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I’m not supposed to complain. That’s the thing that keeps me up at night. I have objectively won the retirement lottery. Thirty-two years with the same company, a pension that covers all the necessities, a house we paid off in 2008, and a wife who actually likes me. Most of my friends would trade their left kidney for what I’m describing. So why, on a Thursday afternoon in April, did I find myself sitting in my F-150 in my own driveway, gripping the steering wheel and wondering if there was actually any good reason to go inside?
The first month was easy. Almost euphoric. I remember the day I signed the papers—they actually threw me a party, someone got a cake, my boss said I’d done good work. I felt light in a way I hadn’t felt since maybe 1998. No alarm clock. No emails at 6 AM. No conference calls about quarterly projections that nobody actually cared about. I had structureless time, and structureless time felt like freedom.
By month two, I noticed something shifting. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a slight grayness to afternoons. I slept better, actually—no work anxiety creeping in at 4 AM. But I also woke up earlier, around 5:30, and just lay there with nothing pulling at me. My wife was still sleeping. The dogs didn’t need walking until eight. I had nowhere to be.
I started going to the gym more, which was fine. Good, actually. I’d read somewhere that physical activity in retirement protects cognitive function, and I was determined to be one of those guys who actually stays sharp. I bought the membership, showed up at 6 AM most days, watched retired guys in their seventies bench press more than I do. That felt purposeful for about five weeks.
But here’s what I’m learning about purpose: it can’t just be something you manufacture to fill time. It has to mean something. And when you’ve spent forty years showing up to a thing that paid your bills, your purpose was always accidental. You did the work because you needed the money. The structure wasn’t a gift—it was a requirement. Now that the requirement is gone, I’m realizing my sense of purpose didn’t come from wanting to do the work. It came from the fact that I had to show up.
Research on retirement identity suggests this is more common than people admit. Studies on identity transitions during the retirement transition show that people who strongly identified with their work roles experience what researchers call “role discontinuity”—a sudden loss of the organizing principle that structured their identity for decades. We’re not lazy when we struggle with unstructured time. We’re dealing with a genuine psychological reorganization, and we’re doing it without a manual.
My wife kept suggesting things: travel, volunteer work, finally take that woodworking class. All reasonable. All things I used to say I’d do if I ever had the time. But when I had the time, I couldn’t summon any genuine excitement about them. This confused me for a while, then bothered me, then started to scare me a little.
Sitting in the truck that Thursday afternoon, I realized something uncomfortable: I’d been avoiding myself for forty years. Not deliberately. Deliberately would imply intention. But the constant structure, the meetings, the responsibilities, the sense that somebody needed something from me—that had been insulating me from a much harder question: Who am I when I’m not doing?
The identity you build around your work becomes so foundational that you stop noticing it. You’re someone’s employee, someone’s manager, someone who solves problems, someone people call when things break. You have an email signature. You have standing in a community. You know what you’re supposed to do every single day. That’s not a prison—it’s also not obviously a cage because you can’t see the bars.
What I’m discovering is that the depression I was sliding into wasn’t clinical in the way I first thought. My brain chemistry is fine. What I was experiencing was existential, and honestly, that’s harder to fix because no antidepressant can manufacture meaning. You have to find it or build it, and that work is uncomfortable in a way that filing quarterly reports never was.
I’m not fixed yet. I’m only at month five. But I’m starting to understand something about what emotionally steady people in their 80s have figured out—they’ve stopped waiting for a structure to tell them who they are. They’ve built it themselves, slowly, in a way that feels authentic instead of obligatory.
I think that’s what I’m actually afraid of. Not the lack of structure. But the possibility that if I build something to fill the time, I might discover it’s not what I actually wanted all along. I might find out that I only liked myself when I was useful to other people. That’s not a depressing thought in the way I first experienced it. It’s an honest thought. And honest thoughts, even uncomfortable ones, are still better than sitting in a truck wondering if there’s a point.
The point, I think, is that you don’t get to avoid yourself forever. The structure will fail. The work will end. You’ll run out of people who need things from you. And then you get to actually meet the person you’ve been running from. That person isn’t a villain. They’re not even a stranger. They’re just someone you forgot you were. Getting reacquainted is awkward and sometimes sad. But it’s also the thing that makes the freedom mean something.
