The best (and worst) thing about Early Retirement

Engage clickbait title. Fuck yeah!!

A week or so ago I was sitting in a Starbucks having coffee with a friend. He’s a few months away from retirement, and since he’s leaving in his early 50’s, most would consider it an early retirement. We both worked for the same Police Department, and we each spent much of our career on the SWAT team. He qualifies for the pension, and it’ll immediately start paying out the day he leaves. Though he hadn’t heard of this FIRE thing before I told him about it, he’s naturally frugal-his hobbies are reading and lifting, and he has little desire to spend money on anything besides those two things and coffee.

Because of his natural saving habits, pension, and a wife who’s even more frugal than him, he will never have to work again. God knows he’s earned it. Dude was a legend on our team. Shot twice in the line of duty. Missed decades of holidays and birthdays with his family because hostages needed rescuing. Trained generations of SWAT officers, including yours truly, resulting in many a life saved.

He left the team a few years back, and has been winding down his career in a slow paced admin job where he manages a supply warehouse. It’s slow enough that he’s able to meet me at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday; something we’ve been doing every month shortly after I retired early. Mostly we talk about books, but I also share what I’ve learned in retirement since he’s about to enter that world.

My early retirement is obviously a bit different; my career was half the length of his, last year I retired at 38, and I deliberately saved and invested so I could leave the job before I vested in the pension. But despite those differences, hopefully I’ve been able to give my friend a heads up on what he’s in store for.

Of course I’m far from perfect; this last time he asked me what I’ve struggled with over the past year during retirement- I stammered a bit and didn’t have a great answer. Something about getting over the idea of withdrawing money from investments after having saved for so long.

I’m not that witty, and it takes me about 2-3 days to come up with an intelligible answer to questions. Normally I’ll play a previous conversation over and over in my head a few hundred times until a suitable response occurs to me in the shower or whatever. This is why I write a blog, and don’t interview people on a podcast or youtube channel. 😉

As per usual, a few days after our conversation, a halfway decent response occurred to me. The biggest challenge I’ve had in retirement is coming to terms with this:

I am responsible for how good or bad every day is.

Me, writing this right now

Look, as I’ve described ad nauseam in multiple other posts, the cop job was absolutely wackadoodle. In the 15 years I was a cop, about a dozen people tried to kill me. Guns, knives…fucking clothes irons, all used to try and keep me from making it home alive. But that didn’t bother me near as much as the complete lack of schedule; working mostly at night but often during the day with work hours based on whenever the criminals we pursued were active. Always being on call to respond to the next emergency, which occurred about every other fucking day. Next up was the insane amount of bureaucratic nightmares and management headaches. It was a giant shit stew of stress. I was pissed off at least half of the time during the years I was working.

With all of those outside inputs from the job, it made sense why I was pissed. While working I read books on happiness, stoicism, buddhism, and zen. I tried to apply what they taught, and it worked a little. Better than nothing, for sure. Even went to therapy to address underlying issues. But still, I was an angry guy. While working, I’d self reflect and observe this anger, then chalk it up as a normal reaction to my work situation. Yes, we can try to choose our reaction, and I sure did try. But I guess I’m not Obi Wan Kenobi or the Dali Lama, I was still angry. So I took control of what I could; saved aggressively so I could become financially independent, to get the fuck away from my objectively toxic work environment, and finally be happy.

Surprise, surprise! I left the job and magically everything didn’t get better. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds trite but the worst day in retirement is way better than the best day working. Hands fucking down.

Even though no one’s trying to kill me, I can take a nap almost every day, and no dickhead boss is yelling at me about my TPS reports. But I still have bad days. Yes, in some ways they are not as bad while working. But in others, they are worse.

Because now, if I have a bad day, you know who’s fault it is? It’s mine. It was way easier to blame a bad day on work. “Yeah I’m pissed, but I’ve been up for 72 hours and some asshole just tried to stab my partner, of course I’m mad.” is a lot easier to justify than “I woke up, worked out, had some coffee, everything is amazing and I’m somehow pissed off???!!”.

Having work as a scapegoat for all of my problems was luxury. I see that now. But it was also a crutch. Because guess what else? All those books and shit were right-it was my choice to be pissed when I was working, and it’s my choice to be pissed when I’m retired. No matter what, I’m the one responsible for me.

The difference now is that the excuses have been removed.

If I’m pissed on a Thursday a 11 o’clock even though I have no articulable problems, it is my fault. We can go down a convoluted PTSD victim narrative here. But let’s peel that back a bit too-I may have not chosen to experience the specific bad shit to happen which led to my PTS, but I did choose to put myself in the line of fire for it. Nobody put a gun to my head and made me become a Soldier or a Cop. I chose that shit. And even if that were not true, the symptoms are still mine, which means they are still my responsibility to deal with. No one can magic that shit away. Yes I can get some help, but ultimately it comes down to what I choose to do about it.

I can now do one of two things:

1. Choose to find a new scapegoat to blame my bad day on-this is pretty easy since various types of media seem to be offering up plenty of options to focus one’s rage on. Man, it sure is appealing to blame your problems on someone/something else. Goddamn lizard people or whatever! I could also embrace some sort of doomer outlook and say I have to go back to full time work because I need more money to prepare for the coming peak cat infestation apocalypse. Double win! I can then go back to blaming my job for my problems and blame whatever societal issue I perceive as responsible for forcing me back to work. Self deception sure does seem nice. Much easier than taking responsibility for yourself.
2. Or I can choose to own my problems, and work to better them.

Which leads us to the flip side of this whole thing. In early retirement, I am ultimately responsible for how my day goes. But since I’m not stuck working all day I’ve got plenty of time to try and make my day better! I can actively work on my own shit, and try different ways to enjoy this badass position I spent years getting myself into. And that’s pretty fucking awesome.

Look, this is not simple, nor is it easy. I’m still getting the hang of it. I still have bad days, but I’m getting better at seeing them coming, or at least recognizing when I’ve sunk into the funk. But through even more reading, trial and error, and trying to track what works and what doesn’t, stuff is mostly good.

There you have it. In early retirement, if you have a bad day it’s your fault. This is no different than working life, but you no longer have distractions and scapegoats which make it easy to blame it on something else. But the good news is if you have a bad day whilst early retired you’ve got the space to do something about it.

Which is why I wrote this post, because writing shit always turns my frown upside down 🙂.