For most of my life, I had an answer ready.
“How are you, what have you been up to?” — and I’d be off.
The project, the trip, the thing I was training for, the committee I’d somehow ended up running. I was the person who was always doing something, and I liked being that person. When I listed it all out, I could watch the other face do the small approving thing. Busy. Impressive. Good for you.
I’m sixty-three now, retired last year, and the answer has changed.
These days, when someone asks, I tell them I do very little. I’m not being modest, and I’m not fishing for people to keep asking. It’s the truth — most of my days have very little in them, by design.
What surprised me wasn’t how the empty days feel to live — it’s what my answer does to the person across from me. I’ve started to think you can learn a lot about what we believe a life is for by watching someone try to respond to a person who isn’t busy.
The winding-down didn’t come with an announcement
People expect a story here. A health scare, a loss, some line in the sand that split the before from the after. I don’t have one.
What happened was slower than that, and a lot duller.
I retired, which I’d expected to be a doorway into more — more travel, more projects, the list I’d been saving for when I finally had the time. For a year or so, I tried to live up to it. I filled the calendar because an empty one felt like a problem to solve.
Then one week I didn’t fill it. Nothing came of leaving it open except a kind of ease I hadn’t felt in decades. So I left it open the next week too.
I want to be careful how I say this, because doing very little can be a sign that something’s wrong — I’ve watched it be exactly that in people I love.
This wasn’t that. I wasn’t hiding or sinking.
I was, for the first time in a long while, not performing my own life. The slowing wasn’t a loss of something. It was the end of needing to prove I was using my days well.
Now, when someone asks, I watch them reach for something to say
The question is always some version of the same one.
“Keeping busy?” “What have you got going on?” “Staying out of trouble?”
It’s the standard greeting of people my age, and it assumes its own answer. You’re meant to say yes. You’re meant to have a list.
When I say “not much, these days,” the conversation hits a small pocket of air.
Some people laugh, like I’ve made a joke they don’t quite get. Some rush to fill the gap for me — “well, you’ve earned the rest!” — which is kind, and also a way of putting the busy years back on the table so we have something to stand on. A few get a look I can only call concern, as if I’ve admitted to something. And a fair number just change the subject, fast, the way you do when someone says a thing there’s no easy reply to.
What almost nobody does is ask me about it.
“Very little” is not a thread people know how to pull. There’s no follow-up question for a person who isn’t going anywhere or building anything, because we don’t have a ready way of being interested in that.
A man I used to work with cornered me at a retirement party last fall and kept circling back to it. “But what are you doing with all that time?” He wanted a project, a plan, a book — something he could file me under. When I said I mostly just live my days, he laughed and said, “No, come on,” as if I were holding out on him.
He couldn’t find the answer that made sense to him, and it seemed to bother him more than it bothered me.
The first few times, I rushed to rescue them. I’d add something — a small project, a vague plan — just to hand the conversation its footing back.
I don’t do that anymore. I let the pause sit there. It’s the most telling part of the whole exchange.
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We’ve turned being busy into proof that we matter
I understand now that the discomfort isn’t about me. It’s about the question my answer raises without meaning to.
Somewhere along the way, most of us agreed on a quiet trade: busy would stand in for worth. A full schedule would mean a full life. If you were doing a lot, you were a lot — wanted, capable, still in the thick of it. We ask “keeping busy?” the way you’d check a password, and the right answer keeps everything moving along.
So when someone hands back the wrong answer — “not much” — it doesn’t compute.
If busy is how we measure a person’s value, then “I do very little” sounds dangerously close to “I’m not worth much,” even when the one saying it feels the opposite. There’s no slot in the conversation for a life that’s deliberately small and content to be.
I understand it, because I built my own self-regard on the same footing for sixty years. I thought the doing was the point. A lot of what I called a full life was really just momentum — I kept moving because moving was the only thing I’d practiced.
When I finally stopped, the thing I’d half expected to find waiting didn’t show up. What showed up was room I hadn’t had in years.
A smaller life turns out to be a perfectly good one.
I’ve decided the plain answer is worth the awkwardness
I could make all of this easier on everyone.
I could say “oh, staying busy, you know how it is,” and let the conversation roll on undisturbed. Some days I’m tempted.
I don’t, because I’ve come to think the small awkwardness is the point. Every time someone has to sit with “not much” and find they’ve got no reply ready, the script loosens a little — for them and for me. It’s a tiny thing. But the only way that question ever gets a wider range of acceptable answers is if some of us keep giving the ones it isn’t built for.
I’ll be honest about the cost. The old itch hasn’t vanished.
There are mornings the empty day looks like freedom, and mornings it looks like a question I’d rather not answer, and I have to remind myself which one it is. The reactions can wear on you, too — there’s a version of being unbusy that the world reads as having given up, and you don’t always get to correct the record.
But “very little” was never nothing.
My days have a walk in them, the same café where the owner knows my order, a garden that needs me, a few people I love, and long stretches where I’m not in a hurry to be anywhere. I stopped measuring it and started living in it. That feels like a good thing.
So I’ll keep answering the question the way I do: Not much, these days.
And I’ll keep watching people discover they have nowhere to put that — and hoping, a little, that one of them goes home and wonders why.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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