Retired and bored?

[jacob]

I don't read all that many journals, so I was struck by this comment:

Wherever you go, there you are. As I read journals of people who have retired, I kept getting struck that these people kept needing to figure out what the hell to do with their time all day.

... because I usually have the opposite problem of often feeling overwhelmed by all the things on my to-do list. This is no picnic either BTW.

Here's my list
1) 4 standing podcast invitations.
2) 600 word article for NE.
3) Creating routes for AVA before season end.
4) Building a Kerbal Space Program controller
5) Finishing a new table top
6) Making an air filter
7) Painting the window frames of the house
8) Collecting all the pokemon (no, really)
9) Building a frame for "clock2" and getting it to run reliably.
10) Learning how to braze small parts to finish "clock3"
11) Building a temperature controlled window fan.

As far as I recall, "the list" has become longer and longer the more years it's been since quitting employment. I suspect it's related to an ever expanding WOG. The bigger the WOG, the more potential outlets for action. There are several things on this list I lacked the skill or even awareness of 10 years ago. Basically, "the more [opportunities] you can see, the more you will see". Thus the combination of renaissance expansion of WOG eventually gave me more than enough to do.

The other question is whether one has the will to do it. This is a different question. For example, there are lots of annoying responses to the "I'm so bored"-statement that come in the form of long lists of what one could do. This doesn't work insofar one doesn't find any of them inspiring. The "Tension"-theory of action may explain it. "Tension" is the difference between "what is" and "what could be" both on an intellectual basis but also on an emotional basis. It's one thing to see and understand intellectually that something could be different, but in order to drive, one also needs to feel that something ought to be different. Wants can not be manufactured!

I suspect that some forms of employment train that feeling away. Associating work with rewards that are external to the actual work is a particularly nefarious kind of operant conditioning. Perhaps it helps [me] that I've never chosen my vocation based on what kind of money it paid. I'm wondering if people who struggle with this issue picked their career based on how much it paid?

[chenda]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i3fqjJVXh5o

[jacob]

@chenda - That wouldn't work for me at all. Retooling every 30 minutes---metaphorically returning to the surface---makes it impossible to go deep.

See http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Perhaps for those who are more "managing"-oriented, boredom would be solved by self-imposing a set routine for the entire day.

[AxelHeyst]

For me right now a self-imposed routine for half the day, composed of 1-2hr chunks, works well. But I frequently 'drop in' unplanned and a 1hr chunk turns to three hours. And the unstructured part of the day often goes deep on just one thing, although sometimes the afternoon stays shallow. This is just self-discovery of what works well for me.

I think coming up with what to do is only half the battle. The other half is coming up with what not to do, and then not actually doing those things, because there are activities that do harm to the practice of engaging in activities that are 'good'/durably interesting.

Getting sucked into netflix, doomscrolling, youtube holes, for example, makes it difficult to go deep on anything else. And so if you don't possess, cultivate, or protect your ability to go deep, your day will consist of shallow skipping which doesn't actually result in a day that felt good. String enough of those days together and RE starts to feel not so great after all. At least at w*rk you were 'forced' to go deep at least every once in a while when deadlines approached.

[Scott 2]

@Jacob - I think they are seeking legacy. Other than maybe 1, everything else on your list idles days away. It may be meaningful to you, but who else? When or how, will someone reflect that energy? Either back to you, or out into the greater world? Rhetorical of course, not asking for justification.

You could buy 5 and 6, skip the others. Now you're faced with the consideration of untapped potential.

That's the biggest source of unrest I face in retirement. If my existence is purely for my own benefit, then it's already reached a terminal state. What's the point?

I don't think the "you'll be bored" folks articulate the problem well. But work is an effective answer. It creates ripples through time and space. And the money can act as an amplifier.

I would have said, the desire for legacy is an unresolved fear of death. But now I see it as a cherished celebration of life. When one is filled with joy, they want to send it. Both forward in time and outward into the world. Legacy can be an expression of love, for the greater whole.


So far, my solution has been leaning into local relationships. And doing a little charity. I can see that's not the final answer. As my adulting improves, I contemplate larger ripples.

Taking impact as the metric, my retirement IS boring. It's hard to ignore the leverage offered by salaried work.

I think there's another level - for someone who can operate beyond the salary man level. But even now, I find that hard to visualize, let alone actualize.

