Adjustment to Early Retirement

[mystang52]

It took me several months, but gradually I stopped waking up every morning with a huge grin on my face.

+1 Well, to be more accurate it's more than 3 years and I'm still grinning. I had no adjustment problem at all. As others alluded to, I did quite a bit of research beforehand so was quite prepared from day 1.

 

[Options]

Thanks for all of the great responses! My unofficial tally of everyone's experience is:

A Year or More: 30%
A Few Weeks or Months: 30%
Just A Day or Two: 40%

I had heard from a lot of people that it was a difficult transition that would take a lot of time, but clearly many of you were well prepared for it.

Among the folks that took longer - it sounds like there were often (not always) some extenuating difficulties that happened at the same time as your ER.

I'm guessing that ER enthusiasts would be much better prepared than the average bear, and I think that helps a lot.

See this:

A Satisfying Journey: Is Retirement Time the Same as Working Time?



Particularly this in the comments section:

I realized that 60+ is a time period where even if we still work for money, we're in the last inning of our last game.

We can play it out and work till we die, for the honor of dying with our boots on and leaving more goodies for our heirs; or we can just walk off the field.

Most of the other worker-players will return in a few months to start a new season. But not us. The game goes on; but without us. We do not go on (in a temporal sense) if we play our last inning of the game with our normal teammates doing the normal thing.

But it's hard to realize that we can pull ourselves out of the game we're so habituated to and rewarded by. We don't have to wait for a coach to tell us to go home; we can just walk off the field. And go do something else with this last cache of time.

...It's almost a bending of time when you slow down to spend your last big inning by walking off the field and allowing yourself to experience every nook and cranny of the final journey home.

A similar phenom exists under the theory of relativity called "time dilation". This is where The faster the relative velocity, the greater the magnitude of time dilation. You're on a speeding train to its final destination but as the observer time seems to slow as you focus more deeply on things that matter to you.

Emphasis added.

 

[Helen]

Yes, we will be about 4 driving hours rather than a 2+ hour flight. Looking forward to it!

If you are a hiker, you will love Oregon!!!