What To Say When They Ask What You Do.

By Karen and Erica

If you are approaching, or have just begun, the retirement journey, you need to learn a new language. Yes, you must learn retirementspeak.

Inevitably, you will soon be in a social gathering, meeting new people, and someone will ask: What do you do? Your likely instinct will be to tell your interrogator that you had a fantastic career as a nuclear scientist or world famous soprano, and you just retired. Surely everyone will be impressed–they always have been–and the conversation will go from there. 

But no. 

The eyes of everyone who hears you will glaze over, and they will soon wander away, perhaps after giving you a sidelong glance of pity. After this happens a few times, you will start to wonder if you have suddenly become a non-person. You might even doubt your own self-worth. And you will wonder–what on earth happened???

What happened is that when the word retired was spoken, you were suddenly hidden behind an archaic image of someone who is old and done, who during her remaining years will do nothing of note. An image created when retirement was invented, decades ago. Most of these retirees were men who had short runways after leaving physically hard jobs, and who had lived through a depression and two world wars. They wanted nothing more than to spend their few golden years having fun in sunny new retirement communities.

But the world has changed since then, and with it how retirement is done, especially by women. Now, it is not reasonable for people to assume that you instantly became boring, possibly a leech, and definitely old, so they should run away from you as fast as they can. But until we all create a new image of retirement—and age—they will.

So what do you do?

You just make sure retirement is not the end of your story. 

Tell people you just retired from the peak of a career you absolutely loved, and after you play for a while you plan to use the skills you learned over the years to do something completely different. You are going to use your scientific background to create an online hub that allows scientists and regular people to exchange ideas that might result in advances for all. You are going to set up a program to allow children who never heard of opera to be initiated into its glories. You’re smart–think up something inventive and personally appealing. Put some details into it. Perhaps add that you are thrilled to be in a position where you can design your own future without constraint. By the time you are done, everyone around you will be totally envious. 

Can you describe a fun and purposeful future even if it is  a bit inchoate? Of course. You learned long ago how to fake it til you make it. And you will make it. The more you talk about it, the more real it will become. And lots of your new friends will offer to help–to introduce you to people with ideas or connections that might move you forward, to tell you about other projects, to suggest new approaches. 

This being 2025, we decided to ask ChatGPT what to say. Mostly it came up with the same ideas–could it be scraping Lustre???  But here’s a sentence we like, if you are not quite ready to create a vision of a new world: I’m in between identities–it’s exciting and a little weird, but mostly exciting. This suggestion echoes a phrase one of our members uses–I’m in transition.

The point is, if people think you are enthusiastic and engaged, they will want to hear more–about your plan for the future and about the past that gives you a foundation for the next phase. They will see you for the person you are. The shroud of archaic misconceptions will be torn away. You’ll be happier, and so will they. And we’ll all be further down the path of creating a positive, and accurate, image of post-career life.

So learn retirementspeak, and watch your world open up!