Retirees vary widely in their approaches to life after work, so I’m not going to demean them by making one-size-fits-all pronouncements about the demographic of which I am a proud member. But there definitely exists a sub-group from which you hear a litany of complaints along these lines. “How is it that ever since I retired, I don’t have enough time for anything?”
There’s no question that my life has fewer moving parts now than it did during my working life. Whenever we’re trying to make a date with friends who aren’t retired, I find myself saying “It’s on you to propose possible dates and times because your schedule is much fuller than ours.” But if it’s true that we’re less programmed than we used to be, then why is it so difficult to work through the reduced agenda that represents our lives now? It’s true that we probably work more slowly now and that we carve out a half hour or so for a nap most days, but that should be balanced out by the absence of commuting time and our liberation from minimally productive meetings,not to mention from the work itself. It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma. There are still just as many unread New Yorkers and Atlantics scattered about as there used to be. I still have to take the day’s New York Times to bed to have a shot at completing it before the next day’s issue is upon us.
Every day I’m reminded of how much work and timeare involved in just keeping our unsteady ship moving forward. There are bills to be paid, keeping our finances in order, keeping everything in the apartment in working order, shopping (how is it possible for just two rather small people to need to restock this often?) and other assorted business that, despite its triviality, creates a powerful time suck. How did we get all that stuff taken care of while we were working a zillion hours a day and raising kids to boot? Another mystery.
There’s no question that our pre-retirement lives were not plagued by the distractions that life online has brought. Writing this blog is not a full-time job by any means but I would probably produce it more efficiently if I didn’t stop to check the email, to look at the weather report for our upcoming trip this weekend, to research a place to have lunch with a friend, to see what sports events will distract me from my reading this evening, not to mention the blogs of others and the constant bombardment of articles from the magazines that arrive daily. I’ve only read the article by Chris Hayes, excerpted from his book about the havoc that technology has wrought on our ability to attend, to focus, to avoid distraction. Maybe that explains how we were able to check all those boxes in the olden days.
One of the sugar plum visions I had of retirement was how much time I was going to have for reading. It’s true that I would have been less likely to tackle my current project of reading War and Peace, but on the whole, I don’t really think I’m reading more than I did B.R. (Before Retirement). That feels like something that can be remedied, but see me in a month. I’ll probably be back at the bottom of the hill again.
