How Will You Spend Your Time When You Retire?

While I’m far from retirement, it comes up regularly.

I published my first book 18 years ago and since becoming a writer—which simultaneously has and has not been a job—I’ve found myself in conversations with people (my age, older, younger) who had an art or writing practice at some point (or played music, or wanted to make movies) and then stopped. Life didn’t leave much room for their creativity.  

Some of these people I’ve spoken to once at a party; some have become individual clients I work with to establish or reignite a creative practice. (As a creative coach, my strength is helping people figure out how to use the lives they are in to make their creative forms.) More often than not, in conversation with a wistful stranger contemplating their imagination, I look toward the future: I wonder how you might want to spend some of your time in retirement?

I’ve had intergenerational friendships throughout my life, and in the last ten years several of those friends have retired. It’s been fascinating to see who picks up what; how a person holds the uncertainty of free time; what questions they return to or hear differently at a new juncture in life.

Several friends have retired and then found other ways to contribute to society, whether through volunteer work or by writing the book about the work they did. 

I’ve heard countless stories of people who center their careers above all other aspects of life and have something of a crisis upon retirement, wondering who they are if they no longer have the job they held. Carissa Moore, a professional surfer retiring at 31, puts this anxiety well and asks questions for the ages:

“All those wins, the competitive part that’s so much of my identity, I’m taking that away, and I’m facing myself this year,” she said. “And that’s scary. Like, who am I? Am I going to be OK? Will I be able to love myself and think that I’m worthy without this?”

Culture Forms was built on the premise that all of us are more than whatever positions we hold.

Whether working full- or part-time or tending to life’s other seasons, there’s no wrong time to reflect on how you want to spend your own, right now or in the future.

Sign up for the waitlist for a future CAG or Creative Processes, or get in touch for a few individualized sessions to jump start your creative habit.