When I picture retirement, I picture the version from the commercials. You’re tan. You’re relaxed. There’s probably a pool involved, and nobody is emailing you about anything.
I think a lot of us imagine that after decades of work, stopping will be one long exhale. And for some it is. But some people retire and, six months later, they’re consulting, working part-time, picking up projects, or finding some excuse to stay connected to the thing they supposedly couldn’t wait to leave.
The people around them call it workaholic behavior, or say they don’t know how to relax, or wonder out loud why someone who earned their rest won’t take it.
But sometimes what they miss isn’t the workday. It’s the strange absence of a feeling they had for forty years without naming it: being the person people came to for answers. And then waking up one morning and realizing nobody is asking the question anymore.
Being asked for your opinion carries a message underneath it
For years, somebody was saying it. Can you look at this? What do you think? You’ve dealt with this before, what would you do? Those little questions come so often during a workday that they stop sounding like anything special. They’re part of the noise.
But they carry a message underneath them: your judgment matters here. You’re not filling a seat. Somebody trusts what you know enough to bring you a problem and wait for you to weigh in.
Trond Arne Undheim, a former researcher at Stanford and MIT, has written about how professional expertise becomes central to the way people understand their own identity. Over decades, the work and the self grow together until it’s hard to see where one ends and the other starts.
Being consulted is one of the most ordinary ways that fusion gets reinforced. Every time someone says can I get your take on this, they’re reflecting something back about your value. Most people don’t notice it happening until it stops.
The nurse who spent thirty years knowing which question to ask before the doctor walked in. The teacher who could tell from the second paragraph whether a student understood the assignment. The manager who knew which two people on a team couldn’t be paired on the same project.
That kind of knowledge took years to build, and every time someone relied on it, it confirmed that the years had been worth something. The confirmation was so constant and so ordinary that it became invisible. Like a sound you only hear once it stops.
The expertise didn’t go anywhere, the audience did
On Friday, they know exactly how to calm the difficult client, spot the number that doesn’t add up, train the new person, solve the problem everybody else is stuck on.
On Monday, they still know all of it. Nothing got erased. But there’s no obvious place for that knowledge to go.
Their grown kids don’t need a management strategy. Their spouse probably doesn’t want a debrief on how to run the grocery list more efficiently. The neighbors aren’t looking for someone to troubleshoot their quarter. The friend at dinner doesn’t need their opinion on her company’s hiring process, even though they spent twenty years building one.
The experience is still sitting there. The questions stopped coming. And the absence of the questions is louder than people expect it to be, because the questions were never about the answer. They were about being the kind of person who has one.
That can be disorienting. Mark Lipton, an emeritus professor of management at The New School, has described the experience as watching the phone ring less and less until they realize the version of themselves that everyone consulted is no longer on the other end of the line.
The calls don’t stop all at once. They thin out. A former colleague reaches out about a project, then doesn’t call back the next quarter. The industry moves on. New people fill the role. And at some point they notice they’ve been checking their phone differently than they used to.
The retiree sitting at the kitchen table with a finished crossword and nowhere to be at ten o’clock may not miss the commute or the meetings or the deadlines. They may miss the feeling of someone walking into their office and saying do you have a minute?
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Going back isn’t a failure to retire, it’s the knowledge finding somewhere to go
Sometimes consulting two days a week, mentoring someone younger, working part-time at a completely different kind of job, or volunteering in a role that uses what they know gives that expertise somewhere to travel again. It doesn’t have to be the same career. It doesn’t have to be full-time. It has to be a place where someone is asking.
The retired accountant who helps a nonprofit organize its books. The former principal who coaches first-year teachers through their classroom management. The engineer who consults on a project two mornings a week and spends the rest of the time with grandchildren. None of them went back because they couldn’t handle free time. They went back because the free time didn’t ask them anything.
The first time the nonprofit treasurer asks the accountant to look at a column that doesn’t add up, the feeling is immediate. Somebody needs what they know. The knowledge has a place to go again.
Michal Mor-Barak, a researcher at the University of Southern California, found that many older workers value their jobs specifically as places to share what they’ve learned, not only for the paycheck or the structure. The opportunity to pass accumulated knowledge to younger colleagues was a distinct motivation, separate from income or social contact.
That’s a useful distinction, because the person going back to work may not miss anything about the daily grind. They may not miss the inbox or the conference calls or the commute. What they may miss is a room where their experience still counts.
The word “workaholic” isn’t quite right
Obviously, some retirees keep working because they need the income, and some are uncomfortable slowing down in ways that go deeper than expertise. Work can become too much of someone’s identity if nothing else was ever built underneath it, and that’s worth paying attention to.
And work isn’t the only place experience can go. Volunteering, community boards, family roles, creative projects, teaching a class at the community center, coaching a Little League team because you spent twenty years managing people and you’re good at it: all of those can create the same feeling of being useful without a commute or a boss or a deadline attached.
So people calling them workaholics are missing what’s happening underneath. A person who spent forty years being useful is looking for somewhere to keep being useful. That’s not a failure to relax. That’s a person who knows what they’re worth and wants a room that still knows it too.
