truenorth418
Full time employment: Posting here.
The usual clickbait nonsense from CNBC. “I love being early retired! Here are 5 reasons why it sucks:” [emoji849]
If you retire early and are just waiting around expecting to see the light one morning about what to do, it's not going to happen. You at least need to have some idea of how you're going to fill the time. It doesn't need to be about what to do every hour you're awake, but some concept of what you want to do that will bring satisfaction. For a few decades you were basically told what you needed to do all along. Now you likely have somewhere close to those decades to fill that time on your own - nobody will do it for you.
that furlough period felt like every day was a Sunday to me. I wouldn't know until first thing the next morning, whether I was going back to work or not. Also, I was burning through my leave, and the stock market was in a bit of turmoil, so that was working my nerves a bit. It was also making me not want to really go out and do much of anything, because I was reluctant to spend money. And, to top it off, it was wintertime, and I usually get a bit, for lack of a better word, hibernatory, around that time. Oh, and I had just bought a house a few months before that furlough, so the extra expense there didn't add to the joy.
I think if I was actually retired though, and made my peace with the fact that I was not going back to w*rk, I would have weathered that furlough period much better.
Heck, I will continue to spend my own money and time to do my own things at home.
I went through a couple of fuloughs when I was a Fed. employee, and they were really nothing like retirement .
I have found that to be less of a problem as the women in that age range are looking at their phones now! I sometimes say Good Morning to them just for the hell of it. By the time they come out of their trance, only my backside is in view.As far as feeling out of touch it’s Kind of like getting used to women in their 20s looking past you instead of at you when you turn 50.
Downsides of Early Retirement >>>> everyone that I would want to do things with are still working.
I read the first part of the article, until I came to this quote from him - which to me sums up why he had some of the problems he did:
"It was only after I left my job that I realized how obsessed I was with my profession. I often wondered: How is the business doing without me? I was there for 11 years. Were they really able to survive without my expertise?
But after months of no emails or phone calls begging for me to come back, I finally accepted the fact that I was no longer needed."
This guy's sense of identity/worth was obviously closely tied to his job, though it appears he didn't admit that to himself before he decided to retire at age 34.
If you like your job (or most parts of it, anyway), and feel like you are making a contribution there, it's of course normal to have some of those feelings upon retirement. But, if retiring early is important to you, you really need to start detaching yourself from those feelings well before your retirement day, and start preparing yourself for the next phase of your life. I also felt like I made a significant contribution where I worked, but I knew (many years before my actual retirement day) that I wanted to do many other things with my life, too. So, the transition to retirement was not very difficult in my case.
You might be good at what you did, but no one is irreplaceable. If you think it's different in your case, you should probably keep working, as you're not ready to retire.
we’re 50 something with several 70 something and older friends. Health issues are a huge problem. For all the report of still active 80 and 90 year olds, we know those guys are outliers. Time is not on our side. At 50 something this is very obvious to us, let alone our older friends. I doubt this would have been the case in our 30’s.