[Sclass]

If you’re that bored you might have something else going on. Depression can result in boredom or lack of motivation.

Fear of boredom is often used as an excuse. That’s just rationalizing one’s current state.

Having nothing to do is for the most part one’s own fault.

It’s amazing what traditional retirees do to have something to do. Just look around your town for examples. IT’s everything from inspirational to frightening.

[IlliniDave]

Hmm, I just passed the 2-year mark this weekend. Boredom has not been an issue. I'm easily amused. Part of it is maybe that I did not set out to accomplish a lot of things in Phase III. Phase III is simply about being, following muses/whims, avoiding health-eroding stress, etc. In good measure I picked, and more so continued, my career because it paid well. But that was just my money raking activity. I always maintained a lot of interests outside of work which I always considered my primary interests. Maybe it has more to do with how closely a person aligns their self-identity with their job role. I never really thought of myself as an engineer, or analyst, or integrator, or any other type of task I encountered in MegaCorpLand.

Of course, like Scott 2 said, it's quite likely that an outsider would look at me and conclude my existence would be boring to them; therefore I must be bored.

Out of the handful of IRL people I know fairly well who retired early, not one has ever complained of boredom in my hearing. I don't spend a lot of time following journals, but the ones I keep tabs on don't spend a lot of time talking about struggles with boredom. Retirees do an amount of seeking and often move from interest-to-interest, but I don't think boredom drives that most of the time. I see as it more as an outgrowth of viewing retirement as freedom-to rather than freedom-from.

[Jean]

one problem is that i trained myself to refrain most of my want.
And when i want something ( like building a high stand) it's done quickly. If i try to commit to something that will take a lot of time, i very quickly convince myself that it's useless as soon as it's not enjoyable.
I'm left with hiking (i'm trying to section hike the whole european water divide) and video game. And hiking today, i really wished i had kid to show how great hiking is.
Still i'm not bored, and doing pointless things thst amuse me us still better than doing pointless things i don't like.
But a job your affraid to leave solves some of those problems.

[7Wannabe5]

On the other end of the spectrum are those of us whose stuff-we-want-to-do list is so motivating, we always quit our boring jobs before we have saved up very much money . I would also note that there are other factors such as strict adherence to minimalism and/or lack of vigor/health and/or sharing your potential project space with others whose personality types are rigid that will limit your potential project-scape more than your available time in retirement or semi-retirement/self-employment.

[mathiverse]

I don't find my non-working lifestyle boring, but I suspect my family and friends do, for the most part. The perception of my family and friends can be chalked up to different preferences. For example, several of my family members would be traveling all the time if they were in my position because that's their dream. They also don't like spending as much time at home as I do, so they'd out of the house doing things on the town more than me. The other thing keeping my lifestyle more boring to the external perspective than otherwise is my partner's job and lifestyle preferences which limit where we can live and what we can do.

It is true that I have to actively figure out what I have to do all day, but that's more about figuring out what to prioritize among my interests and what to commit to and for how long. The list of things I want to do is fairly long and the outcomes I want are fairly involved, so I can't do them all at the same time.

[suomalainen]

Haha. I will point out that, as the "outsider" looking in, I did not say that anyone's life was boring. Yes, my very next sentence was a memory of @BRUTE describing his own gap years or whatever he would call them as "very boring". But the very next sentence after that was quoting @ffj describing how he is on the far end of the spectrum - so deeply involved in an activity that he felt "stagnant", "myopic" and "muted". It's not an observation that people needed to find something to do, it's an observation that people had to make decisions every day what to do that day.

To me, that's the most interesting thing - that you can have such wide variety of emotional reactions to the set of opportunities presented by a string of 24-hour days, and it matters not whether that string of time is occupied by a big chunk of external responsibility such as a job, a chunk of nothingness with no agenda, or chunks of freely-chosen tasks. In the end, in the middle of that opportunity set is you - and you're going to behave similarly in this time and place as you did in that time and place, regardless of how different those times and places are. So if I'm having a hard time finding (or doing) meaningful activities now in my working years (i.e., I'm "bored"), I'm going to have a hard time finding (or doing) meaningful activities in my non-working years. It's a matter of focus - the journal reading reminded me that it's better for me to focus on my behavior now than it is to focus on my time and place then.

