the idle rich. Perhaps I'm making too much of this.

I know that, in my own experience, I did look forward to not working, not setting the alarm clock, not having to be doing things I really didn't want to do. And I had, frankly, a pretty good job. I thought the work was valuable and I enjoyed the people I worked with. Most of working America is not so fortunate. And so for me to write a blog post about the stress of not having a job, well, I don't know, some people may take it as a slap in the face or an expression of my own sense of entitlement.

For me, the reality has been that, after the first few weeks of staying up late and sleeping in, I began to feel a creeping sense of purposelessness. And I don't want that to be an affront to my friends and family, because I love them and find great meaning and joy in my interactions and time with them, and I hope they find my presence to be a positive contribution to their lives, but it's not quite the same as having your work valued.

Part of me, the inside part, is saying: "be careful how you talk about this, people will know or think, that because you can't find meaning and value outside of work, that your life must be somehow empty and that you lack the inner resources to create meaning for yourself."

For the first year and a half of retirement I have struggled to create that meaning for myself. I have struggled to find a reason to make a contribution, to step outside myself and reach out to others, to perform a creative act, to stretch myself to become “more.” I seem to be content, or at least unbothered by, becoming somewhat "less." I can find things to do to keep me busy, but it seems mere self-indulgence. Maybe some will say: “You've worked your whole life and you've earned the right to be self-indulgent.” Maybe some will say: “There's nothing wrong with just keeping busy.” Maybe some will say: “I have no idea what you're talking about my life is so full and busy in retirement I can't imagine how I would ever go back to work.” 

Over the last year and a half I've counted calories on spreadsheets, tracked my exercise, kept a sleep diary, journaled in the mornings and the evenings, and learned to bake bread, to try to impose some order on what seem to be a series of disconnected, meandering days, just sliding past. It might well be a failure of my own imagination that requires structure, deadlines, and expectations in order to create a life that has meaning for me. I can accept that other people aren't like that. I don't think that structure, deadlines, and expectations implies that your values or meanings are externally imposed, though. I think back to a fiction writing group I belonged to several years ago. We had structure, deadlines, and expectations and I wrote a chapter a week, got three quarters of the way through a novel, and haven't written a word since the group disbanded. I haven't picked it up in retirement, though Lord knows I've thought about. There's plenty of time to think in retirement, there are plenty of days to procrastinate forward to, there's lots of opportunity to do other things.

This is been kind of rambling, because it's difficult for me to come to terms with the idea that maybe, just maybe, work was good for me and a life without work is feeling like a life diminished.

I look forward to your comments, I'd love to know how your retirement is changing the way you view the world, and yourself.