Finding the interests, activities and contributions that give your days meaning.
If you’d rather think a problem through than be handed the answer, decades of research on ‘need for cognition’ and intellectual humility suggest that habit may sharpen your judgement and go hand in hand with a healthier, more engaged mind as you age.
I came across Lyndsey Simpson’s book The Age Rebellion and was struck by how much it has in common with the four ingredients I write about here: Energy, Connection, Purpose and Vision. Simpson comes to the subject through her work in banking and recruitment. I came to it after leaving a long career in education
You sit down with a cup of tea in the middle of the afternoon. There’s nothing particularly urgent to do. You could read a few chapters, go for a walk or simply stay where you are. And yet, somewhere in the back of your mind, a question appears: shouldn’t I be doing something useful? I
We spend decades learning how to work—but retirement asks us to unlearn a few things too Read More »
There are two useful ways of thinking about wellbeing. Hedonic wellbeing is the pleasure and enjoyment we get from life. Eudaimonic wellbeing is the satisfaction that comes from meaning, personal growth and doing things that matter to us. Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci explored these two approaches in their review of wellbeing research. The
There is a particular kind of silence that can arrive in retirement. It is not simply the absence of meetings, deadlines or the alarm clock. It is the silence that follows when nobody is asking you for anything. At first, that can feel like relief. You can drink your morning coffee while it is still
For years, many of us imagined retirement as a kind of permanent holiday. No alarm clock. No meetings. No inbox. No one asking for one more thing before the end of the day. Just freedom. And there is something beautiful about that image. After decades of working, caring, organising, leading, raising families, paying bills and
The people who seem most at peace in their later years took a strange detour — they let themselves sit in the discomfort of not knowing instead of outrunning it.
There is a version of retirement that looks almost impossible to complain about. The house is comfortable. The bills are manageable. There is food in the fridge, time in the day, and no one asking you to be anywhere by 8.30 in the morning. You can sleep in if you want to. You can go
The silence of retirement isn’t emptiness — it’s the first honest acoustics you’ve had in decades, and most people panic before they hear what matters.
I’ll admit something that took me years to say out loud: the periods of my life when I felt most alive were rarely comfortable. They were the stretches when I was deep inside a problem I cared about solving, when the work mattered enough that I forgot to check the clock, and when the difficulty
