When people think about retirement, they’re usually thinking about money. How much do you need? When can you pull the trigger? What does your portfolio look like? And those are fair questions to consider because the financial piece is real and important.
But nobody ever asks about the harder part. The part that almost no one warns you about. The part that tripped me up enough that I actually went back to work for four months just to feel it again.
The harder part is this: what do you do with yourself?
Now, I’m guessing you can think of no shortage of things to do with yourself the second you stop working. Sleep in, exercise more, pick up a couple of hobbies, spend more time with your kids. But it turns out we all need something a little deeper to make us feel alive, satisfied, and useful. Work, for all its flaws, provides structure, identity, social connection, and a sense of contribution. When you walk away from it, you have to rebuild all of those things intentionally. And if you don’t, you end up drifting. Or, like me, you end up “unretiring” for a hot second.
What Makes Life Worth Living?
I picked up a book from The Minimalists recently, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, called Love People, Use Things: Because The Opposite Never Works. In it, they have a values framework that I found partially useful. They argue that there are different levels of values and that we all share basically the same five foundational values. These values make life feel full and meaningful and they are health, relationships, creativity, growth, and contribution.
And it struck me. They are absolutely right. In retirement, these aren’t nice-to-haves. They are everything. These five values are what everyone who is recently retired should be striving to build back into their lives. It took me a couple of years to build these back. In fact, some of them I’m still working on.
Let’s explore how these values can make us feel more whole, happy, and connected. Here’s how I’m (trying to!) live each of them.
Health: Finally Treating My Body Like It Matters
One of the first things I wanted to do when I retired was to “get healthier”, though it took me a long time to figure out what exactly that meant for me. I thought I was pretty close and if I got a couple of extra yoga sessions in, then I’d be golden. Turns out, it’s a lot harder than that to overhaul your health in retirement.
The first thing I noticed right away was that when I spent more time at home, I moved around a lot less. Gone were the days where I’d run from meeting to meeting. My “walking one-on-ones” that I cultivated were suddenly non-existent. And when given infinite opportunities to try new workout routines, I just reached for the same ones I’d always done.
As a retiree, you have to build back in movement throughout the day. So, I started walking at lunch and in the afternoons. I found a twice-weekly yoga session and built that into my routine and I also started going to the gym at least three times a week with friends. I run and swim the other days. It turns out, I needed to be incredibly intentional around my exercise routine. I had to go out and find the right things to do and then…
…balance them with rest. I still struggle with this one. Even in retirement, I have a to do list the length of the Mississippi. But I have found that a walk or a workout in the morning, followed by getting things done, then lunch, a walk, more “work” (i.e. stuff from my list), and then a reading / tea break at around 3pm makes my day amazing.
Other health items I’ve tackled have been sleep and food. I’ve largely moved to a model where I go to bed and wake up approximately the same time every single day (even weekends). For me that means going to bed between 9:30-10pm and waking up between 5:30-6:30am. We still use an alarm clock because I appreciate showing up to the gym on time, but often, I wake up before the alarm, refreshed.
I also work with a health coach. It’s the only way I’ve been able to get my competitive swimmer style-eating (that I acquired in high school when I was, in fact, swimming two hours a day) under control. Every day I log what I eat, when I eat it, and my exercise. I get feedback. I’m paying attention to my body in a way I never did before, and it’s working. I used to plow through an entire restaurant plate whether I was hungry or not. Now I stop when I’m full (usually). That sounds easy, but it isn’t. Most days now, I feel lean, fit, and ready for bed at the end of the day instead of stuffed and stressed.
But it took me a while to get here and it didn’t happen overnight (pun intended). Retirement gave me the space to actually prioritize health instead of perpetually pushing it to the backburner. And let’s face it, without health, retirement wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.
Relationships: Quality Over Quantity
Here’s something nobody tells you about retirement: it will change how you think about your time with other people. Profoundly.
When I was working, I said yes to almost every social invitation because the alternative was work. Going to coffee with a colleague who drains your energy a little? Sure, beats sitting in meetings. Attending a happy hour you’re mildly interested in? Why not, the day is basically over anyway.
In retirement, that calculus completely flips. Every invitation now competes with time that is genuinely mine, doing things I really want to do: a walk with my husband, a good book in the afternoon, a game day with the kids. So I’ve gotten much more intentional about who I spend my time with and why.
I think about whether it’s worth driving across town for a particular coffee. I think about which friendships genuinely energize me and which ones I’ve maintained mostly out of habit or obligation. I’m more deliberate about showing up for the people who matter most to me, and more comfortable declining the ones that don’t fit.
I also noticed something strange right away when I quit. The work relationships that I thought were strongest, were sometimes the weakest. I had a colleague who lives just around the corner from me who I thought I’d for sure see often and continue to be friends with. Guess what happened when I retired? He got “busy”, failed to return text messages, and generally disappeared into the ether. That’s ok because in a way, retirement helps you uncover which of your friendships were actually worth holding onto.
