Retired? What do you do all day?

I have been asked this question time and time again by friends and family of all ages since I retired less than a year ago. There seems to be a sense of bewilderment by many of what the hell you are going to do once you stop “working”!  It seems that many cannot picture a life without a 9 to 5 routine.

In the same vein, the word “retirement” seems to have bad connotations these days. As we all met outside our condominium building following the recent earthquake here, I struck up a conversation with one of my Thai neighbors. I mentioned that I was retired and he jokingly said that I shouldn’t use that word. The problem was I could tell that he was actually more serious than not. He told me it was just a “pause in working”. Well, actually, no it isn’t! I don’t actually ever plan on working again. At least, not by how most people would define work.

I have been reading a lot of articles online recently about this topic. It is amazing how many experts are providing advice about how to prepare for retirement. If you listened to all of them, you would still be carrying on with your job at 80 or 90 years old.  And it seems that I was supposed to spend months planning what I was going to do for those possible 20 – 30 years that may lay ahead. Apparently, you gotta have a plan.  It reminds me of schools forcing elementary kids to plan out their career path before they even know what a career is.

And then we have the financial aspects. It is unbelievable how much money you are recommended to have to prepare for this point in your life. The last article I read stated that you should have at least two or three million in the bank before you consider leaving your job. I can see why some continue to work until they drop,  futilely trying to meet a goal that is basically unattainable for most. I have to laugh at all the advisors saying to keep working until you are 70, or older, to make sure that you max out your savings or pension. All I can say, despite the experts’ advice, is that there is more to life than working. And if you don’t have enough money to retire in your own country when you are ready, then get the hell out! There are still lots of places in the world where you can live a great lifestyle for very little monthly income.

So back to the original question…what do I do all day? Whatever I want! I didn’t even think about it before I left my job, or should say, was basically kicked out because I had reached the magic age that was a no no in China for working. Even though I knew the end was coming months in advance, planning my next twenty or thirty years didn’t cross my mind. I knew that I had enough interests to keep me busy for another lifetime. The problem would be to decide which ones to do! So for now, here’s a typical day in my new life, with a few side trips along the way. Maybe a little inspiration for all those who are staying awake at night trying to plan their retirement years!

I have not been able to sleep in for years so getting up at 6 or 7am is pretty much the norm. With the roosters crowing next door, and the myriad of birds and insects coming alive in the early hours of the morning, we really wouldn’t have much of a choice anyway!  Now I have time to enjoy a leisurely breakfast and a couple of coffees every morning. We usually eat at home but sometimes we head out the door to our favourite breakfast spot in Chiangmai, Butter is Better. The name says it all!  For 5 or 6 bucks apiece, we can have a great meal. If we are feeling lazy and don’t want to spend much money, we can go local and duck out for some BBQ pork, or mangoes and sticky rice, from the numerous street vendors around. This will only set us back a dollar or two!

Usually after breakfast, I check my email. With all my online activities, I get dozens every day. I have finally had time to delete and organize everything. I recently went from 2000 unread emails, mostly notifications, to zip. Now I finally keep on top of them all and have an empty box by the end of each day. I usually spend an hour or two with email and reading the news. That gets me to 8 or 9 o’clock and that is about it for my “routine”. The rest of the day? Whatever we feel like! The only limiting factor is money. We are living on about one-half of what we were a year ago. If I had been responsible and carried on with my teaching job in Canada instead of moving to China, diligently continuing to pay into my pension fund, my financial situation would be much better. But I would have had half the fun of the last seven years and a fraction of the traveling.

Currently, I am spending a lot of time in several virtual worlds, along with continuing to hone my skills at making 3D mesh objects for virtual reality. Now that I have the time, I am spending a lot of hours teaching myself Blender and other 3D building programs. I still believe that within my lifetime, virtual reality will become a big part of the internet and that is very exciting to me. Facebook has just paid out $2 billion to purchase  Occulus Rift, a new company that will soon be producing state-of-the-art virtual-reality head-mounted displays. Philip Rosedale, the guy that started Second Life, has been working on a new virtual reality system, High Fidelity, that is about to revolutionize VR as we know it. High Fidelity will be powered by home computers around the world, giving it a capacity of billions of residents rather than a few million. I have already signed up for the alpha phase of the development and cannot wait to be invited to take part.

Three times a week, we take Body Combat classes at a local gym. These are basically intense one-hour long classes of martial arts to music. Because we live near the centre of the city now, we end up walking pretty much every day, for both pleasure and errands. Everything we need is very close. Add reading, blogging, writing, going to movies and shows, taking in cultural events, scooter trips around town and beyond, and the days fill up pretty quickly. Not to mention the numerous festivals that take place almost every month for one holiday or another. Visitors from afar give us an opportunity to visit the local tourist sites. So even without playing golf (never did like the game, as hard as I tried off and on over the years), and not hanging out at bars (a big part of many expats’ lives in Chiangmai!), I manage to keep busy every day. And yes, we do fit in TV most nights! Do I miss not getting up and going to work every day? Not one iota!

We hope to plan larger trips for the future but decided to spend this first year settling into our new surroundings. So far, it has worked out well. If I could have afforded it, I would have done it long before now. Certainly, heading overseas to teach was one of the best decisions I have made. It opened up a whole new life of travel and adventure. I would highly recommend living and/or working overseas to anyone that has the opportunity.  If you stay mobile, it really doesn’t matter where you end up. It makes for an easy job to pack up and move somewhere else if the need arises.  We have already planned out our escape route to the nearest border just in case all this political turmoil turns super ugly in the days and weeks ahead!  We’re here for a good time but it doesn’t have to be a long time!

I read a great quote the other day.”The work you do while you are procrastinating is probably the work you should do for the rest of your life!”. I finally have time to do that; I just don’t think of it as work.