It has been 5 years since I left gainful employment. The last day at my office was on Mid-Autumn Festival in 2016, shortly after my sixty-first birthday. Although I left my job suddenly in dramatic circumstances, I had thoughts of retirement a few years before that. I had planned my post-work finances and expected to ease out of working life gradually as I still enjoyed my work tremendously. In fact, when I was in my prime, I could not imagine living a retired life. But we all grow up and realize the follies of our younger selves. I think one must leave enough time for life reflection before departing this world.

When we are young, we usually do not think about death, old age and retirement. These concepts are like brakes to our exhilarating and go-getting life. Perhaps that is why “60% of Singaporeans face an uncertain future by not prioritizing their retirement planning”, according to an AIA survey published on 7 July 2021. Even if we have sufficient provision for our retirement financially, we might not be fully prepared for a work-free life for another 2 decades. Now that I have spent 5 years in retirement, I can give a glimpse of what to expect for those who are at the edge of the abyss and also those far-thinking individuals who are years away.

There are many advice on how to retire well. If you cannot bear to tear away from your beloved job or profession, semi-retirement could be an option. If the idea of not getting an income gives you anxiety, you can engage in some economic activity using your current skills or acquiring new ones. Of course, one could also start an encore career, but that would not count as retirement. You could also volunteer your skills and time to your church, temple, mosque, or other social causes.

I have done none of the above, remaining largely a homebody. Although my experience is idiosyncratic, I am sure there are some common grounds with others who have been retired for a while.

Retirement – the word

Initially, I hesitate to use the word “retirement” (or be called a retiree) as it sounds rather passive. It suggests a final period of stasis, rest and ultimately decline towards the endpoint of life. It reminds me of my childhood at Sago Lane in Chinatown when I lived next to a shophouse with old people in small cubicle beds awaiting their end. Some smoked opium in long bamboo pipes that made guzzling sounds to pass the days. Incidentally, I cannot get rid of this image when seeing bassoon players in an orchestra.

Other more palatable terms for “retiree” such as “senior citizen” and “older adult” unfortunately do not have a corresponding word for the condition we are in, as in retirement for retiree. Senior citizenhood and older adult period sound really awkward. Maybe “post-work life” is a good candidate word to replace retirement, but a post-work lifer? A more recent exalted term is “third ager”. And you can say “I am in my third age”. Calling myself a third ager does sound a bit pompous and I am sure most folks will scratch their heads when I say I am in my third age*. I would have to explain what is the first, second and fourth age.

So, it is difficult to find a satisfactory word that truly reflects the status and the state I am in. If one is happy to while away the time enjoying the pleasure of life, retirement is a suitable word. Perhaps it is an ultimate state to look forward to. Meanwhile, people who just retired are usually burdened by more than sixty years of indoctrination and reflexes to be ambitious, goal-driven and in constant pursuit of the carrot always hanging in front of them. The idea of always doing something useful and productive is ingrained in us, even in retirement.

One could also attribute the reluctance to using the word “retiree” as an identity problem. After decades of building a successful career or work life, our identity becomes totally wrapped up with what we did for a living. When we retire, we are suddenly no longer a teacher, an engineer, a librarian or a CEO, but join the hundreds of thousands to become mere retirees. It will take time before we become less attached to our former identity and ease into a new one.

For many people, assuming there is no financial burden or serious health problems, retirement means devoting more time to family and loved ones, taking care of aged parents, or enjoying grandchildren. But we are also individuals with our own needs and journey in the last quarter of our life. So, what is life in retirement like?

Routines in work-life

During the first few months of not going to your workplace, you feel like you are on a super long vacation. However, at the back of your mind, you cannot get rid of the feeling that you will soon have to report back to your office, or an office in another job. But one day it will finally strike you, with pleasure as well as trepidation that it is not going to happen, and you will be in this state until you expire. This is when time becomes a blurry mass. Workweeks, weekends, staff retreats, annual vacations and public holidays can no longer help you structure and organize your life. You miss the routines more than you think. It is like every day is Sunday.

We all take for granted our daily routine, even complain about it. Little do we realize that it is the secret engine that drives our life forward. You wake up, go to the office, do the stuff that gets you paid, go out for lunch, attend meetings, break for tea, continue doing your stuff and when you finished, hop on a bus or drive home. Your routine had moved you through time. Repeat this every day and a year will pass easily. Without routines, you will just chug and splutter along slowly. When you are working, you are inevitably controlled by routines. Even if you are very high up in the pecking order in your organization, there will always be a master who controls your routines, and erect goalposts to make you move along. You have no choice but to pedal on as routines demand.

The good thing about routines in working life is that they are often punctuated by interesting incidents and unexpected events that make work worthwhile on top of the monthly take-home pay. In a single day at the office, you could placate a quarrel among colleagues or step into one yourself, get a tremendous boost from solving a difficult problem, trade witty remarks over email with workmates, travel to the other end of Singapore or faraway places for meetings, etc. In other words, there is plenty of variety in routines at work to feed your sense of accomplishment.

