By Karen and Erica

We actually cannot believe we have been retired for five years.

The time has gone by quickly—faster, of course, once we found purpose in our post-career lives by figuring out our new job was to redo retirement and change the image of retired women. Such fun we wrote a book about it!

What have we learned? Many things. Here are ten:

1. Retirement is a strange status. Neither here nor there. Probably because when it was invented retirement was not intended to last very long, and not intended with women in mind. Retirement as a status must now accommodate entirely different realities. Opportunity knocks.

2. It is a very exciting time to be a retired woman. We have a clean slate upon which to create the future. Together, we can make it great.

3. COVID was a wrinkle we did not anticipate. We tell our children life will never be quite the same kind of awful as it has been during this pandemic. The only place to go is up. True for them and true for us.

4. It is also a very exciting time to be an older woman. We are among the first generation of women who will be, at one and the same time, wise and dynamic. We have the years that underlie sagacity, yet those years will not cause our minds and bodies to disintegrate the way they might have eons ago.

5. Women want a lot more out of retirement than the pallid offerings before we came along—and now that we are creating something new, men are realizing they want something different, too.

6. A surprising number of men seem to think LinkedIn is a dating site for retired professional women.

7. We have learned to enjoy our freedom without feeling, uneasily, that having freedom means we’re irrelevant.

8. It is thrilling to see how many of our peers are becoming entrepreneurs. Of course, that is partly because people will not give us jobs, but it is evidence of our energy. And our creativity.

9. We are meeting delightful people who are well outside our former spheres of activity. Elegant clothing designers, legendary ad execs, path-breaking marine biologists, fascinating book agents, younger female founders.

10. We did not enjoy retiring. But if we had stayed in our jobs we would have missed out on our new lives. That would have been a limiting mistake.

So yes! All in all, now that we’ve been through the early stages, we’re glad we retired.