When Did You Last Lose Track of Time?
Why Creativity and Joy Is the Most Underestimated Dimension of Retirement Planning
🟢 When was the last time you were so immersed in something that you completely lost track of time?
Maybe you were so deep in something creative that you looked up and realized the whole afternoon was gone. Or maybe you were on a hike and so caught up in what your eyes and ears were taking in that everything just faded.
In his book The Second Mountain, David Brooks makes an important distinction between joy and happiness. Happiness, he says, is something we can work toward and it often comes and goes.
Joy is different. Joy seizes us. We are pleased by happiness but transformed by joy.
That difference matters more than we may realize, especially as we think about retirement.
🧭 The dimension we underestimate
Creativity and Joy is one of the six dimensions of the Life Design Purpose Wheel, a tool I introduce in my book Designing Your Second Act, forthcoming from Routledge in November 2026. I originally called it Creativity and Play but I’ve come to prefer Joy and the free worksheet on my website reflects that now.
In the coaching work I do with people approaching retirement, Creativity and Joy is consistently the dimension people score the lowest. I think I know why.
We spend decades adulting. Working. Raising children. Volunteering. Caring for aging parents. Life gets full. Full of what we have to do, what we should do, what others need from us. Over time, the things we actually love doing just…stop happening and get lost.
We get good at what we’re supposed to do. And what we actually love? It gets buried and we forget about it.
Sometimes when I ask people what brings them genuine joy in their life, they go quiet. They look at me and say they don’t know.
🌱 Two stories
My mom can redesign a room with a can of paint and a few things from a second-hand store. If you peeled back the layers on the farmhouse walls where I grew up, I wouldn’t be surprised to find ten layers of paint and wallpaper! She gets lost in it. She says she finds it relaxing… almost meditative. She repositions furniture in ways I never could have imagined, and two months later the whole room looks different again.
My husband is the same way with music. He’s gifted across multiple instruments and can compose something new, play it for you, and then play it again the following week and it comes out differently every time. The notes just come. He couldn’t tell you exactly what he played.
That kind of talent always felt like the definition of creativity to me.
Then I found YouTube tutorials. Watercolor. Mixed media art projects, laid out step by step. I watch, pause the video, paint, glue down paper and ribbon, make mistakes, and keep going. The materials I have almost never match what the artist in the video is using, so while I follow along I’m making it my own. I hold it up when I’m done and I’m proud of what I made. I found it meditative, and the whole afternoon slipped away before I noticed.
The picture at the top of the article is some of my watercolour painting :)
It’s not something I’m particularly good at. Not something I’d show many people. But that’s not the point.
💡 Deborah’s story
Deborah was thinking about what retirement might look like for her and in one of our coaching sessions I asked about creativity and joy. She said she didn’t feel creative at all. She remembered getting low grades on art projects in school and that experience followed her for decades. When I asked her to rate herself out of ten on this dimension, she gave herself a three.
But then she mentioned something small. She told me she liked storytelling and was curious about whether she might enjoy writing.
So she challenged herself to write one LinkedIn post per week. Within an hour of her first post it had 50 impressions. People she hadn’t heard from in years reached out. She felt energized, not by the numbers, but by following through on something she said she would do, and by the encouragement from people who remembered her.
What is Deborah doing now? She is writing her first book! It’s based on decades of work experience and real stories. It’s titled: Change Conditions - Practical Strategies to Rebuild Your Career After Layoff. It will be released soon so watch for it!
What’s interesting is that Deborah went from “I’m not creative at all” to carrying a notebook everywhere because she can’t stop the ideas from coming.
When David Brooks collected people’s accounts of joy, he found different layers: physical flow, collective effervescence, and emotional transcendence. And what he found was a word I love: self-forgetting. When we are truly in joy, we stop monitoring ourselves.
Deborah didn’t decide she was a writer and then write a book. She tried one LinkedIn post. One small experiment that generated real information about what gave her energy.
In my experience, clarity doesn’t come from thinking about something longer. It comes from trying it…experimenting! Deborah didn’t figure out she loved writing by thinking about it more. She figured it out by doing it.
This is the heart of the IDEA Cycle (Imagine, Do, Evaluate, Adjust) another tool I use in my coaching work and explore in depth in Designing Your Second Act. You don’t have to have it figured out before you begin. Deborah will tell you that she certainly didn’t. She just tried one thing and paid attention.
✍️ A question for you:
What did you love doing as a child, or early in your life, that you’ve quietly stopped making room for? And what would one small experiment look like?
If any of this resonates, I’d invite you to try the free Life Design Purpose Wheel on my website at nextchapterlifedesign.ca under resources. One of the questions in the Creativity and Joy dimension is simply: are there activities in your life where time passes? These insights are important to pay attention to. Especially if you’re starting to think about what retirement or your next chapter might look like.
If this reflection resonates, I share more thinking like this here and through my writing and coaching at nextchapterlifedesign.ca.
Tammy Martins is a retirement transition coach, speaker, and author of Designing Your Second Act, forthcoming from Routledge in November 2026. She helps professionals and executives design a purposeful and fulfilling life after work.
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