Routines and incentives in retired life

When you are retired, apart from waking up, eating, and going to bed, you no longer need to be a slave to routines. It is liberating for a while, but soon living in the murky mass of time at your disposal feels more like being adrift in the vast ocean. You hanker for some order in your life. So, you fall back on tried and tested solutions to manage the passage of idle time—set goals, create work plans and establish routines, just like you did at work. The idea is to find ways to experience the passing of time meaningfully, to bring back Mondays to Saturdays, instead of being perpetually stuck on Sundays.

However, there is a crucial difference between work routines and the one you set up in retirement. Your work routine is fueled by your paycheck. No matter how difficult it is to get up from bed, you have to wake up, go to work and follow the routines or else your income stream will stop. When you are retired you do not have any monetary incentive to follow routines. You have to find a replacement to get your routines moving.  Furthermore, your new retirement routines are likely to have fewer opportunities for experiencing serendipitous and interesting encounters than at work due to the sheer drop in the number of people and events you interact with. Lastly, it is difficult to enforce routines when you are your own enforcer.

Finding a strong enough incentive in place of a paycheck is not easy. It is a piece of cake for people who have concrete passionate hobbies, such as calligraphy, nature photography, climbing mountains, cycling, artisanal baking, knitting and crocheting, soccer coaching, etc. You can easily set up goals and routines to further your achievement and enjoyment in your passion. How long you can do this depends on the intensity of your passion and for some activities, your physical health trajectory.

It will be difficult for those whose work means everything to them – identity, expertise, relationships, and social circles. Before you can plan an effective and enjoyable retirement routine, you need to have invigorating and enjoyable activities to indulge in. I think it is far better to have cultivated some non-work interest while we are in our prime. When retirement comes, we just slip into this other interest fully with anticipation and eagerness. If I have any advice for my younger friends still at work, it is not to invest one hundred per cent of your time in work but leave sufficient space to sprout other interests.

Being purposeful and being spontaneous

I do not have any do-or-die passion, hobbies or causes like some lucky people. I do have little things I dabble in now and then like sketching, painting, making music and cooking; most of which I am not able to reach a satisfactory level of competency. However, I do enjoy these when I am fully immersed. The trick is to do rather than to achieve. In the beginning, I tried to establish routines based on these activities and other household chores. I even kept a diary of everyday activities to remind myself of the day of the week I was in. However, I found it difficult to keep to the routine I planned. The incentive to keep to them is weak (nothing beats a paycheck to look forward to) and when the obligation is just to yourself, you can afford to be lax about it.

In retirement, we are often advised to have a sense of purpose, not just potter along with things that keep us busy. A sense of purpose gives us something to look forward to each day and for the rest of our days. Each of us has to find our own sense of purpose in retirement—something that is compelling, motivating and not limiting. It doesn’t have to be some big hairy audacious goal or the undertaking of an epic journey. It is simply something that gives meaning to us. It could pertain to relationships, personal growth, spirituality, or altruism that is cultivated to the end of time.

The thing that keeps me motivated in retirement is the greater amount of time available for learning. Not learning to solve a problem or to acquire a skill, but just learning for the sake of knowing. Seldom is there a day when I have not read, listened or watched something that absorb my attention. I do not have any particular subject areas that I focus on. Rather, I am more of an intellectual voyeur. Even before I became a librarian, I enjoyed browsing library shelves, skimming the vast range of human knowledge from the first classification number to the last. It gives me a sense of the connectedness of the world we live in. Sometimes I go deeper into the topics I dabble in, like cosmology, consciousness, human beliefs, Chinese philosophy and music history but most times, I skip along like a butterfly. No doubt I am touching just the surface of these subjects, but I hope to learn enough at a holistic level to attain a state of equanimity, have a glimpse of enlightenment and remain there until my time runs out.

Although having a purpose seems a sensible way to direct and manage retirement time, one cannot discount the alternative laissez-faire approach—just spending time to do whatever comes to mind without worries and thoughts of the future. It takes a supremely confident and self-assured individual to be able to indulge in the moment, go with the flow and letting nature takes its course on a daily basis in the last sprint of his life. Someone like this is not worried about the future and his eventual encounter with mortality. He is either delusional or enlightened! Possibly the latter, since Zen masters tell us that enlightenment comes unexpectedly in everyday life, not through intellect or scholarship. Perhaps the following poem by the Chán (Zen) monk Wumen Huikai (无门慧开) (1182-1259) might be your koan moment.

Finally

Each of us spends time in the last quarter of our life in our own unique way. For me, there is a certain quality of time during this period—a mix of urgency, calm, resignation, joy, nostalgia, anticipation, satisfaction, apprehension and peacefulness, all blended well together. I studied checklists on what it takes to retire well, came to accept the “retiree” word gradually, tried to follow routines to recapture Mondays to Saturdays, indulged in little hobbies regularly and get invigorated by letting my curiosity rummage through the treasure of human knowledge. My hope is that on my last day on earth, I can tell myself that this retirement strategy works!