Recently Retired? You Need A Friend.

By Erica and Karen

One of the most difficult parts of suddenly being retired is suddenly being alone. You have spent years working with teams, clients, customers, colleagues. Your days are filled with people. People who make you joyous—or not. But people.

When you are not at work, you have family and friends around you.

You are seldom alone.

Except now you are. Your former colleagues are too busy to hang out with you—or even meet you for lunch. So are many of your friends. And they actually don’t really want to see you. They don’t know what to make of you now that you are retired. Your family is also worried. Are they going to be responsible for keeping you occupied? They did not sign up for that.

Somehow the end of your job became the end of community. All of your structures are gone. No new ones are obvious. So you really are alone. It’s not that much fun. You are at sixes and sevens, you don’t know what is next, you want to talk to someone.

You need a friend who can commiserate and help you come up with a plan.

Luckily, we went through the process at about the same time. Right after we retired, we played—museums, matinees, boat rides. We talked about how weird it was that we could do whatever we wanted to do, whenever we wanted to do it. No place to be. No phone calls to return. No meetings to attend. It was a lot of fun. But then it was disconcerting. After that, it became sort of embarrassing. 

We hadn’t really thought much about retirement before it happened. We learned a lot about the first stages. Who knew our status would disappear overnight? And our image become unrecognizable? Who knew it would take so much time to move on from careers and jobs we loved? And even more time to figure out what to do next?

We came to realize how important it was to be able to talk about our fears and frustrations, as well as our plans for overcoming these strange reactions.

Almost without our noticing, the future subliminally began to take shape. We began to understand we had to work at this, just like any of the other difficult problems we had faced in our careers. We learned more about retirement reactions by meeting with people who had recently retired. We discovered more about what they wanted to do next by talking about that, too. We got an office, where we could work on the solution for ourselves. We learned about what a blog was, and decided to start one of our own.

Once we had an idea about what we were going to do, people were happy to talk to us and to introduce us to other people. Our ideas began to crystallize and a new community began to form.

It would have been hard to do this alone. (We are thankful we did not retire in the teeth of a pandemic.) That’s one reason we decided to work with Revel, a platform that allows women to find other women with similar interests, in their city or somewhere else, so they can connect. Revel would have been a game changer if we had not known each other.

But we did, and we started Lustre. Of course, something else would have come along—maybe we would have become real estate agents or designers, or book store owners. Maybe we will anyway. But it was great that were able to push each other forward.

If you are just starting the post-career journey, we hope our story will help push you forward, too.