7 Things That Go Quiet After You Retire (Nobody Prepares You For This)

[00:00:00] Hey, welcome to another episode of Retirement Made Simple. I'm your host, Kevin Lum. I'm a certified financial planner based in Los Angeles, and this podcast is dedicated to helping a million people retire without worry. As a quick reminder, every episode here comes straight from our YouTube channel. So this is just the audio, so you can listen while you're walking, driving, or living your life. Let's dive in.

[00:00:26] Someone once said something that really stuck with me. They said, Kevin, when I retired, everything went quiet. And as they told me what they meant, they said, it's not really a good or a bad thing, but it was an adjustment. So today, I want to walk through seven things that go quiet after you retire. Some you'll expect, some you won't. And two of the things I discovered while I was researching the transition from working into retirement really took me by surprise. But once I thought about it, I realized they explained so many of the challenges that I've seen in the post-retirement.

[00:00:56] Retirement transition. And they involve cortisol, dopamine, and the way your body has been trained to operate for years. Today, we're not just talking about whether you have enough money to retire. I've talked about that a lot. But we're talking about what happens after the paycheck stops. Because retirement is not just about dollars and cents, but it's also about the life you're going to live.

[00:01:20] So let's dive in and talk about seven things that go quiet after you retire. Number one, your automatic identity goes quiet. Let me explain. For 40 years, when you'd meet someone new or you were at a cocktail party, people would say, what do you do? And you immediately had an answer. You know, I'm a lawyer. I'm an engineer. I'm a professor. I'm an executive. I am a business owner. Right? I'm a medical provider. Whatever it was, you said it without thinking.

[00:01:50] And the person across from you immediately had a way to understand who you were. And the person across from you immediately understood a little bit about you. Right? They had an idea of your skills, maybe your discipline. Right? If you have a PhD or what you do and kind of your place in this world.

[00:02:04] And then one day when you retire, that answer disappears. Right? You're not fired. You're not unemployed. You're not even taking a break between jobs. You're retired. Which to many of you watching, if you're not yet retired, you're like, that sounds wonderful. And it is.

[00:02:20] But what surprises a lot of people is not that they miss the work. It's that they miss knowing who they are without having to explain it. Because your job was not just a paycheck or for many of us, it was a shortcut to our identity. It told other people who we were. And in some ways it told or tells us who we are.

[00:02:41] And so when that goes quiet, the question becomes, who am I when I'm no longer useful? The question becomes in many of our minds, whether we think this explicitly, but it's something along the lines of who am I now that I no longer can define myself by what I do?

[00:02:59] Who am I when nobody cares about my title or what it was that I did? Who am I when the thing I spent decades building or decades working to and climbing towards is now in the rear view mirror? And that's one of the first things that goes quiet. The title disappears, but the need for identity doesn't.

[00:03:18] And what is really exciting for many of us is that when that work identity is quieted, we have the opportunity to rediscover our identity that we had outside of work. Often it's something that has been completely suppressed by our work identity. And honestly, if this is you, you're like, who am I outside of work? You have identified who you are with what you do.

[00:03:40] I'd really encourage you if you're still working to begin thinking about what is my identity outside of work, right? What is my identity outside of work so that the transition doesn't feel like a loss of self. So before you retire, wherever you are in your career, you have to start building an answer of who you are outside of your job title. I'll get a bit personal here. For me, my identity is that I'm a financial advisor. I'm a YouTuber, at least to my daughter, I'm a YouTuber.

[00:04:08] When I redid my office, I got some new bookshelves and repainted it. One of the things I did is I brought in an old record console, an old Motorola record console from like 1959, 1960. Why? Because that's actually one of the things about me. I love mid-century modern architecture, and I also love classic audio equipment, right? I have a 1937 Philco radio, floor model radio. I have this record player. I have this stereo console that's behind me, right? Is it a part of who I am? Part of my identity that I often

[00:04:38] kind of forget is that I'm a tech geek. I love tearing things apart and trying to put them back together. By the way, when you're a kid and you're nine years old and you take apart your family's VCR and you don't know how to put it back together, it doesn't always make your family happy. But that is part of my identity. And it's one of the reasons why I put that in the background, because I want to remind myself that my identity is not just that I'm a financial advisor or the things that I do, but there are other things that make up who I am.

