Retirement: what I miss about work

Roger (Mr. Peril) over on Contains Moderate Peril wrote about the things he misses in retirement from his work experience. Much of what Roger had to say felt consistent with my own feelings, but I also feel like I have a few words of my own on the topic. I strongly encourage you to read Roger’s post before reading mine.

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Okay, you are back from reading that excellent post? Great! Now on to my comparatively sparse collection of thoughts on the topic of what I miss from work. Short answer: I don’t miss much from that part of my life- I’m generally happy being retired. But there are still some things I miss.

To set the stage: I worked in Information Technology (IT) for over forty years, over 30 years of that at IBM. That gives a specific slant to my perception of work that might not apply to people with other professional backgrounds. But I suspect that many people will recognize at least some of the workplace benefits I mention here.

Structure

Working means having schedules that must be met, tasks that are urgent or important, meetings to attend. Add in potentially dozens of ways of communicating in a modern office: email, Slack, wikis, instant messaging, project tools, and even old fashioned methods like phone calls or text messages. These things combine to create a structure in which each day is measured and metered out.

I didn’t appreciate that structure at the time. And in retirement I also appreciate its absence. But there is no question that the structure made each day full and ensured a sense of regular progression: a todo list constantly being ticked off and added to. Now that continuous drumbeat of activity is silent, and sometimes that silence can be deafening.

This loss of structure may have even affected my health. I had a mental breakdown this past December which put me in the hospital for the better part of a month. I was ultimately diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but the lingering question is: why did I have a psychotic break now for the very first time at the age (at the time) of 61? The only answer I could extract from the doctors was “change and stress”, with retirement being a common stressor.

Strange to think, though, that I was feeling so good after retirement yet perhaps the loss of structure that work brought had a hidden impact on my mind. Who knows what the real cause was, but it is food for thought.

Kudos and recognition

Completing a project or milestone in a professional organization often comes with some kind of recognition. Maybe it is just a warmly written email, or perhaps something more tangible like a small financial reward. But getting thanks for delivering good work is a common enough experience in the workplace for most people that we come to expect it.

A lot of the time the thanks I most valued didn’t come through official channels. Instead it was a thank you from a co-worker I helped or someone on the team showing appreciation for something I wrote on one of our internal wiki pages. These small gestures were true and heartfelt, and often touched me more than even a financial bonus for a project completion or annual work performance.

One of my favourite things to get thanked for was the simple act of sharing knowledge. I used to write pages in our internal wiki describing debugging processes and solution steps, and the number of times I received thanks for sharing that information was in the dozens. The funny thing about it was that I mostly wrote those wiki pages to help future me: I was forever solving problems then three months later needing to refer back to that old solution again. Thus goes the life of the IT warrior.

Daily life post retirement doesn’t bring the same kind of frequent dopamine rush that I got from a thankful coworker. My wife sometimes says “thanks” but it doesn’t hit quite the same way.

Shared thinking: the people

Work is all about solving problems, and I miss having good people to share the mental load of that work with. Having someone to talk through a challenging issue can result in good advice or different perspectives that lead to better solutions. Even just explaining a situation in a meeting can force a re-ordering of thoughts that sometimes leads unexpectedly to an answer.

I’ve already mentioned how sharing knowledge in wikis and via Slack is something I miss doing, but the flow of knowledge went both ways. Other people could reply with their own thinking on a problem area and suddenly a solution would appear. Having that kind of group or shared thinking was a powerful thing, and I feel its absence.

Some of my best work friends were the ones I felt ‘safe’ using as a sounding board for my frustrations. They acted as a pressure valve for stressful situations of which there were often plenty in a large bureaucratic organization. As with problem solving, sharing the emotional load with others is a benefit from my work years that I never really realized I was getting at the time.

Things I don’t miss

There are plenty of things about work I don’t miss, some of which are the mirror of the things I miss. I will try to not repeat myself too much here, but will aim instead to give just a few things that stand out.

• Meetings: Some meetings were productive and informative but, sadly, many were not. I was never really a fan of meetings for the sake of meeting, but sometimes that seems to be a necessary form of ‘grease’ for the skids of a large organization
• Unreasonable client expectations: both internal and external clients often had unreasonable expectations. Things like expecting use of particular technologies like AI in a project that didn’t need or benefit from it. Or supporting uses of an application that have specifically been excluded in prior interactions due to known issues. And of course the perpetual “get it done by this date regardless of what you discover while completing the work” circumstance
• Corporate directives: One of my favourite of these from shortly before I left was the use of Agile methods. I’m a proponent of Agile: the basic concepts from the Agile manifesto make sense to me in general terms. But IBM’s view of Agile was more like a development version of LEAN: All about reducing team size and cycle times while using the cheapest resources (people) available

In conclusion…

For the most part I am happier retired than I was working, although there are some aspects of my work life that I miss. Most of those aspects revolve around the people that I was closest to at work: the ones who I shared victories with, gave and received thanks with, and battled the bureaucracy with. I miss the shared knowledge of that environment, and there are definitely times I’d like to get some of that feeling back.

The header image for this post was AI generated using ChatGPT