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I’M TRYING MY HAND at retirement. It isn’t going so well.
As a teenager and when I was in my early 20s, I would take to the couch and happily spend the day consuming a novel. Could I do that at age 62? It seems not.
At some point over the past four decades, I lost the ability to do things solely for my own enjoyment. It seems the endless demands of work, family and household chores have crushed my inner self-absorbed teenager. Am I missing out? I’m not sure.
Sleeping in. This is relative. Before my diagnosis, I’d regularly get up at 5 a.m. Today, I’ll often stay in bed past 6. This is partly a conscious attempt to sleep more and partly because my body needs more sleep. My cancer, coupled with my treatment, can leave me feeling pretty fatigued.
Still, after decades of getting seven hours of sleep a night and often less, it feels like a great luxury to linger longer in bed. This is one part of my “retirement” that I’ve successfully embraced.
Travel. Since my diagnosis 11 months ago, Elaine and I have visited Ireland (twice), London and Paris, gone on a cruise, taken the kids and their families for a long weekend at a luxury resort, and made a number of shorter trips to places nearby. Many dollars have been spent. Has it been worth it? Some of the trips have been great. Others have been more of a struggle.
Since late October, my mobility has been all over the map, a result of the cancer spreading to my spine. At its worst, I could barely walk a city block. After radiation treatment, I can almost feel like my old self, and have no problem walking. Even then, fatigue is an issue, and it’s especially bad when coupled with the changing time zones that accompany transatlantic trips.
Before my diagnosis, Elaine and I had a wish list of places we wanted to visit, perhaps staying for weeks at a time. But those travel dreams have been largely nixed. It’s been tough for me to leave town for more than a week or so, given my endless medical appointments.
All this is a reminder of what I’ve often read from HumbleDollar commenters, which is that retirees should travel while they can, because you never know when deteriorating health might steal that from you.
Television. I’m ambivalent about TV, inclined to view it as a passive activity that usually isn’t worth the time invested. Still, in recent months, I’ve started to watch sports on TV every so often, something I stopped doing more than 25 years ago. Elaine and I also occasionally watch an episode of our latest TV series during the middle of the day, which feels like the height of decadence. I may even pay to stream July’s Tour de France, though I’m not sure I want to commit the necessary hours to take full advantage.
Family. With my diagnosis, my family—my two kids, my mother, my three siblings—have rallied around me. We speak more often on the phone and see each other more frequently. If there’s an upside to my illness, this is it.
Still, I’m not sure all of the above amounts to much of a retirement. Don’t I have any hobbies, you might wonder? I did—bicycling—and I imagined retirement would give me the chance to explore the Pennsylvania countryside on two wheels. But because I’ve had balance issues, the doctors ordered me to stop riding outside when I got my diagnosis, so the only cycling I do these days is in the basement.
Any other hobbies? The problem, and I’m not sure it is one, is that my hobby is my work. I no longer spend my days editing articles for HumbleDollar. Those edited articles have been replaced by the pieces that the site’s readers post directly to the Forum.
But while I’m no longer editing, I still devote part of each day to various writing projects and to monitoring activity on HumbleDollar. I enjoy it, and I think it’s a worthy use of my time. But I’m not sure others would consider what I do each day to be anything akin to retirement.
Is there a lesson here? Perhaps. While HumbleDollar might be a community united by a desire to discuss financial issues in a civil and intelligent manner, the debates within the Forum highlight readers’ many differences. Among them: the virtues of budgeting, the wisdom of investing abroad, when to claim Social Security, whether to favor individual bonds over bond funds, how much to travel, the desirability of continuing care retirement communities, whether to buy income annuities, and much more.
Similarly, there’s no one definition of retirement, and what makes others happy likely won’t work for you and me. Don’t like the way others are spending their retirement? That’s an easy one: Don’t do what they’re doing.
Jonathan Clements is the founder and editor of HumbleDollar. Follow him on X @ClementsMoney and on Facebook, and check out his earlier posts.
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…Don’t do what they’re doing! lol, I almost spewed coffee all over my desk. Sage advice sir.
I agree on stream the TdF. Look on it more as a meditation package looking at the French countryside with a bit of high energy chess thrown in at the end of stages.
I think you probably found your calling and thus full “retirement” isn’t in your make-up. I wouldn’t write off TV. There is some superlative stuff out there. try Patriot on Amazon (James Bond if done by Wes Anderson) or Adolescence on Netflix (frightening glimpse of the ordinary victims of today’s manosphere) or Black Mirror, for great guest turns in near current dystopia.