[00:05:05] Okay, I've gone on too long about that. The first thing that goes quiet is your work-related identity, and you have an opportunity to rediscover your identity outside work. Number two, your external structure goes quiet. For most of our adult life, you probably didn't have to think much about how you organize your day. Work did it for you. You had a time to wake up or you had to be at the office or had to be in a Zoom meeting by a particular time. You had to leave at a particular time. You had to start at a particular time. You had meetings that started.

[00:05:34] You had to call at 11. You had to call at 11. You squeezed lunch in there somewhere. You had a deadline on Friday. There was a routine, a reason to move from one thing to the next. You're like, I would love freedom. And a lot of that, if you're still working, you know what is and was exhausting. But it also provides structure. It gives our day shape. And then you retire and someone says, congratulations, you're free. You can do whatever you want. And at first, that freedom feels amazing. There's no alarm. There's no commute.

[00:06:04] There's no boss. There are no meetings. No one asking you to do one more thing before you left the office for the weekend. But after a while, freedom without structure can start to feel a little empty and unnerving, right? Monday feels like Saturday. Tuesday feels like Saturday. Every day begins to feel like the next. Every day begins to feel like the one before. And while you have a world of possibility, you can do anything you want with your time. Endless possibilities can become paralyzing when nothing has a priority. I see this a lot.

[00:06:34] People spend years of dreaming about retirement. And then they retire and they realize that the schedule was not just a burden. It was also a container. It gave their life structure. It protected their time. It organized your energy. It told you or tells you what mattered today. It kind of gave things priority. And when that goes quiet, the question then becomes, what is this day for? What am I going to do? And that's why I think a great retirement

[00:07:01] retirement still needs rhythm. It doesn't need rigidity. It doesn't need a calendar packed with obligations just so you can feel busy, but it does need a rhythm. Maybe Monday mornings are for exercise. Tuesday is for helping out around the neighborhood, helping people who need someone to mow their lawn. Wednesday is for golf. And Thursday is for volunteering. And Friday is for a long walk. I don't know. I'm making stuff up.

[00:07:25] I'm rambling on here. But maybe every morning starts with coffee and reading and movement. And maybe you build into every week something that causes you to grow and to learn something new. And maybe you build in something into your week that causes you to connect with other people.

[00:07:39] The point is not to recreate your old work schedule. The point is when that calendar goes quiet, the need for a rhythm and a structure to your life does not. So the second thing that goes quiet is structure and rhythm. And you need to find a way to recreate that in retirement. Number three, and this is where it really starts to get interesting, or at least I found it fascinating in my research. Your stress response begins to go quiet, right? That is one of the first things that happens inside your body. For decades, many of us, not all of us, but many of us have

[00:08:09] been living at high alert, right? Deadlines and emails that have to be responded and performance reviews and market cycles and clients and sales quotas and patients to care for, right? Depending on our career, the pressure was different. There were these outside responsibilities that kept us on a constant state of alert. It wasn't quite fight or flight, but we were just in this constant tense mode. And even if you loved your work, your body still often was responding

[00:08:39] to the demands of the work. And one of the hormones involved in that response is cortisol. Now, some of you who are experts in this topic, you're like, that's a little simplistic, but it is close enough for this conversation, right? It's a stress hormone. Cortisol helps wake up our body. It helps us stay alert and respond to pressure and to mobilize energy and to get through the day. And for a lot of people, work creates a steady rhythm of cortisol. We're always kind of in a constant alert state.

[00:09:08] We wake up, we check our calendars, we look at our emails, we immediately begin to feel the pressure and that kind of sets us into action. We come home and we crash and we go to bed and it all kind of starts again. And then retirement comes along and that pressure drops. There's no more emails to reply to. When you wake up in the morning, the inbox is empty and you would think that it would feel amazing. And for some it does, but for others, it begins to feel strangely disorienting

[00:09:35] because your body has been running on urgency for 40 years. Then suddenly the urgency disappears and the nervous system does not always know what to do with the silence. And you might even begin to feel a bit disoriented. You might begin to feel a little flat, a little restless, a little anxious, maybe even a little guilty for not doing more.

