The Men Who Retire and Suddenly Don’t Know Who They Are

Retirement is supposed to be the reward. After decades of alarm clocks, commutes, deadlines, meetings, difficult customers, demanding bosses and Sunday evenings spent thinking about Monday morning, you finally reach the point where you don’t have to do any of it anymore. People congratulate you, somebody probably buys you a watch or makes a speech, you clear your desk and walk out of the workplace for the last time.

On Monday morning, nobody needs you to be anywhere. At first, that can feel fantastic. You can stay in bed, go somewhere in the middle of the week, have lunch without looking at the clock and experience the extraordinary luxury of knowing that tomorrow belongs entirely to you. Then, for some men, something unexpected happens. After the novelty wears off, they start wondering what they’re supposed to do now.

Retirement doesn’t only remove work. It can remove routine, status, social contact, responsibility and a large part of the identity somebody has spent decades building. If you’ve been a builder, doctor, manager, engineer, teacher, business owner, driver or police officer for most of your adult life, becoming “retired” can feel like a surprisingly enormous psychological adjustment.

Work gives us much more than money

We tend to talk about work primarily as an economic arrangement. You give somebody your time and skills, they give you money, and eventually you save enough of that money to stop doing it.

In reality, work provides all sorts of things we rarely include in retirement calculations. It tells you what time to get up. It gives your week a shape. It puts you around other people, creates problems for you to solve and gives you a reason to leave the house even when you don’t particularly feel like it.

Work also provides countless small interactions that don’t necessarily feel important until they disappear. The person you speak to every morning while making coffee, the colleague you argue about football with, the receptionist who asks about your weekend and the group you eat lunch with may never have been people you described as close friends, but they were part of your social world.

Retirement can remove all of that on a Friday afternoon. A pension calculation can tell you whether you have enough money to retire. It can’t tell you what you’re going to do with Tuesday.

“What do you do?” suddenly becomes a difficult question

One of the first questions adults ask each other is what they do for a living. We use work as shorthand for understanding somebody, and after decades of answering that question in a particular way, our occupation can become deeply connected to how we see ourselves.

This can be particularly significant for men who were raised to associate work with responsibility, usefulness and providing for their family. Their career wasn’t simply something they did between certain hours. It may have been one of the main ways they measured whether they were doing well in life.

Retirement can therefore create a surprisingly uncomfortable question. If you’re no longer the managing director, electrician, surgeon, firefighter or man everybody calls when something goes wrong, who are you now?

For some men, the answer comes easily because work was always only one part of their identity. For others, discovering that almost every answer begins with what they used to do can be unsettling.

Being needed is difficult to give up

There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from being useful.

People ask your opinion because you know what you’re doing. Your team needs a decision. A customer needs your expertise. Something breaks and everybody looks at you because you’ve fixed the same problem twenty times before.

Then you retire and the phone becomes considerably quieter. Nobody is waiting for your decision at 9am. Problems are being solved without you. The organisation you spent thirty years helping to build continues operating after you’ve left, which is exactly what should happen but can still feel strangely personal.

For men who held senior positions, owned businesses or had highly skilled careers, losing that sense of being needed can be particularly difficult. Status disappears surprisingly quickly when the title does.

This doesn’t mean somebody is arrogant because they miss being important at work. Feeling useful is a fundamental part of wellbeing for many people. The challenge is finding new places for that experience rather than assuming usefulness belonged exclusively to employment.

Your partner may have had plans for your retirement too

There is another person who can be affected enormously by retirement: the person you live with.

Perhaps your partner has spent years imagining all the things you’ll finally do together. Meanwhile, you’ve imagined retirement as an opportunity to do absolutely nothing for six months. Neither expectation is unreasonable, but discovering you’ve planned completely different retirements can make the transition interesting.

Suddenly being together all day can also change the rhythm of a relationship. A couple who have happily spent forty years together may never previously have spent seven days a week sharing the same space. One person has routines, friendships and activities that developed while the other was working, and the newly retired partner can unintentionally arrive expecting to become part of all of them.

The joke about a retired husband following his wife around the house asking what they’re doing today is funny because there is some truth underneath it. Retirement works better when both people are allowed to continue having individual lives rather than assuming that leaving work means becoming permanently attached to each other.

The first six months might feel like a holiday

One reason retirement difficulties can take people by surprise is that the beginning can be wonderful.

There are jobs around the house to complete, people to visit and holidays that were postponed while you were working. You enjoy not setting an alarm and experience the small pleasure of going to the supermarket on a Tuesday morning when everybody else is at work. Eventually, however, you may finish decorating the spare room.

The holiday period ends and retirement becomes ordinary life. That’s when the absence of structure can become more noticeable. If every day is free, weekends stop feeling particularly special. If nothing needs doing today, it can always be done tomorrow.

For some people, that freedom is exactly what they wanted. For others, unlimited unstructured time begins to feel less like freedom and more like drifting.

There is no rule saying retirement needs to be busy. After decades of work, doing considerably less may be entirely deserved. The question is whether you’re enjoying the slower pace or slowly becoming disconnected from the world around you.

