The Strange Gap Between Busy and Bored in Retirement

A gold pocket watch hangs from a branch, melting in a way that evokes a Salvador Dali painting.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 28 November 2024

There's a broader line between busy and bored in retirement than you might expect. It hardly takes a genius to figure out that our perception of the time-space continuum can wobble madly as we age. Grasping this new worldview is difficult, but it can help pave the road to a happy retirement. So, in mid-October, as my wife Pam and I drove across the wide-open Mojave Desert toward our grandkids in Arizona, our conversation kept turning to how buffeted by obligations we’ve felt this year. It was as if 1,000 colored Post-Its had slipped into our car and were beating against our heads like a swarm of bats.

We had to remind ourselves that each of those obligations is attached to something we’ve decided we want to do, and whether the vast freedom of our later years is an eager but impatient hourglass or a helix of infinite boredom is up to us.

Two men covered in post-it notes act like zombies.

Busy and bored in retirement, or just bored?

About a decade ago, a crew of former colleagues and I visited our friend Charlie and his wife in Las Vegas. They’d curated their home there to reflect Charlie’s remarkable career as an editor. It had a pool and a room dedicated to the guitars he’d been playing in bands since high school.

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Charlie, to use one of his favorite phrases, had just “pulled the trigger” on retirement. I arrived expecting to find him kicked back in a floating lounge chair, cradling a margarita and strumming Neil Young tunes. Instead, he was pacing. He invited me on a walk.

“I’ve been talking to friends who’ve retired,” he said. His voice conveyed dread. “They say that if you can make it from breakfast to lunch each day, you’re halfway there. Then all you need to do is figure out something to do until dinner.”

A few years later, cancer crept up and, with little warning, ended Charlie's engagement with time. I’m still trying to understand how my friend could have seen an oppressive emptiness in the hours and minutes that retirement had laid out ahead of him. I am particularly prone to such rumination when the hours and minutes I’m moving through begin to feel so oppressively cluttered that I fear someone will spot me, pacing in tight little circles, swatting at those imaginary bats.

When I’m lucky, my roiling mind can conjure up a chagrined, posthumously enlightened Charlie. “I get it now,” he’ll say, laughing, slapping palm to head. “Time is all we have. How’d I manage to see mine as oppressive?”

Then he snarkily reminds me that over-packing time can drive people batty, too.

Embracing business, in moderation

I still teach college part time because I love it. And if I want to keep loving it, at age 71, I can’t expect the workload to be the same as it was when I started 26 years ago — if only because there are now hundreds of students Jack-in-the Boxing up every few days or weeks to request a job or grad school recommendation.

Years ago, Pam and I emptied our Los Angeles nest and bank accounts into three expensive colleges and moved to new jobs in San Francisco. Our freedom was intoxicating. We needed sixty extra minutes in every hour, as exemplified by one legendary violation of family privacy.

It seems Pam inadvertently left her iPhone turned on beside our apartment building’s pool. Our middle daughter thought it would be hilarious to post a snatch of eavesdropping on Facebook.

Mom: “We can soak in the jacuzzi or we can watch Battlestar Galactica, but we can’t do both.”

Dad: “Yes, we can.”

That attitude helps explain why I never understood my dear friend’s fear of time. It also explains why some of us, even in retirement, occasionally over-schedule our freedom and then freak out.

Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger Retirement Report, our popular monthly periodical that covers key concerns of affluent older Americans who are retired or preparing for retirement. Subscribe for retirement advice that’s right on the money.

A career journalist and communications professional, Sipchen has been a reporter, columnist, blogger and editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for editorial writing (with Alex Raksin). He also shared, as an editor, the Times 2016 Pulitzer Prize for team coverage of the San Bernardino Terrorist Attack and, as a reporter, the 1992 Pulitzer for team coverage of the Los Angeles riots. Sipchen is a visiting full professor at Occidental College.