I’m sad that I don’t see some people more often, but it’s been a lot of fun to grow the relationships that are strongest. And, to spend more time with my kids who will graduate in two and five years.
Intentional relationships, it turns out, are far more satisfying than a packed social calendar.
Creativity: Making Things That Didn’t Exist Before
I wrote my first book while I was still working, and it was difficult! The juggling act of full-time VP work plus writing was brutal. In retirement, creativity isn’t something I have to carve out of the margins. It’s a central part of my days and I’ve found that without creativity, life is not as fulfilling.
These days, I still write. I’m at the editing stage of my second book now, which still feels slightly surreal to say. I am re-learning guitar. These are not side hobbies I squeeze in when the real work is done. They are the work, or at least, they’re as important as anything else on my calendar. I carve out the first two hours of my day for my “most important work” (I have for years) and these days, that’s my book.
There’s something deeply satisfying about making things. About having a creative outlet that asks you to show up, practice, and produce something that didn’t exist before you made it. The Minimalists frame creativity as one of the five foundational values, and I think that’s exactly right. It’s not a luxury. It’s a need. And for people who spent decades in roles that didn’t leave much room for creativity, retirement can be the first real chance to explore what you’re actually capable of creating.
If you’re not sure where to start, perhaps start with journaling. Anyone can do it and it doesn’t have to take much time each day, maybe 15 minutes. Julia Cameron talks about the benefits of writing “morning pages” for any type of creative in The Artist’s Way. Suleika Jaouad has a new book out with a multitude of journaling prompts called The Book of Alchemy. Journaling has the added side effect of allowing you to uncover some of your true desires. I find that sitting down to a pure journaling session is the best way to get myself unstuck when I’m having a bad day.
Growth: Continuous Improvement for Yourself
One of my quiet fears about retirement was that I would stop growing. I feared that without the challenges and problems that work provided (the hard decisions, the tough personnel situations, the high-stakes strategy calls), I would just get bored and plateau. Coast.
That hasn’t happened, but it required some work.
Growth in retirement doesn’t come from your calendar. It comes from deliberately seeking out things that challenge you. For me, that’s looked like learning to produce an audiobook from scratch (a genuinely humbling process that required figuring out equipment, software, editing, and a whole world of production I knew nothing about). It looked like re-learning Italian and learning Portuguese for the first time. It’s figuring out how to market my book and run what will become a small B-Corp with my daughters (more on that soon).
I’ve found that without this work, I don’t feel like myself. When I don’t feel challenged, I don’t feel…human. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but I think this may be a universal truth. Daniel Pink pointed it out in Drive when he said that we all need “autonomy, mastery, and purpose”. Growth is mastery and I hate not having something big that I’m trying to master.
None of these growth items are easy. They’re all a little uncomfortable. That, I’ve come to understand, is the point. If you’re not a little uncomfortable, you’re not growing. Retirement gives you the freedom to choose what challenges you take on. It does not give you the freedom to opt out of challenge altogether, not if you want to feel alive.
Contribution: The Part That Surprised Me Most
When I retired, I thought contribution would be the easy one. I’d volunteer more and mentor people. I’d be generous with my time in ways that the busyness of work had always prevented. Easy, right?
It’s actually not easy to find the right contributions. For me, that’s the sweet spot of me using my unique expertise to be genuinely helpful and not getting burnt out doing it.
What surprised me most, though, was how much I needed “contribution”. Not just wanted it, needed it. After all, this is the “purpose” part of Daniel Pink’s equation.
When I unretired briefly and then re-retired, one of the things I had to reckon with was that work had been providing a sense of usefulness that I hadn’t fully appreciated. Being needed, being the person who could solve a particular problem, being useful to someone, that matters deeply to me. It probably matters to you too.
In retirement, I’ve had to build that back up deliberately. My husband and I volunteer at the local food bank. I mentor students and start-ups. I teach the UW-Madison Computer Science Capstone program, which genuinely lights me up.
Contribution is not about being busy. It’s about mattering to something beyond yourself. And I’ve found that when I’m doing enough of it, everything else in retirement feels more grounded and more worthwhile.
The Framework That Actually Works
The Minimalists laid out the health-relationships-creativity-growth-contribution values list as a way to fill up your life with things that are meaningful once you get rid of your physical stuff. But, it’s really struck me as an important framework for retirees trying to navigate building a life they love post-work. Retirement is not a perpetual vacation. It’s not (just) a walk in the park. We’re still human and we still need the things that make us feel like our lives have meaning.
So, if you’re about to retire or are newly-retired, I recommend you pay close attention to these values. How can you add things back into your life that fulfills each value? How can you rebalance your life to make room for all five?
The activities that fulfill these values won’t show up on their own. I know that from experience.
But when you intentionally build toward all five, something shifts. The days feel full in a different way than they did when they were full of meetings and deliverables. Fuller, actually. More like they’re yours. Like this is your best life and you’re finally, FINALLY living it.
That’s the retirement nobody warns you about, the one that requires just as much intentionality as the financial planning, but gives back so much more.