Retirement: Friend or Foe?

I retired from my job as a university professor in 2023, although I came back on “recall” almost immediately to work part time.  So, I guess I’m retired AND employed. Or is it employed AND retired? In any case, this conflict between two very different states of being pretty much sums up my ambivalent relationship with retirement. There are days I feel retired and carefree, and other days I feel like an over-worked, underpaid, mildly disgruntled employee. There are days I feel retired and old and days I feel employed and contributing. There are even days that I feel old and contributing.

As a university professor for 40-plus years, I had a well-defined identity and set of responsibilities. I achieved a degree of success by academic standards. I had the correct number of publications and research grants, was reasonably well-liked by my students, and agreed to just the right amount of committee and administrative work. 

When I retired, I had always planned to come back and work part time for maybe a year, just to earn a bit more money and plump up my retirement financial cushion a little. The need for such “plumping” seems inevitable when living in sunny California – a state with much to offer, including a very high cost of living. So, a month after retirement I was back at work…part time.

I think a lot of the positive side of being a “working retiree,” for me at least, is the ability to hang onto the identity I established for myself over many decades. I noticed my need to keep this identity after retirement when I met new people. My opening introduction almost always instinctively included a phrase like “I was…” or “I used to be…” or I’m retired but…”

The negative side of being a working retiree is that there are times that I am definitely working more than I am paid for. On some of these days, I feel that I’m being taken advantage of, even though I do try and remind myself that I’m the one who said “yes” to all these writing projects, or lectures, or letter of recommendation writing. On other overly busy days, I feel resentful because I’m being prevented from doing the things I promised myself I’d do more often when I retired: hiking, traveling, learning Spanish, visiting the grandkids, and so on. On these kinds of days, I’m definitely grumpy and not very productive, although I guess maybe grumpiness can be its own kind of productivity.

Although I originally planned to only work part-time for a year. I’ve just started Year 4 of my working-retirement. In fact, I’ve decided, at least for today, to make this an open-ended situation. I feel like I need to keep going on this way at least until I come to some sort of agreement with myself about what will make me most happy in these, my “golden” years…Besides I still need the money.

~ Len Abbeduto