When your retirement goes well you find yourself m…

Transcript

When you're still working, the activities that you think are hobbies are probably coping mechanisms, or at the very least, necessities. When I retired in my first year, I started realizing that I wasn't really into fishing anymore, and I loved fishing. And at first I thought, well, it's probably because it's not a scarcity anymore. I can do it anytime, and sometimes that just sort of takes the fun out of things when you can do it whenever you want. But I thought about it more and more, and eventually I realized the reason that I didn't really like fishing anymore was because I didn't need what it was doing for me in the past. When I fished when I was working, it would be the only activity that sort of quieted my racing thoughts. When I started fishing, everything just went quiet. I didn't really think. I just stood there and cast and retrieved and cast and retrieved, and I didn't think of much of anything. I kind of thought about the fishing, and it was a coping mechanism. It was how I quieted my racing thoughts. When I retired, I didn't have racing thoughts anymore, or not to the degree that I had when I worked, so I didn't need that mechanism anymore. So I just sort of lost interest working on houses, and I've done videos on this before. When I was working, I was always working on houses, either my house or a house that we were reno-ing. And I thought, this is going to be an amazing hobby. I'm going to do this all the time when I retired. And within the first year or two of retirement, I realized I didn't really like working on houses. I did it because we needed it done, because we didn't have the money to pay to have it done. And as I sort of tried to winnow that down into a more cohesive theory, I realized I love little projects. I don't love fixing things. I love fixing things. I love fixing things. I love fixing things out of necessity. So what I realized was, in retirement, what I loved was picking some project and doing it to perfection, at least to my idea of perfection. So taking as much time as I needed to take on it. Like, I wired a dishwasher, and I probably spent three days on that project, because we weren't in the house. There was no hurry to get it done, and I was able to, you know, do it the way I wanted to do it, which required taking out a bunch of drywall and a J-box and doing all the things that I always wanted to do when I was in the house and in a hurry, but couldn't, because we had to get it up and running. So I realized that most of the things and the activities that I was doing when I was working were either out of necessity, or they were a coping mechanism. And when I retired, I had to find all new things to do. And an example of that is, I've been putting Linux on all of my machines. I just, I have to get away from Windows. So I put it on, my main workstation that I use every morning, and then another workstation I have somewhere else. And then I thought, man, I really, really don't love this MacBook operating system. So I thought, I'm going to try and put it on my MacBook too. And I told Amy, I said, I've got a really fun project for the morning. So I'm pretty excited about that. And she was like, oh, cool. Let me know how it goes. So I started on it the next morning, and it was just problematic. And when she got home later in the day, she said, how did your little project go today? And I said, absolutely terrible. And she kind of laughed and said, so perfectly. I said, exactly. It was extremely problematic. And I loved every minute of it. What I've kind of come to realize is I've gone from loving an activity because of the outcome to loving an activity because of the challenge. And everything that I do now, is really only fun if it's really challenging. It kind of reminds me of, you know, you'd see these old guys making chips in a bottle. And I used to think, I would hate that. It would take forever. It would be so difficult. I sort of get it now. When you don't have to do things, you don't have to get things done. You kind of want to work on things that are challenging and take a little more time. You want them to be a problem. You want them to present difficulties and challenges. Because overcoming the difficulties and challenges is kind of the fun part. And you can do that in retirement because you don't have this secondary pressure of expense or time, or you know, the whole family's waiting on getting the bathroom done so they can start using it again. You can enjoy the challenge of the project instead of just the utility outcome of getting something done. It's just a big shift in the way you look at the things that you spend your time on pre-retirement versus post-retirement.