[00:09:58] Not because anything is wrong with you, but because your body is adjusting to a totally different operating system. Honestly, I think this is why some people retire and immediately get sick or they end up sleeping a lot or they feel emotionally foggy. And if you want to know kind of what this feels like, if you were one of those people who's kind of on a constant state of alert, think about the last time you allowed yourself to take a couple of weeks off.

[00:10:22] You know, you took the two to three week vacation and for the first few days of vacation, you just could not settle down. You just felt restless. You kept feeling like I need to be doing something. I need to be being productive, right? You try to sit down and you just could not feel at ease. And so often when you retire, your body needs time to come down and to adjust from decades of being on high alert. And this is something a lot of people don't talk about, right? There's a financial transition, but there's also often a nervous system transition.

[00:10:49] Your cortisol rhythms change. The pressure goes quiet, but your body may not actually trust the quiet at first. And so the solution is not to create fake stress, which by the way happens. I've seen this happen, right? When someone begins to feel at unease because there is no stress, they sometimes will do things to create stress in their life. They'll get in a fight with their neighbor about the property line or about how they mow their lawn or they'll get in an argument with their spouse, right?

[00:11:14] They're subconsciously trying to spike that cortisol again because it makes them feel normal and the quiet and the peace makes them feel abnormal. Tell me in the comments, anyone who's retired does any of this land partially I'm doing research for another project I'm working on. And so I kind of want to hear from you. I read an article on this and it was one of those things like, oh, that makes complete sense. But I also, it could be completely off. So I'd love to hear from you. Number four, the number four thing that goes quiet is your dopamine loop goes quiet.

[00:11:42] This is the second thing that happens inside of your body, right? Dopamine is often described as the pleasure chemical, but that's not exactly right. And there's been a ton of research and people writing about the impact of dopamine on our lives and often the way that dopamine is used against us to get us addicted, right? Social media companies understand the power of dopamine to keep us scrolling on Instagram or wherever it might be.

[00:12:06] And so dopamine is in some ways related to pleasure, but it's more about motivation and anticipation and pursuit. The feeling of moving towards something. It's the chemistry of wanting and chasing and solving and building and achieving. And work gives you a lot of dopamine loops, right? You've finished that project and it feels great. This is why we love to-do lists. We check things off and it feels so great to watch that to-do list be closed.

[00:12:35] And it's why we love it when we close a deal. You know, you close a deal. Often people have a ritual and they close a deal. They'll ring a bell or some way to celebrate. They just made a new sale. So when you solve that problem that you've been working on for weeks, it feels so good. And when you get that promotion, you hit that number that you've been striving towards. You clear the inbox. There's an entire group of people who are all about inbox zero. You get the reply back from the client where they tell you how great you are. You get that recognition.

[00:13:04] These small things begin to create little rewards. And it's called the dopamine loop, right? You solve a problem and your brain gets a little bit of a hit. Then retirement arrives and many of the loops that we depended on kind of disappears. There's no quarterly goals. There's no promotion. There's no major deadline. There's no next big project. No one is asking you to fix a problem by Thursday. And when you fix it and everyone's like, you were the best, you kind of feel that.

[00:13:29] And part of this is great, but part of it can also feel weirdly flat because your brain was trained for progress and pursuit. And now it's stopped, right? This is one of the reasons I think some retirees struggle after that honeymoon phase wears off because the first few months can feel like a vacation, right? You love vacation. And then at some point the brain begins to say, okay, but what are we moving towards?

[00:13:55] Well, what's the next thing? And if there's no answer, life can start to feel less exciting than expected. Not bad, just flat, quiet, uncharged. And this is why hobbies alone are often not enough, right? Hobby can be great, but the brain often wants progress. It wants a challenge, a skill to build. It wants to open up a dopamine loop and then it wants a reward.

[00:14:20] By the way, there is a phenomenal book on this topic, particularly if you're trying to rehabit yourself, trying to build new habits around exercise or eating better. It's called The Power of Habits. It does a phenomenal job of kind of talking about this dopamine loop. So the question is not just what will I do with my time, but a better question becomes what am I going to pursue? Maybe it's learning a language, right? The first time you go to a restaurant in Italy and you are able to order the pasta in native Italian and they understand you, right?

