On Retirement

This blog is about my experiences moving to rural North Georgia following a busy career as a trial attorney in crowded Pinellas County, Florida. There are two parts to that experience. One is adapting to life in a rural area, and the other is being retired. This post addresses the latter.

You may think that being retired is easy because it’s nothing more than not having to go to work every day. You’re wrong. For many people it takes quite a bit of work, thought and adjustment to enjoy retirement.

If you’re married, one of the things you’ve got to adjust to in retirement is being around your spouse all the time. Unless the two of you were a professional dance team or worked together in some other way, retirement is the first time in your life when you have the opportunity to spend every minute of every day with your spouse.

Don’t do it. It will ruin your marriage faster than a paternity notice from a former secretary. I don’t care how good your relationship is, being together that much will drive one or both of you bat shit. If you think I’m joking do a google search on the divorce rate after retirement. It’s high, and it’s rising. Husbands and wives were never meant to spend that much time together. I think it’s a genetic thing. We’re two different species. I know that’s not a politically correct view, but Gloria Steinem be damned.

To give your marriage any chance of surviving retirement you and your spouse need to get away from each other as much as possible. Join different clubs. Take up different hobbies. Have different friends. Do whatever is necessary to avoid spending all your time together. At the very least it will give you something to talk about over the dinner table when one of you asks, “So, how as your day?”

Which leads to my second point. You only have two choices when you retire—stay active or rot. If you don’t want to rot, then you better stay active. And when I say stay active, I’m not talking about playing golf every day or whatever it was that you did as a diversion from work. You’ll find that those things grow old quickly when you can do them all the time. I’m talking about doing challenging things. Things that will occasionally make it seem like you’re back at work. Things that place a demand on your time, your intellect and your abilities. Learn a new trade or skill. Go back to college. Volunteer to use your skills and experience to help some organization in the community. Take on City Hall. Find windmills to tilt at.

Some people find the transition from work to retirement very difficult. There are those who have worked so long and hard at their job that it has come to define who they are. When retirement rolls around they cannot take off the suit or the uniform and find another identity. This is a particular problem among professionals like lawyers, doctors and the military. Many of them end up dead or an alcoholic within a few years after retirement because they cannot make the transition.

For other people retirement comes easy. I’m lucky because I’m one of those. I walked away from my career without a backward glance. I was done with it. It was time to do something else.

Part of the reason it was easy for me to transition into retirement is because I never lost my other interests. So for me retirement is a great opportunity to attempt all thing other things I want to do in life but did not have the time for when I worked.

But more than that, I think retirement has been easy for me because of my screwed up personality. Some people go through the forest of life like an Indian (er, excuse me, Native American); they never touch a tree or break a branch. I seem to run over and through every damn tree in the forest. By nature I’m the bull in the china shop, the fart in the space capsule, the burr under the saddle and the one fish that’s swimming upstream. When they say that nine out of ten people agree, the odds are that I’m the tenth person. If everyone in the room thinks something’s great, I have this innate compulsion to take the contrary view. And I have difficulty keeping my mouth shut.

I can’t help myself. I was born to be a pain in the ass. But that’s a great thing when it comes to life after retirement. It means that every day is a challenge whether I want it to be or not. If you have the same personality be grateful. It means that you’ll always have your hands full in retirement, and that’s a good thing.

So let’s go over my simple rules for a successful retirement. Don’t hang around your spouse all the time. Get involved in challenging and demanding activities. Be a cantankerous, contrary, difficult, garrulous pain in the butt.

Works for me.