Fear & Loathing in Retirement

Work is many things, most of them good. Work offers social interaction, a sense of purpose, intellectual stimulation, health care and a paycheck. Not many things do as much for us. But work is also a form of tyranny. It imposes restraints on our time and our range of self-expression. It imposes deadlines and de facto curfews. It imposes dress codes, modes of behavior and adherence to countless rules of its particular culture that are unwritten and unevenly applied to members of its tribe.

I’ve been retired for two weeks now and it’s all good, but it’s going to take more than a few weeks to adjust to my freedom from the tyranny of 35 years in the harness. When you throw in commuting, I just got an extra 50-60 hours a week given to me and I haven’t quite figured out how to use them yet. There’s a little voice in my head that speaks up 3-4 times a day telling me I’m not making enough progress on my list of things that need to be done, and it takes a few seconds to remind the voice that there’s plenty of time, and that I’m the one setting the timetable now.

For now I’m happy just completing my farewell tour of lunches, dinners, golf and cocktails with assorted pals and business associates who mostly seem happy to pick up the check. I don’t know why golf on Tuesday is so much better than golf on Saturday, but it is. Cocktails remain a joy on all days ending in “y.”

What’s next? Beats me. I feel like I’m still finishing a really long book. It’s about a 1200 page work of non-fiction; alternatively fascinating and tedious, with about 50 pages to go. If it was about someone’s life other than my own I might be tempted to set it aside now and find something more fun to read. But I need to finish it, which will probably take another couple of months. I’m enjoying the journey. Mrs. d’blank and I attended the Metropolitan Opera the other night and enjoyed Il Barbiere di Siviglia (above). Who knew it was a comedy? There’s a lot of New York City I never had time to explore, so boredom is not on the horizon.

I only have one rule at the moment: do an absolute minimum of things I don’t want to do, and fill my days with things that matter to me, while I’m deciding what book to read next.

Retiring

I’m retiring this week; not from the blog, or from life, I’m actually retiring from my job of many years. This is proving to be a surprisingly stressful and demanding process, and I may bore you with the details of it all a bit later. However, it is clearly not going to be this week, so I thought I’d just let everyone know that I plan to return soon.

The hardest part about retiring is that it is like having your leg in a cast. Once people see the cast, you know where the conversation is going, and there are only so many questions to be asked. The victim of the broken leg has the advantage of being able to answer most of the obvious questions the cast evokes. I, on the other hand, have absolutely no answers to any of the standard retirement questions. About the 4-5th time they are asked it starts to make you feel stupid. Somewhere around the 25-30th time, it made me feel homicidal.

More on being a cranky retiree later.