[00:14:47] I've tried and they don't understand me, but they actually understand you, right? You get that dopamine hit. Or you're training for a long hike or a marathon or getting better at something like photography. You decide to learn photography and you push and you grow. Or you're mentoring young people in your field and you see them begin to grow in their careers. Or maybe you're building something or creating a garden and watching things grow. The goal is not to turn retirement into another achievement treadmill, right? That kind of defeats the whole purpose.

[00:15:14] But your dopamine system still needs a healthy reason to look forward. Because when the career ladder goes quiet, the need for progress and to grow and to stretch does not go away. Number five, your daily importance goes quiet. And this one can be a bit hard to admit, but a lot of people do not just miss work. They miss being needed. They miss being the person that people come to when there's a problem. They miss having the answers, right? Being the person that always has the answers.

[00:15:43] They miss walking into a room and knowing that they had value, right? When you walk into a room, people kind of sit up straight, right? Because they realize that you are a person of importance. They miss being responsible for something that matters. Some of you are very critical to your organizations. If you are not there, they fall apart. And during your working years, there were probably people who were waiting on you, waiting for your decision, your approval, for you to ship that product, right? Your expertise, your reply. We need you to weigh in on this.

[00:16:12] We need your judgment. We need your leadership, whatever it might be. And then you retire. And suddenly the machine keeps going without you. Quarterly profits. The company keeps running money, right? The quarterly profits continue to grow. And the company replaces you. And whoever replaces you, maybe they're even better and smarter than you. And the company continues to do well. And part of you, if we're honest, kind of wants the company to go down the drain after we leave because we want to believe that we were that important. And then we leave and the school hires somebody else. The hospital keeps running.

[00:16:41] The emails stop. Phone gets quieter. And even if you wanted the break, there can be a sting in realizing that the world moved on. It's not because you're vain. It's what makes us human. We all want to feel that our presence matters. We all want to know that if we don't show up, someone is going to notice. And work gives us that. It's just part of being human. And it's not perfect and it's not always healthy. But it gave you a place where your presence had a consequence.

[00:17:09] And when that goes quiet, the question becomes, and again, this is something we don't always think about externally, but it's in the back of our head. Where am I still needed? Right. Where am I still needed now that I no longer go into work? And so what do we talk about? Right. We talk about you can travel and golf and hobbies and restaurants and beach walks and all the things we're kind of sold. And those things are all great. Someday I hope to do all those things when I retire, but they do not answer the deeper question. Where am I needed?

[00:17:39] Or who needs me? Or where do I matter? Or where can I contribute in a way that feels real? For some people, that's family, right? For some people, they're going to fill that with family. For others, it's mentoring. For others, it's volunteering. For others, it's serving on a board or helping out an organization, or maybe it's volunteering at your church, or maybe it's teaching or coaching or becoming the person who creates community for everyone else. I still remember this one person I met.

[00:18:09] He had this large home, and he always had it packed with people. He was always feeding people and allowing people to use it for trainings and had college students over from the local university, right? It was a place where people always went. He created community everywhere he went. The key is to find something or a place where your experience is not just remembered, but it's used.

[00:18:30] Because when your job goes quiet, you still have skills, and you still have things to contribute, and you still have a deep desire inside, whether you know it or not, to be needed and wanted. Okay, number six. Your casual community goes quiet, right? That's one of the things that you probably heard people talk about, right? That's probably not shocking to you. But most people do not think of work as their community. They think, I don't need work friends. I have real friends outside of work. In fact, when I've talked about this topic in past videos, people kind of push back on that.

[00:18:58] But work often gives you something that sociologists call weak ties. These are the people you may not invite to dinner, but you see them all the time, right? You see them around the water pool or in the Zoom meeting before the Zoom meeting starts. The person you tell a quick joke to before the meeting. The colleague you complain and moan to about the company after a long week, right? The person at the front desk that you always just say hi to. The client that asks about your kids. The coworker who knows exactly why that one project drove you crazy.

[00:19:28] The casual conversations. These are just little bits of human contact that make us feel plugged into the world. They're not our best friends, but we often don't realize how important these loose relationships are to our lives. Then retirement comes along and these weak ties, they often disappear overnight. And what surprises some people is not loneliness in the obvious sense. It's the absence of casual connection. We felt this a little bit during COVID. No one sees you by default anymore. You don't bump into people anymore.