[Frita]

Well, growing up on the farm, being bored was not option. Complaining (or even verbally observing the state) would surely attract weeding, dung mucking, or some similarly exciting task on top of daily chores. One of my mom’s favorite sayings was “Boring people get bored.” I learned to be busy shaped by a combination of avoidance and shame.

Right now I am in some sort of empty nest and/or middle-aged transition. Sometimes it feels boring in an unsettled sort of way. There is a part of me that actually enjoys the space to decompress, practice not reflexively filling my time, get creative, and experience a nudge to shift between being and doing.

[2Birds1Stone]

Getting sucked into netflix, doomscrolling, youtube holes, for example, makes it difficult to go deep on anything else. And so if you don't possess, cultivate, or protect your ability to go deep, your day will consist of shallow skipping which doesn't actually result in a day that felt good. String enough of those days together and RE starts to feel not so great after all. At least at w*rk you were 'forced' to go deep at least every once in a while when deadlines approached.

Beautifully said and a timely reminder. Obliged

[ffj]

@Frita

Yeah nobody in my family was dumb enough to declare to my parents that they were bored. At least after that first time, haha. Growing up we were forced to entertain ourselves because my parents sure as hell weren't going to do it for us and if they thought of any activities for us it most likely wasn't going to be fun.

@suomalainen

You get it. Your responsibility to yourself to be balanced never goes away, especially when you've created massive freedoms most people will never get to experience. And yes, just like being mindful of what you eat, you have to be mindful of how your day will be spent. If I remember correctly I wrote what you quoted because ALL I had done for two weeks was cut brush and my brain was consumed with everything related to restoring my land, to the point I was becoming isolated and one dimensional. My wife was the one that was bored. I accomplished a lot, but sometimes you have to force yourself to do something different for everyone's sanity.

[jacob]

"Bored" is maybe an inadequate word.

I'm interested in what people choose to do with their freedom-to when there's no longer anyone telling them with to do. In particular, how those choices are found and developed.

1) Are some innately better at handling freedom-to than others? Is there a temperamental bias?
2) Is freedom-to trained out by schooling to the point that many don't know what to do without being told what to do?
3) Finding your own structure vs adopting an existing structure by e.g. volunteering?
4) How important is it [for you] to engage with the existing economy/what 90% of the rest of the world is still doing?
5) Willingness to sacrifice freedom-to in order to be part of a team/tribe ... some of whom do not have the same freedom as you?
6) How important is it for you to make a difference (i.e. engage)?
7) How important is it for you to make a difference that makes a difference, that is, not just occupy a job that someone else could just as easily do but change the job or do a different job.
8) How important is it for you to socialize/engage with others?

[mathiverse]

Creating or finding your own structure seems to require another journey through the CCCCCC stages. That can take a long time! Wrestling with questions 4 - 8 help you copy, compare, compile, compute, coordinate, or create a structure that fits your preferences. Going through the six stages can result in the actions that look like not having freedom-to figured out, but maybe that's fine because that's how you figure out freedom-to? Also, "going back to work" (or any other high level description of an action) doesn't get into the details that may distinguish an abundance of freedom-to from a lack of freedom-to. (Was Jacob going to work in finance a lack of freedom-to or not?)

As for question 2, I don't know, but I recently read the book "Weapons of Mass Instruction" by John Taylor Gatto and he said the instinct toward freedom-to is trained out and never to be recovered by some people based on his experiences teaching. If it's possible to overcome your training of over a decade, then it may take some people a comparable amount of time of detraining. Given the length of time that might be required to detrain oneself, it's likely that many people won't resist the temptation to get some external structure into their life long enough to completely detrain their habits and come up with something new. Doubly so if they don't feel any distaste toward the available external structures available since they won't have any strong force opposing their reintegration.

[J_]

@ Jacob
8) for me it is important to socialize/engage with others: let's say three times per week for one or three hours. I find it at maintaining boats at my rowing club, at giving sailing instruction at my sailing club. And: I do such things for some years and change thereafter for something new.
7) in my working for money period (now about 20 years ago) changing job after three years was for me more important than rising salary. I accepted lower salary at a new job to gain more overall-knowledge and skills.
6) I do not make a difference for the difference, there must be some gain, mostly mental
5) see 8: I always reserve the right to discontinue my engagements during the year for my yearly relocations.
4) I find it important to react en diminish my ecological footprint
3) always first are my own findings how to structure my life. After 15 years fi I started volunteering in moderate ways.
2) I think that in the 25 years of my working life as a salaried person it only slowly came clear to me to realize I had freedom to do what suited me. Thereafter I changed and became entrepreneur.
1) I think that I have been born with the gift of handling freedom, but it took time.

