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Editor’s Note: This article is based on a letter we received from a reader who wanted to share his experience of early retirement.
While the story is his, the lessons resonate with many men facing similar transitions.
Three months after my retirement party, I found myself sitting in my home office at 2 PM on a Tuesday, staring at a blank computer screen.
The cursor blinked back at me, waiting for something, anything.
But for the first time in forty years, I had absolutely nothing to type.
The silence was deafening.
I’d done everything right, or so I thought.
Saved aggressively, invested wisely, paid off the mortgage.
At 62, I walked away from decades of corporate life with a healthy pension, a solid investment portfolio, and grand plans for all the things I’d finally have time to do.
Golf three times a week. Travel with my wife. Read all those books gathering dust on my shelves.
Within six months, I understood why retirement kills so many men.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
1) The identity crisis nobody warns you about
You spend forty years being something.
In my case, I was a senior executive, then later a business owner.
Every morning, I knew exactly who I was and what I needed to do.
My calendar told me where to be, my inbox told me what mattered, and my title told me who I was.
Then one day, it all stops.
Sure, the financial advisors prepare you for the money side.
They run their Monte Carlo simulations and show you colorful charts about withdrawal rates.
But nobody prepares you for the psychological crater that appears when your professional identity evaporates overnight.
I remember meeting an old colleague for lunch about four months into retirement.
“So what are you up to these days?” he asked.
I froze. I literally didn’t know how to answer.
Was I supposed to talk about my morning walk?
The documentary I watched yesterday?
The fact that I’d reorganized my garage for the third time?
When you’ve spent decades defining yourself by what you do, suddenly doing nothing feels like being nothing.
2) The cruel irony of having all the time in the world
Here’s what they don’t tell you about unlimited free time: it’s terrifying.
When I was working seventy-hour weeks building my company, I fantasized about having time to pursue hobbies, to really live.
But when that time finally arrived, I discovered something unsettling.
Without the structure of work, days blend into each other like watercolors running together.
Monday feels like Thursday.
Thursday feels like Sunday.
Every day feels like nothing.
I started creating artificial deadlines just to feel something resembling purpose.
I’d tell myself the lawn had to be mowed by noon, as if the world would end if I finished at 12:15.
I’d schedule unnecessary errands just to have somewhere to be.
The freedom I’d worked so hard to achieve became a prison of its own making.
3) When achievement addiction has nowhere to go
If you’re the kind of person who can retire at 62, you’re probably the kind of person who’s driven by achievement.
You set goals, you hit them, you set bigger goals.
It’s been your operating system for four decades.
But retirement doesn’t have KPIs.
There’s no quarterly review of your golf game.
Nobody cares if you optimize your morning routine.
I tried to apply my business mindset to retirement.
I created elaborate systems for managing household projects.
I tracked my exercise metrics like I used to track revenue.
I even made a spreadsheet for planning our travels, complete with cost-benefit analyses of different destinations.
My wife finally sat me down and said, “You’re trying to win at retirement. But it’s not a competition.”
She was right.
But knowing that didn’t make the itch go away.
After decades of measuring my worth through accomplishments, I didn’t know how to value a day where my biggest achievement was finishing a crossword puzzle.
4) The social death that comes before the physical one
Nobody talks about how quickly you become irrelevant.
One day you’re in the thick of things, your opinion matters, people seek your advice.
The next day, you’re just another old guy with outdated ideas about how things should work.
The phone stops ringing.
The lunch invitations dry up.
Former colleagues connect with you on LinkedIn but never actually connect.
You realize that most of your social life was built around work, and without that scaffolding, it collapses remarkably fast.
I joined a golf club thinking I’d make new friends.
But those relationships felt hollow, built around a shared activity rather than shared purpose.
We’d talk about our backsigns and the weather, but never about anything that mattered.
The loneliness was different from being alone.
It was the loneliness of being surrounded by people but not feeling connected to any of them.
5) Why the second year is worse than the first
The first year of retirement has the momentum of novelty.
You’re doing all the things you said you’d do when you had time.
Traveling to places you’d always wanted to see.
Tackling those home improvement projects.
Catching up with old friends.
But by year two, you’ve checked those boxes.
The honeymoon is over.
The reality sets in that this is your life now, possibly for the next twenty or thirty years.
That’s when I understood the statistics about men and early retirement.
Depression, cognitive decline, even mortality rates all spike in those first few years after retirement.
It’s not just correlation.
When you remove purpose, structure, and identity from someone who’s had them for four decades, the psychological impact is devastating.
I started having what my doctor called “anxiety episodes.”
Waking up at 3 AM with my heart racing, not about anything specific, just about the vast emptiness of time stretching ahead.
The bottom line
I’m not writing this to scare anyone away from retirement.
I’m writing it because I wish someone had been honest with me about what I was walking into.
The financial planning industry sells retirement as the ultimate goal, the finish line where happiness begins.
But for many men, especially those who’ve defined themselves through their work, it’s more like stepping off a cliff.
I’m three years in now, and I’m surviving.
I’ve found some purpose in volunteer work, though it doesn’t fill the void completely.
I’ve learned to appreciate smaller moments, though the achievement addiction still whispers in my ear.
I’ve made peace with irrelevance, though I still miss mattering in the way I once did.
If you’re approaching retirement, do yourself a favor.
Start building your post-work identity before you leave.
Develop interests that aren’t tied to achievement.
Create social connections outside of work.
Most importantly, understand that retiring from something isn’t the same as retiring to something.
Because that golden years fantasy they’re selling?
For many of us, it’s more like fool’s gold.
And the sooner we’re honest about that, the better chance we have of surviving it.
