Retirement Unplanning
- Earl Fowler
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
When I first retired, I imagined that I would spend my days cultivating a lifestyle that suggested linen trousers, leisurely mid-morning espressos and the sort of effortless multilingualism that comes from having lived abroad, though I hadn’t and never intended to. I pictured myself leafing through novels in translation, adopting a plant-based diet, possibly even learning to cook without using the microwave.
Instead, I have developed a meaningful emotional connection with our sectional sofa, which I now refer to (internally only) as “The Big Easy.”
This shift from delusion to reality was not abrupt. It crept in slowly, like grout mildew or adult-onset disillusionment. In the weeks following my last day of work, people — acquaintances, extended relatives, baristas who once admired my lumberjack shirt collection — began asking, in earnest, what I did all day.
“Keeping busy?” they’d ask, eyebrows raised in a way that felt vaguely prosecutorial. “What are you up to now?”
There is no good answer to this. The true answer is “the square root of sweet Francis Ann,” but saying so causes people to lean forward with that hospice-chaplain expression and ask if I’ve “thought about volunteering.” So instead I say vague things like “Oh, reading, a bit of writing to bore all my friends, you know …” which is code for “scrolling through estate listings in cities I will never live in and pretending I have a lifestyle that involves exposed beams and seasonal linens.”
The truth is, my day — always a torrent of episodes of derring-do — begins when the cows in an adjacent farmer’s field start mooing and ends when I’ve convinced myself that eating Cheerios while tuned to Turner Classic Movies is a form of self-care. I structure my time around the mail arriving (1:30), the wine opening threshold (4:45) and the nightly debate of whether Jeopardy! counts as intellectual engagement.¹
I no longer know what day it is. This is not hyperbole. There are entire weeks in which I am under the impression that it’s Thursday until someone informs me that it is, in fact, Monday and also July. This temporal slippage is oddly pleasant, like floating through a warm fog, except occasionally you miss a dentist appointment. Or Easter.
To quote the great Elvis Costello, I’m a man out of time. My to-do list, once a bulleted battlefield of productivity, now reads more like a ransom note written by someone with Captain Jack Sparrow/Willy Wonka-level apathy:
— Buy milk
— Water Doug (the plant)
— Delete three emails and feel accomplished
— Resist endless entreaties to join toxic condo board
— Nap (structured)
Speaking of naps: I don’t fall asleep now so much as I retreat into it, like a fainting goat. I’ve developed a taxonomy of nap types: the Decoy Nap (“I’m just closing my eyes”), the Accidental Nap (aka “Documentary Nap”), and the Existential Nap, which occurs after reading the news and briefly trying to do push-ups. I have preferred nap locations, nap playlists and a hierarchy of throw blankets.
There’s also the Bonus Unplanned Nap, sometimes during the news, but that one can go unnoticed by the wife (also retired) unless I start to snore. So it doesn’t really count. If an old codger snores in the woods and no one hears him, is it time to play RummiKub?
The grocery store has become our social outlet. We don’t even need food. We just wander through produce like it’s a farmers’ market for the emotionally displaced. Me, I like to loiter near the heirloom tomatoes, compare olive oils with strangers and pretend I know what to do with fennel. (I do know what I’d like to do to kale.) Lately, I’ve taken to reading cheese labels aloud. (Only the lactose-free ones, because otherwise that would be quite a chore.) I nod to other retirees who are doing the exact same thing, like we’re all in on some mutually agreed-upon fiction: that we meant to be here at 10:45 a.m. on a Tuesday, and that Superstore is now a legitimate destination, not a placeholder for living.
Our daughter has picked up on our availability, of course, and regularly calls with suspicious enthusiasm.
“Hey, Dad! You doing anything this weekend?” This is code for “Can you please drive 500 kilometres to the Okanagan to monitor the boys before we lose our minds or end up accidentally subscribing to Disney+ for the eighth time? Marken and I have booked a weekend at Harrison Hot Springs.”
She seems to believe that retirement means free time, when what it actually means is that your time is now spoken for by things like reorganizing the plastic whatzits in your new screw container box in the garage, or watching a two-hour YouTube video on Scandinavian lutefisk preparation techniques for the upcoming festive season.
But the best part of retirement is the magical phrase: “I’m retired.” You can deploy it to escape nearly anything. Need help moving a couch? Sorry, I’m retired. Want to attend a Zoom meeting for a thing you forgot you signed up for in 2019? I would love to, but I’m retired. It is a get-out-of-life-free card that somehow sounds noble. You’re not lazy — you’ve transcended. It’s like the Rapture, but you get to keep your corporeal body. (Not that that’s necessarily a good thing when you knees creak like cemetery gates.) Like everything too good to be true, this excuse has its limits. “I’m retired” will not get you out of colonoscopies, jury duty or paying rapt attention to Kurt Browning commercials for reverse mortgages. It will, however, allow you to wear elastic-waist pants to brunch without explanation.
Sure, I had ambitions.
I was going to write something that mattered, learn to identify backyard birds, maybe develop a signature cocktail. But retirement has shown me that my truest hobby is imagining myself as someone who does those things. In that sense, I am extremely productive.
What I have become is someone who watches the local news early every evening and has developed emotional opinions about the weather anchor. (Too chipper, though surprisingly knowledgeable about wind shear. And pace the old dears who send vitriolic emails to the TV station about this, I dig it when she wears short sleeves.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a hard stop at 2:15 for a scheduled period of mild horizontal reflection, followed by light email deletion and the ritual boiling of something I’ll probably forget on the stove.
Please don’t ask me to join your committee.
Busy, busy. Doug needs watering.
¹ Personal rule: If I get Final Jeopardy right and slur the name of the wine correctly, the day is considered a win. What is: “Goodbye tension, hello pension?”
Earl Fowler is a retired overachiever who now divides his time evenly between avoiding group texts and refusing to understand the point of Sodoku. This is his first published work not written in a birthday card.
Ten years later I still get the question. “Whatever I feel like doing.”seems to satisfy the blandest of all inquiries. Ask again and I’ll send you AND Alice to the moon.
Having recently retired myself, and after promising to one and all to do more writing, I can now put that off indefinitely since you've pretty much captured the entire experience here. Thanks Earl! Now off to settle into the Eames chair and shop for dish towels on Amazon....