[AxelHeyst]

As for question 2, I don't know, but I recently read the book "Weapons of Mass Instruction" by John Taylor Gatto and he said the instinct toward freedom-to is trained out and never to be recovered by some people based on his experiences teaching. If it's possible to overcome your training of over a decade, then it may take some people a comparable amount of time of detraining. Given the length of time that might be required to detrain oneself, it's likely that many people won't resist the temptation to get some external structure into their life long enough to completely detrain their habits and come up with something new. Doubly so if they don't feel any distaste toward the available external structures available since they won't have any strong force opposing their reintegration.

Interesting. k-12 and the logistics of my childhood involved a lot of autonomy and a requirement to self-direct, both for school work and for my leisure hours. And for some reason my handlers at work during my adult career had an extremely hands-off approach and I was free to pursue self-led projects to a degree that's really uncommon I think. I'm critical of that (I lacked any real mentorship or critical feedback which contributed to a sense that I was flailing when out of my depth), but your post makes me grateful that I don't have to detrain/unlearn much when I exited FTE. I've always had the 'if its to be its up to me' default attitude.

The downside is I don't have much experience with pulling off larger scale projects involving other people and so it doesn't naturally occur to me to try to do that. Even the larger projects at work I was involved with I felt like a solo operator running around with minimum oversight OR support within the bowels of the machine trying frantically to keep it all from spinning apart. I've very rarely experienced group/unit cohesion or really strong positive active leadership. It feels like I could be more effective if I could a) find existing projects that align with my purpose that are being well run, either hierarchically or holarchically, and b) master the skill of interacting as a part of a team rather than solo operator. So I feel like if anything I have the opposite problem described in your post...

[ertyu]

Imo the road to freedom-to passes through letting yourself be bored. It goes kind of like this: oh wow, freedom! ... oh wow, no external structure sets requirements of my activity ... I don't want to start an activity, the association between acting and doing violence on myself is still too strong*

* some deal with compulsively setting projects for themselves here, they substitute ego for the external structure that set demands on their time and they continue to feel like they're being the shit and very very productive -- there's no escape from the values of the system, in other words, just the external slave-driver is substituted for an internal one. V common w people who were very good at jumping through external hoops and ended up in highly paid, often high-status, often interesting careers.

If you are not one of these individuals, you go, "association between action and doing violence to myself too strong, i refuse to initiate action, refuse, refuse!!" **

*Imo this is a bit more adaptive in the sense that there is an unyielding current to self-preservation here

But! Pitfall!! You refuse to do violence to yourself, cool. But this leaves you doing nothing. The temptation here is to default to the doing-nothing strategies you had during full-time employment: scrolling, gaming, you have it. Most of these are receptive activities and train a receptive, rather than a proactive, state. They also, as identified by many on multiple occasions (most recently by @AH above) suck you in and have a very incidious opportunity cost: if you fall in this trap, you sacrifice the ability to go beyond it.

So here is where letting oneself be bored comes in. Don't reach for the stop-gap. Go through the withdrawal. If your mind starts chewing on you, handle that, be mindful with your own mental chatter, because it can suck you in just like twitter can. Maybe one does need to go through this, too - to give all the psychological bs one didn't deal with while working time to air itself out. MIndfulness is the name of the game here.

Imo eventually, as all that clears itself out, what will remain is a thirst, a drive -- the drive to be alive. This is where people are different. When one taps into that drive, one will hear what "being alive" means for one. Is it contribution, is it a particular quality in one's relationships, is it intellectual stimulation and learning, is it skills and projects and what kind. LIttle by little, this clarifies itself.

[Henry]

It’s amazing what traditional retirees do to have something to do. Just look around your town for examples. IT’s everything from inspirational to frightening.

I live in a community with a bunch of retirees. It's not officially 55 and older but in function it is and its "run" by a bunch of 70's-80's. And let's make something perfectly clear and something that is not discussed enough. Traditional retirees are batshit fucking crazy. Like flying out of their windows in their onesies Cocoon fucking crazy. It's somewhere between Hell's Angels and The Golden Girls but it's not the Golden years it's the descent into pure fucking madness years. Traditional retirees are dangerous people and should be avoided at all costs.