"The coffee tastes the same at 7 AM on a Tuesday as it does on a Saturday. I learned this my second week of retirement. I was trying to convince myself that there was magic in unstructured mornings-no rush, no agenda, just me and the coffee and some vague sense of possibility. But magic requires you to be present, and I was doing everything I could not to be."
"I'd scroll through my phone. Read the news twice. Check email even though nobody was sending me anything work-related anymore. Look at the neighbor's house across the street. Anything to avoid sitting still with my own thoughts. This was embarrassing to admit at first. I'm a reasonably introspective person. I read. I think about things. But there's a difference between thinking about things abstractly and being alone with yourself with absolutely nothing else to do."
"My wife noticed it, of course. She has that ability to see you with a kind of gentle clarity that makes you want to either cry or leave the room. One morning, she asked me what I was running from. I said I wasn't running from anything. I was just adjusting. She didn't argue. She just said, "Well, when you're done adjusting, let me know.""
Unstructured mornings in retirement felt unchanged outwardly but exposed an inner avoidance of presence and introspection. Frequent phone-checking, news reading, and small distractions masked discomfort with being alone with personal thoughts. A partner's clear observation prompted recognition that the competent professional persona had been a performance sustained by role and audience. Losing that role revealed identity discontinuity and the challenge of redefining self outside of work. Socioemotional selectivity theory frames the transition as a reorganization when time feels limited, prompting shifts in priorities toward emotionally meaningful goals and presence.
Read at Silicon Canals
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