Male friendships can become important very quickly

Work can hide gaps in our social lives. A man may interact with dozens of people every week and therefore never consider himself lonely. The problem becomes visible only when those workplace relationships disappear and he realises he has very few friendships that exist independently of work.

You may promise to keep in touch with former colleagues and genuinely mean it. For a while, you probably do. Then their working lives continue, you’re no longer part of the daily conversations and gradually the messages become less frequent.

This is one reason friendships outside work matter long before retirement arrives. Having somebody to meet for coffee, play golf with, go fishing with, watch football with or simply talk nonsense with becomes considerably more important when social interaction no longer arrives automatically through employment.

Those friendships don’t need to involve deep conversations about the meaning of life every Thursday afternoon. Connection can take many forms. What matters is having people in your life who know you as something other than the job you once did.

Retirement needs something to retire to

We spend years planning how to leave work without always thinking enough about what will replace it.

The answer doesn’t have to be another job disguised as a hobby. Retirement isn’t a productivity competition and nobody needs to launch a consultancy, run a marathon and learn Mandarin simply because they have some spare time.

It helps, however, to have things that give life some structure and purpose. That might be grandchildren, travel, volunteering, gardening, golf, learning something, mentoring younger people, joining a club, restoring an old car, helping in the community or finally having time for a hobby that work always pushed aside.

Some men even choose to continue working in a smaller way. A few days of consultancy, occasional shifts or a completely different part-time job can provide social contact and structure without recreating the pressures of a full-time career.

The important thing is that retirement becomes a life you’re moving towards rather than simply a job you’re escaping from.

You are allowed to miss work

There can be embarrassment in admitting that retirement isn’t everything you expected.

Everybody spent years telling you how lucky you’d be when you finally finished. Former colleagues joke that they’d swap places with you tomorrow. Your family thinks you should be enjoying yourself, and you may feel ungrateful admitting that sometimes you miss Monday mornings. You can be delighted that you retired and still miss parts of working life.

Perhaps you miss the people. Maybe you miss feeling competent, being challenged or having somewhere you needed to be. You might even miss complaining about work because complaining about work was part of the routine too.

Missing those things doesn’t necessarily mean retirement was a mistake. Major life transitions usually involve gaining something and losing something at the same time, and retirement is no different.

Watch for the difference between slowing down and withdrawing

There is nothing wrong with spending a quiet day at home. There is nothing wrong with spending quite a few of them there either.

But if days gradually become weeks where you rarely leave the house, stop seeing people, lose interest in things you previously enjoyed or find yourself feeling persistently low, anxious or hopeless, it is worth paying attention.

Retirement can coincide with other significant changes too. Health problems may emerge, children have their own lives, parents may have died and friendships can change. What initially looks like boredom may sometimes be loneliness, depression or difficulty adjusting to a major life transition.

You don’t have to diagnose yourself. If you’re worried about changes in your mood or wellbeing, speak to your doctor or another qualified healthcare professional. Retirement is a major adjustment and struggling with it isn’t something you simply have to put up with because you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself.

Start building the next version of yourself before you retire

Perhaps the best preparation for retirement has nothing to do with pensions.

Ask yourself what else you are. If almost every answer involves work, it might be worth expanding the list before your leaving speech.

You’re a husband, partner, dad, grandad, brother, friend, neighbour, volunteer, golfer, cyclist, terrible guitarist, enthusiastic cook or person who has always wanted to learn how to sail. You have interests, relationships and abilities that existed before your career and can continue long after it. Those parts of life deserve investment while you’re still working.

Maintain friendships. Find interests that don’t involve your profession. Protect relationships that have nothing to do with your status. Learn to enjoy time that isn’t productive.

That way, when work eventually disappears, it doesn’t take your entire identity with it.

Retirement isn’t the end of your useful life

There is something strange about the language we use around retirement. You finish. You stop. You leave. Your career is over. Yet somebody retiring at 65 could easily have twenty or thirty years of life ahead of them. That’s far too much time to treat as an epilogue.

You have decades of experience, mistakes, stories, skills and knowledge that haven’t suddenly become worthless because somebody organised a leaving collection. You may choose to use those things to help other people, or you may decide you’ve given enough to your profession and want to spend the next chapter doing something completely unrelated. Both are legitimate.

The bigger adjustment is learning that usefulness no longer needs to come with a salary, job title or somebody waiting for you at the office. Retirement can be a loss of identity if work was the only place you ever looked for one. It can also become an opportunity to discover parts of yourself that never had enough time while you were working. So plan the pension and think about the money. Work out when you can afford to finish and what kind of lifestyle your retirement income will support. But somewhere among all those calculations, ask another question.

When you no longer have to go to work, what are you going to get up for? The answer doesn’t need to be impressive. It just needs to belong to you.

Keep looking after you

Wellbeing looks different for everyone, and sometimes the most useful thing is simply finding the right information at the right time. Explore more from Daily Round with our dedicated Women’s Health, Men’s Wellbeing and Wellbeing for Leaders sections, or head to the Leaders Library for our latest book recommendations, ideas and inspiration for life in and outside work.