What do I do now that I’m Retired!
Retirement is much different than I thought it would be. After slaving away in the tech industry for 40+ years you’d think I’d be glad to be out of it. It’s not as simple as that. I enjoyed much of the technical aspects of working in tech. The things I didn’t like were unrealistic deadlines; pointless meetings that could have just as easily been done by sending an email; lack of support from management or the customer’s engineers or both. And writing my own performance reviews 🤬!!!
I miss working with other people for the most part. Most of the time you were solving a problem and most people appreciated the effort and the final results.
What you don’t expect when you finally do retire is the feeling of being lost and not sure what to do with all your free time. You can’t watch TV all day… That would drive me absolutely nuts!
During the COVID pandemic I watched way too much TV while working from home. I think that kind of put me off of TV a bit. I love Sci-Fi and anything to do with Space. I wanted to be an Astronaut when I was a kid and I think that’s why I like it so much. But when you spent days watching all the Sci-Fi that’s available until you’ve watched it all and watched the same shows sometimes several times, you become a little more selective and tend to only want to watch new shows which are fewer and far between these days. Another issue is everything that happens during your retirement years, like the passing of close family members and friends. The health related issues that come from being older as well as the issues that arise from no longer being employed and having to take care of all the insurance issues yourself.
Finding a New Purpose
What has helped me was learning new things related to the areas I’ve worked in the past. For a time I was out of work after the Dot Com crash of 2000. During that time I tried to make a living by doing computer repairs and IT support for small businesses. Also, during that time I learned new things like setting up a Web Server, DNS Server and Email Server. I was also spending a lot of time playing some games called Mechwarrior Vengeance and Mechwarrior Mercenaries. Way too much time actually. But it helped to keep me sane during a tough time. It was an online game and I played with a lot of people, some of them I’m still friends with today.
One of the things I had always wanted to do was learn how to setup a website using the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Now that I’m retired and looking for something new to do with my free time, I started to look into learning how go about creating a LAMP website and during the process I found out about WordPress which uses Apache, MySQL and PHP to create websites dynamically as opposed to using an HTML editor to create individual pages. Eureka! I found a way to not only learn something new but share some of what I’ve learned and my life’s experiences through blog posts on the websites I created.
After the industry began to recover from the Dot Com crash, I eventually went back to work as a Test Engineer again and for the next 20 years worked on a lot of amazing new technologies. But during that time all the things I had been working on before fell by the wayside. I had a lot of old PC hardware sitting around, some of which was still usable. I started replacing the obsolete parts with new ones and using what was still usable from the old ones. I ended up with some PCs that were capable of running some of the latest games. So I started looking for new games that I might enjoy and found several. So far Halo: MCC and Halo: Infinite have been the two I’ve enjoyed the most.
Also, because of the availability of books from libraries online and in print I’ve had access to a lot of great reading material like Azimov’s Foundation series and O’Reilly Books on WordPress and some books for other electronic projects I’m working on.
Realizing that there are things you still want to accomplish
I’m starting to find that being retired is an opportunity to try to learn some new things and rediscover some of the old ones that I would’ve liked to have had more time to work on. Plus I need the extra time it takes to deal with all the minutiae that comes from being older. It’s about taking advantage of the time you have left and making the most it.
~ R. Lopez (Retired)