Her viewpoint is certainly food for thought, though it is hard for me to visualize what her problems really are and how this could be. I don't seem to feel this way during vacations, at any rate.
That's because a vacation ain't a retirement.
From my experience, Vierneisel hit the nail on the head and I think her experience mirrors that of quite a number of retirees. With a few differences, I can tell a very similar story.
I had a recent conversation about this with a former co-worker who is a good friend (as opposed to the people Vierneisel wrote about - which I refer to as "work friends"). He's finally starting to come to grips that he will be retiring in a few short years and he and his wife visited another now-retired co-worker living in the Hill Country (where they want to retire to).
It's a high-pressure, life-and-death kind of job (Vierneisel wrote about 50+hour weeks, we had many 50+ hour
days) that is also a way of life that goes to the very core of who you are. Becoming a cop comes with some major rethinking of how you view the world and the people in it. And being a Narc is like being in a very tight-knit inner-sanctum-brotherhood of copdom. Having a huge ego, and I was accused of having one of the biggest, is essential to success. And I have four walls full of awards and trophy pictures that prove my ability to wrap myself up in my ego and be damn good at what I did.
Unwinding all of that takes a bit of time and effort.
While I had been financially planning for about a year before I retired, I made the actual decision in just a few hours because I could have never, or almost never, duplicated the financial opportunity that retiring at that moment was offering. So, overnight, I went from being consumed by my job to having nothing to do with the place.
My friend's dad was a career military officer who has been retired for a couple of decades now. Whenever I ask my friend
"when are you finally leaving that place", he has usually responds by repeating something his dad told him,
"you don't want to retire too early."
But after his trip to the Hill Country I think he has started to realize that the reality of retirement just might be different than what he has been anticipating. He asked how I coped with that, and I explained this to my friend:
You have to learn a whole new way of seeing yourself; to discover who you really are outside of that crazy job and how you fit in the world. It takes time to figure out the difference between what you want to do from what you think you're supposed to be doing. And being a Type-A, anal-retentive, hardcharger, just like I was, you will have to figure out what things are genuinely important to you, versus obsessively working at doing the things you think are supposed to be done in retirement.
Like Vierneisel, I had the massive Type-A "to-do list" from Hell. Somewhere along the line I started re-evaluating that thing. Especially after I realized that I wasn't lying when I said "I've got more stuff to do every day than I did while working". The process of re-evaluating the to-do list led to a period in which my sentiment for a lot of things could best be described as "who gives a rat's ass". Since I felt like I was a prisoner of the list of stuff that I thought I was
supposed to be doing, I neglected the whole thing.
I entered the "lost" period which lasted until there were too many days when I said "Wow, it's Friday already? But I didn't get anything done." When that turned into "Wow, it's February already?" I knew it was time to take a look at the "to-do" list and make it more like a "want-to-do" list. Unlike Vierneisel, I didn't have sleepless nights or (too many) angry outbursts, but when I came out of it I think back on it like what William Bridges calls "the neutral zone".
So, my list is segregated into those things I have to do because there are things I own, and people I love, who need me to do things for them. And there are the things that I want to do because they are fun, or they make me happy, or feel fulfilled. Gone are (most of) the things that, I realize now, were just my competitive side trying to carry on my old obsessive ways from the days of w*rking (
Must be number 1!). I'm no longer the guy who was famous for always saying,
"Second place is just first place for losers". My preferred saying is now modified to,
"I don't give a damn for anyone who doesn't try to win". A seriously big improvement I think
With a hat tip to Nords, I told my friend,
"The City and the Pension Board have proven that they have confidence in your ability to entertain yourself. You just have to figure out what that means to you and the worm will turn for you then."
All my other friends still w*rk.
