I still have a long way to go on my deprogramming…

Transcript

Here's three things I've stopped doing in the second year of my retirement that's made it much nicer. The first thing is I stopped telling people what I'm doing tomorrow. So people ask like, what do you got going on tomorrow? And I used to feel like I really needed to come up with an answer to that question. Now I just say nothing. I don't really have anything going on. The only person who really asks me regularly is my wife, Amy, and it doesn't bother me at all. I'm actually, I kind of appreciate the fact that she cares enough to ask. But in the early, like in the first year, every time she said like, what do you have going on tomorrow? It would sting. I was like, oh man, I don't have much to say. I really need to have a good list of cool stuff. And eventually I realized that was just my old programming getting at me saying, hey, if you don't have a big list of important stuff you're doing, you're not contributing and you're wasting it. And I was like, well, I'm not contributing to that. And I was like, that's some productive member of society could be breathing. And so I had to recondition myself to when I hear that question, what do you have going on tomorrow? It's just a question. I don't have to have a good answer. So now I just say nothing really. And sometimes she'll even say like, well, weren't you going to go do whatever? And I'll be like, oh yeah, yeah, I have that, but nothing else. I've gotten to the point where I almost overshoot now. And it's not, I don't do it for the other person. I do it for me as part of, I deprogramming. The second thing I don't do any longer is I don't create deadlines, schedules, and project lists. I have a list, but it's not like, it's not like projects I need to do. It's like things that I would like to do or things that I would like to learn, but it's, it's all post-it notes. So it isn't something where I just check it off. I just look at my post-it note board. And if there's something on there, I feel like doing, I peel the, I do it. I peel the post-it off and I put it over on the done side. Uh, but lots and lots of days, I don't even go to my post-it board. I just kind of hang out, piddle around on the computer, uh, walk around in the woods, just do nothing. And that's perfectly cool with me. And the third thing that I've, I've stopped doing is performative retirement. Performative retirement is like performative work. It's a phrase that's pretty common in the leadership circles. It just means performing for other people and where you'll see it. And the other thing that I've noticed in the workplace is when someone, um, talks about how late they worked or how hard they work or how overloaded their schedule is, they're performing for everyone else. It's performative. So performative work is a problem in the workplace because it often sets the wrong example for other people in the workplace. Performative retirement's the same way. If you're around people all the time who are performatively retiring, meaning they're telling you all the big stuff they're getting done in their retirement. It makes you feel like you also need to be getting big stuff done in your retirement. So I'm not going to engage in performative retirement. When someone asks me, so you retired, huh? What do you do? I say, I don't do anything. I just chill. And I can always tell a lot of people are really disappointed when they hear that. They're like, I never thought he was the kind of guy that would do that. That's just it. I'm not the kind of guy that would do that. I'm becoming the kind of guy that would do that because breaking my back, for someone else, for the rest of my life, isn't my objective. It's just my programming. And I'm going to fix it. So when you're performative, when you're retiring in a performative way, you're performing a play that already ended years ago. You need to start a new play. And the new play is I don't do anything. I just relax and have fun. And so if I'm going to perform, I'm going to perform the right play. The play that's actually going right now. So those are the three things. I'm going to do another post on performative work and performative retirement, and I'll tell a little story about how we dealt with performative work at my old business. Either way, I hope these three things helped you. They're a little later for me, and they're a little more nuanced, but it's been a huge thing for me to just reprogram myself so when I get asked these questions, I check myself when I hear the answer in my head formulating, and I say, yep, are you about to pretend that you're still working, or are you going to be a retired person? It is a tough transition. This is part of it.