Things we lose in retirement - relatability

Transcript

My relatability factor went way down when I retired. I no longer had work stories to share. All of my hobbies are kind of weird, like real science-y hobbies. Most people I know aren't that into it. And it's hard to tell our working friends about struggles, so to speak, that we have in retirement without feeling kind of bad about it. So we find it a little harder to hold up our end of a conversation, or at least I do, because I'm not into sports. So I literally don't know the first thing about any sport, and I absolutely tune out if anyone starts talking sports with me. So I'm probably not a great conversationalist in that respect. I would say relatability went down significantly in retirement, and that probably happens for a few people. The one thing I found is if I try and focus a little bit on things I know other people are interested in, that I also could have an interest in, it helps a lot. So for example, for a long while I was going to county board meetings, and you get a nice little peek into what's going on in the county, what kind of stuff they're going to be working on, what they are working on. And a lot of them are online. You can even go to the meetings online. But it's nice because when you're talking with someone who lives in your area, and you bring up something that you know about what's going on, like the government's working on or whatever, people are usually interested in that. And I'm sure there's a handful of things like that, that each of us can find that we're interested in, that are sort of universally interesting to the people around us. But just kind of be prepared for your relatability index to get knocked down a few pegs when you go into retirement.