Blog

Busyness after retirement is widely celebrated as a sign of healthy adjustment, and that assumption is almost entirely wrong. The retired person who volunteers four days a week, joins three committees, and takes up pickleball before the farewell cake has gone stale receives admiration from friends, family, and ...Read More

Robert, a former logistics director who spent thirty-one years coordinating supply chains across Southeast Asia, told me about a neighbourhood Christmas party seven weeks after his retirement. He was standing near the drinks table, holding a glass of something sparkling, when a woman he hadn't met extended her ...Read More

Retirement reveals something most people spend their entire careers avoiding: the possibility that without a role to perform, they have no clear sense of who they actually are. This sounds dramatic. It sounds like the kind of existential crisis reserved for philosophers or people with too much time. ...Read More

Professional competence becomes a kind of armour. You wear it so long you forget there’s skin underneath, and when someone finally takes it off — or you take it off yourself — what’s exposed feels tender and unfamiliar and deeply private. The retirement transition strips that armour in ...Read More

Some mornings I sit with my coffee longer than I need to. The place is quiet, the apartment looks exactly the way I want it to, and there’s nothing on my calendar that requires urgency. By every measure I was taught to care about, everything is fine. And ...Read More

Picture an older person sitting on their porch most evenings, watching the street. That's it. They just watch. The passing cars. The neighbours walking their dogs. The light changing on the houses across the road. They don't narrate it. They don't photograph it. They don't reach for their ...Read More