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YEARS AGO, while practicing law, I was a frequent contributor to Humble Dollar. I loved Jonathan Clements’s vision for the site – a corner of the financial universe built on clarity, frugality, and the quiet dignity of living within one’s means.
Then my life took a sharp pivot. I left legal practice to teach gifted-and-talented students and coach varsity athletics at a public magnet high school. Almost immediately, my submissions here dried up. I was consuming entire days guiding brilliant teenagers through complex history, breaking down match film, and grading papers long past sunset and on weekends.
I wrote to Jonathan with genuine regret, apologizing for going dark on such a wonderful enterprise. His reply was quintessential Jonathan: he explained to me with characteristic, succinct warmth that his own adult child was a teacher, adding that he wasn’t sure there was a higher calling on Earth.
He was right about the calling. But what nobody warns you about a calling is its capacity to consume you whole if you let it.
The Cliff Edge
This past year, the math simply broke. Between high-load AP teaching, head coaching, and the relentless calendar of high school athletics, I was regularly clocking 17- to 18-hour days during soccer season. My central nervous system finally redlined badly. Worse, I realized with a gut punch that I had missed nearly the entire senior year of my oldest son while running on that treadmill. This realization hit me at his graduation when I felt physically exhausted and unable to enjoy what should have been one of the proudest moments of my life. I was determined to make it up to him in whatever way I could (for example, we are visiting him today at college, and we go often to see him in San Antonio – a 90-minute drive from Austin). Moreover, I will not repeat this mistake and will enjoy the years I have left with my two high-school-aged daughters.
With teenagers preparing to leave the nest and a close family member facing severe illness, I stepped away. I took a sabbatical. Maybe it will delay our retirement slightly, but as I will express further below, I am not sure I will ever really retire.
The Void
Financial planners love to reduce retirement to a single milestone: “The Number.” The spreadsheets run 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations, the house is paid off, the withdrawal rates are dialed in, and the industry assures you: You have arrived. You are safe.
At 45, I had not retired in the traditional sense, but I had stepped off the cliff of full-time professional identity because my body told me I needed to. And what I discovered in the sudden, unanticipated quiet is something many retirees spend years agonizing over without having the vocabulary to describe: The number is not the answer.
When you abruptly remove the machinery of a demanding daily routine, you don’t instantly find nirvana. You find a void.
In a recent discussion on non-financial retirement readiness, former financial adviser Tyler Gardner framed this dilemma in his video on non-financial retirement needs around Self-Determination Theory, pioneered by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Deci and Ryan posited that human well-being rests on three basic psychological nutrients: competence, relatedness, and autonomy.
For all its stress and bureaucratic friction, a demanding career supplies all three automatically. When you walk away from work, those three nutrients can vanish before your celebratory cake is even eaten.
If you don’t deliberately rebuild them, the fallout can be physiological.
The Trap of “Mental Retirement”
In aging literature, researchers study a sobering phenomenon bluntly termed “mental retirement” – the cognitive softening that occurs when a person ceases to be intellectually stretched.
A decade-long study from Binghamton University examining China’s rural pension expansion revealed that early retirement significantly accelerated cognitive decline. Crucially, the researchers noted that the negative impact of reduced social and mental engagement outweighed the physical benefits of improved nutrition and sleep that the pension provided.
Work forced us to solve problems under pressure. Sabbaticals and retirements do not.
To counteract that loss, I had to create self-imposed challenges. During my grueling years in the classroom, exercise was the first thing pushed off the ledge. On leave, I reclaimed the time. I started chasing benchmarks for physical competence.
Recently, I set out to regain a grueling standard: 10 continuous minutes on the Jacob’s Ladder. It was a benchmark an elite special operator had given me when I served as an Army JAG supporting special operations in Afghanistan in my late twenties. My first time back on the ladder? I barely completed one minute and staggered off it trembling and nauseous. But every week, I kept working at it – sometimes adding a few seconds and other times several minutes until I got to 10 minutes again this week. Crossing that threshold didn’t merely burn calories; it restored a measurable gradient of physical competence and, with it, confidence.
Whether it is conquering a brutal conditioning standard, learning a language, or mastering an instrument, we need something where we can objectively say: I am better at this today than I was last month. I will now find a new physical benchmark to pursue, while coming back occasionally to that masochistic Jacob’s Ladder.
The 40 Invisible People
The second nutrient, relatedness, is where most folks get ambushed.
When people contemplate retirement, they assume their social health depends on their spouse or a handful of close friends. But work provides something entirely different: a vast scaffolding of “weak ties.”
In a landmark 2014 study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn found that daily subjective happiness and feelings of belonging rose noticeably on days when people had more peripheral interactions – even something as fleeting as a 20-second genuine exchange with a coffee barista.
Broader public health research reinforces this with astonishing gravity. A massive meta-analysis led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad spanning over 300,000 individuals found that strong social integration increased survival likelihood by 50%. Remarkably, the mortality benefit was strongest for complex, varied social networks (the diverse web of people you bump into) rather than simple binary measures like living with someone.
When I taught, I had hundreds of involuntary interactions before lunch: hallway greetings, banter with the front desk, coaching video sessions, cafeteria check-ins. On my sabbatical, I plunged into writing a historical thriller called The Blood Money Ledger set during the Vietnam War – a passion project rooted in my love of history and informed by my own military service.
I was thrilled to find that the fiction flowed with unexpected ease. In fact, I am now leaning toward turning my main character, Tom Calder, into a series of books about morality, the law, and institutional rot. But writing is, by definition, solitary confinement.
Left entirely unmanaged, isolation is insidious. To survive it, I had to engineer artificial friction:
None of these people are lifelong confidants – except my close friend who joins me for coffee. But together, they rebuild the 40 casual touchpoints work used to gift me for free.
Anticipation Over Accumulation
The final hazard is structural: time without seams.
When we dream of retirement, we picture unstructured calendars and checking off items on an expansive bucket list. But behavioral psychology shows we often misunderstand how human satisfaction works.
In a well-known 2010 study by Dutch researcher Jeroen Nawijn tracking over 1,500 adults, vacationers exhibited significantly higher happiness before their trips than non-vacationers. The post-trip happiness bump, however, was negligible and evaporated rapidly. Even though I haven’t written for Humble Dollar much in the past several years, I have been a frequent lurker, and know that this is a topic we all understand well.
The engine of joy is almost entirely anticipation, not completion.
A bucket list should never be treated like a grocery list where the goal is an empty page. If you clear out your list with no new ambitions behind it, life goes flat. The real art is maintaining a continuous horizon of things you are eagerly anticipating: an upcoming course, a seasonal trip, an archival project, or a fresh manuscript draft. We are in the midst of using high school and college graduation presents as family adventures we take. For my son’s graduation gift – he loves soccer – I took him and his soccer-obsessed sister to the World Cup. My other daughter, who is very much not soccer-obsessed, and my wife visited a spa together for significantly less money. Win-win.
The Real Ledger
The Monday morning after your final Friday, your spreadsheet will not ask how you are doing, provide an intellectual hill to climb, or hand you an unexpected laugh across a desk.
The number is just the admission ticket that we too often obsess over. The actual show begins when you decide what will make your days count.
John Goodell was a deputy director of policy and general counsel at the Texas Pension Review Board. Currently an Army Reservist, he previously served 14 years on active duty before leaving to become the general counsel at the Texas Veterans Commission. John has spent much of his career working with public sector employees on tax, investment, estate planning and retirement issues. His biggest passion is spending time with his wife and kids. Check out John’s earlier articles.
