Dear LPG

It has been a couple of years since I retired, and I think that I can say that I am just about getting to the point where I am happy with who I am again. I believe that when we are fully invested in a job and a family, we don’t have that much time to be negative about how happy we are. Suppose we have enough time to think about it, between keeping things tidy and ensuring we have everything under control. In that case, we are more likely to be positively unhappy because we don’t have the time to do what we want to do. 

For many, there is not much time after we have taken that retirement step either. In the months before I stopped working, I remember being so focused on what I was going to do once I could, but with all that extra time, it was not long before, while I was not on the brink of despair, I was aware that I was not feeling quite as positive as a few weeks earlier. The fact was that a few months into my retirement, I felt pretty unhappy.   

When I had a good think about all this, the irony of the situation stood out for me. I suddenly had all the time I always looked forward to, but it was as if I missed the discipline that spending all that time at work each day forced on my lifestyle.  

I think that after the first couple of months, when I spent my weekdays visiting all those places I never had the opportunity to before, it became so easy for me to capitalise on the fact that I didn’t have to get up early every morning and there was no rush needed when it comes to doing anything anymore; especially if you, like me, live on your own. 

I went out to dinner with my workmates nearly every day before I retired, so there was no need to cook that much.   I would grab breakfast before work, and once home in the evening, there was so much to do and so little time that most meals were snacks when I needed them. 

It was things like that that I missed, and soon I admit to not bothering to get up early, spending much too much time watching television for a while and looking at things that I could have been doing around the house but not bothering because there would always be tomorrow to get it done.   For a short while, I thought this was my future. While my friends and family were available during the weekends, I got to that point where I was reluctant to phone any of them because I remembered just how busy working life can be and recalled many a time when I received phone calls that I felt that I did not have time for.  

Luckily for me, it was not too long before I found a few new friends and a social club to attend, and life became more optimistic again, but during those first six months, I felt pretty negative about life in general. I am now a volunteer driver for a local charity. I have found some friends who are also retired and at a similar stage in their lives as I am, but I think my life could have so quickly gone from bad to worse.

Recently, my newly found friends and I talked about this subject, and we concluded that perhaps being positively unhappy is better than being negatively happy. There is a difference, and maybe it happens to men more often than women, but it is up to us, who have experienced something like this and come out the other side, to warn those up-and-coming retirees about what they might be about to experience… 

I hope that what I have written might help in some way… 

KP, Lee

KP finds a few other online opinions on the subject…

(►►►)     (►►►)   

(►►►)     (►►►)    (►►►)     (►►►)