The Retirement Honeymoon Was Short

🟢 I sat down recently with a colleague who’d just retired from a long career in law enforcement leadership. I asked how retirement was for him.

“Like a high-speed car crash.”

Well that was the first time I heard someone describe it quite like that! I asked him to tell me more.

For decades, he said he was married to his phone. People called him either for permission, for forgiveness, or for advice on what to do next. He said his nervous system was tuned to a 24-hour operational tempo — where even a two-week vacation required slow deceleration. “Like scuba diving,” he told me. “You can’t surface too fast.”

Then one day he turned in his gear, and the phone stopped ringing.

He had planned for this. He’d built a second career on the side for five years before he officially retired from law enforcement. Within a month, he was consulting, teaching, advising. He had structure. He had purpose. He had a plan.

And still…he felt like it hit like a car crash.

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The bailiffs

He told me about the retirees who come back to work per diem — as bailiffs, as court security, posts that don’t ask much of them. They don’t need the money. Many of them have been retired for twenty years. What they’re really there for is lunchtime, when they can sit with the active officers again.

“That hour was the highlight of their day,” he said. “Outside of this, they had nothing else.”

I keep thinking about that.

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Why a financial plan isn’t enough

Most people plan financially for retirement. Very few plan for the parts that turn out to matter just as much: identity, structure, connection, purpose.

How do you introduce yourself when you’re no longer the COO, the Director, the Business Analyst or the nurse? What replaces the rhythm of Monday through Friday? And who, exactly, do you talk to when the work group — the people you assumed would stay close — quietly drifts apart? A former colleague of mine told me she would have bet money on which work friendships would survive retirement. She was wrong about most of them. Other people she barely expected to hear from again became the strongest part of her week.

My dad passed away before my mom got to retire with him. The retirement she’d pictured — the one she’d been building toward for decades — was gone overnight. So was the relational core she’d planned to lean on.

These aren’t worst-case scenarios. They’re just life. And they’re exactly the things most retirement planning doesn’t touch.

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A question for you

What would you do if the structure, the title, and the people you see every day all disappeared on the same day?

Not because anything had gone wrong. Just because one chapter ended.

Again, most people plan financially for retirement. Very few design how their time, their identity, and their relationships will actually feel once they get there. That’s the work I’m honoured to help people with.

A good place to start is the Life Design Purpose Wheel — a simple exercise to step back and look at all the dimensions of your life, not just how you spend your time but where it draws meaning from.

You can grab the free worksheet here.