norah: Monkey King in challenging pose (Default)
norah ([personal profile] norah) wrote in [personal profile] lightreads 2018-05-12 01:19 pm (UTC)

That is such a hard question, but you are SO WISE to be struggling with it now, and anticipating it. People DIE when they retire because they think it will somehow magically resolve itself and it doesn't and they drown in a lack of meaning.

What my mother has done (and my mother is a fucking dynamo, though maybe not quite at your crazy adrenaline-rush level) is to take on only work that she loves. She doesn't have to - their savings and assets and rentals and retirement bring in more than they spend each month - but she loves it. And then what she does is to be in town for that work, and show up for it, and maintain those relationships, and then she has scheduled her travel around it. She works from our local library and every day she is home she wakes up at 5:30 and goes for a 3-mile hike and then comes back and bakes for charity (she has a cottage kitchen license) until 9 or goes for a 20-mile bike ride with friends, and then walks to the library to work until mid-afternoon or evening, and then my father picks her up on his way back from his day maintaining their rental properties and they spend the evenings together unless she has a board meeting.

And then they travel around the world - mostly for Habitat for Humanity, but my Dad also does sustainable-biology research scuba diving, and she goes along on those, and sometimes they travel just for fun, and sometimes they travel separately (more diving for him, more remote places for her) and I want to be *just like her* when I grow up. If you want to meet her and pick her brain about this (happiness research says that actually asking people who are doing/have done things is the best way to gauge whether that thing leads to happiness) she will be in DC at the same time I am (long story) and I bet would love to meet you. If not, also fine, but she's amazing and a great example of how a workaholic has really managed to make retirement ("retirement") work in a sustainable way.

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