Pros and Cons of Retirement - five years on

After almost a year of retirement,I blogged about how I felt. If you're interested, you can read that here. When I went back and reread that blog, it got me thinking about the pros and cons that have surfaced since.

I never wanted to retire.  I loved my job and was convinced that retirement would be boring. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the decision was taken out of my hands—kinda...sorta. See here for what I mean by that. 

Fortunate, because I was already almost ten years past the accepted retirement age; it was time. Also because, shortly after that, my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (PD), and his eyesight was getting steadily worse due to age-related macular degeneration (AMD). While he's very capable despite such handicaps, he could no longer drive and needed someone around to help out with that and a few other things.

So—having been pushed into retirement, but with a few months' warning, I gave a lot of thought to what to do once I had nothing to do. I remember my mother-in-law, Mildred, expressing her concern when my husband retired early. She said that retirement caused people to die early as a result of having nothing to do. To be fair, she missed the point that he was actually retiring to take care of her—at that time, she was legally blind—also from AMD. Apart from that, she had multiple health issues requiring a constant stream of doctor appointments. I've blogged about Mildred a few times, this post explains more about her—if you're interested.

I'd published a book, Peeling The Onion, eight years earlier and, of course, blogged incessantly since then. I decided that perhaps writing would be something to keep me occupied. Peeling The Onion was a memoir, and there's only a limited number of memoirs anyone could or should attempt to write, so I decided it would have to be novels. That's what I planned. You can read about that here. Yes, I blog about everything more than once.

Five years on, I still miss work some days. But I keep myself occupied writing every day, creating covers for my novels, learning as much as I can about the craft of writing, and trying to learn how to market my books. I say 'trying' because it's something that does not come naturally to me. I mean, marketing is selling yourself. Selling yourself is basically telling everyone how amazing you are. For as long as I can remember, my mother denounced 'showing off'—but isn't that marketing? I find it very difficult to do. I have done it, but every time I publish an ad on Facebook, I hear my mother's voice in my ear: "Stop showing off, dear."

The first PRO of retirement has got to be the fact that I've written and published ten novels—hoping to start on number eleven at the time of writing this post. It's something I'm very proud of (sorry, Mammy—that's what we called our mother, back in Dublin in the 50s). I also created the covers for all of my books and yes, I've sold quite a respectable number, (over 20,000 if you count the Kindle Unlimited page reads, which I do) with an average rating of  4.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon. 

Another PRO is having time to work out and cool down, without watching the clock. Of course, I could also list that as a CON because I don't actually enjoy working out. But I'm old and so are my bones—they need it, and so I do it.

The biggest CON, of course, no surprise, is the loss of income. Yes, we get social security but that is not enough to live on, especially now that the cost of everything is skyrocketing. And yes, I diligently saved while I was working. But it's like watching the lake level go down on a daily basis, to watch our savings slowly dwindle away. 

Another CON is the lack of human interaction. While I've never been very outgoing or gregarious, human beings are not designed to be isolated. I retired during the COVID lockdown, so we were already isolated. All work related interaction was over Zoom, and social interaction ceased to exist.

But, I am retired. Whether I like it or not. And, as I said above, though sometimes I miss work, I do enjoy being retired. I enjoy being able to plan my days around what I, and my husband, want to do, as and when we want to do it. And, while writing a book, or multiple books, is not easy, I love it. I love the challenge. But I do hate watching the lake go down.