[00:19:58] And I think this is one of the things we lose in our digital age where all you do is meet with people over Zoom and you don't go into the office anymore. There's something you lose, right? You don't stand around the water cooler asking each other how your weekend was. It's harder in retirement and then our Zoom age, it's harder to share those little moments that connect us to other people.

[00:20:18] And it matters because humans were designed not only to live on deep relationships, but we also need those light relationships, those low pressure interactions, the familiar faces, the people who recognize us and know who we are, people we recognize. So when the work community goes quiet, you need to be more intentional about connections. That may mean a walking group or a gym class. Or when I was growing up, my dad used to go have breakfast with a group of older men that had breakfast every Tuesday morning.

[00:20:48] It was the breakfast group. And they met like at the local gas station. Every Tuesday morning, he went down, they would have breakfast together. A volunteer team, right? Maybe or faith community, right? Your church or synagogue, a club, that regular coffee shop when you go in and they actually know your name. Something where people expect to see you, not because you need to be busy, but because we have this desire to be known and for someone to recognize us.

[00:21:12] And this is especially important as we move into retirement and some of the social ties begin to fall away. Because when you retire and often you move at the same time you retire, you're not just changing locations. You may be removing your routine in the familiar places and the weak ties all at once. And that can be a lot. So don't underestimate this. When your workplace goes quiet, your need for community does not. Number seven, I'm not quite sure how to frame this one, but essentially your permission system goes quiet.

[00:21:42] And this is a big one for a lot of people who are watching this channel. Because a lot of you are great savers. You did the hard part. You lived below your means. You paid off your debt. You maxed out your 401k. You drove the same car for longer than you had to. You skipped the things you probably could have afforded, right? You were responsible for 30 or 40 years. And that discipline built the retirement you have today. But here's the problem.

[00:22:10] The habits that helped you build wealth are not always the same habits that help you enjoy wealth. Accumulation has a clear scorecard. Save more. Spend less. Invest consistently. Many of you are doing that really well. And then you watch that number grow. But retirement is different. It requires a complete reorientation. Now the question is not just how do I protect this or how do I grow this?

[00:22:38] But how do I use this well? And it can feel surprisingly uncomfortable because for decades spending felt like the enemy of progress. Every dollar spent was a dollar not invested. Every splurge came with just a bit of guilt. Every big purchase had to be justified. Then retirement comes and the plan actually says you can spend money. You can travel. You can upgrade to business class. You can help your family buy their first home.

[00:23:06] You can give money to an organization you care about. You can enjoy the money you've saved. But emotionally it does not feel that way. Because the internal voice that helped you save does not go away when you retire. It just keeps whispering, be careful. Be careful. You could run out of money. What if something happens? What if you have a big expense? Don't waste it. Maybe just wait another year. And of course, some caution is wise. Planning is wise. You need a plan. You need a withdrawal strategy.

[00:23:35] You need to understand how much can you spend and what can you do when things go against you. How to behave or how to respond when there are bumps in the road. You need to account for taxes and healthcare and inflation and long-term care and market volatility and all the things I'm talking about. I'm not saying you should be reckless, but I'm saying that many retirees do not need more money. They need more permission. Permission to use the money for what it was for, retirement.

[00:24:01] Permission to stop treating their portfolio like a scorecard and to treat it like a tool. Permission to turn savings into experiences and generosity and comfort and memories. Permission to understand the goal was never to die with the biggest net worth. The goal was to build a life that money could support. And that is one of the biggest shifts that you're going to need to make in retirement. The savings years goes quiet, but the need for purpose does not.

[00:24:29] And this is why I believe retirement planning has to be about more than growing the pot of money. You want your investments to grow. Smart investing makes sense. But you can have the perfect portfolio and still struggle to spend. You can have more than enough money and still feel anxious. You can win the accumulation game and still not know how to live the next chapter. So those are the seven things that go quiet, right?

[00:24:52] Your identity goes quiet, your external structure, your stress response, your dopamine loop, your daily importance, your casual community, and your permission to enjoy life. And if retirement feels strangely quiet at first, it doesn't mean you made a mistake. It just means that the old structures did their job and they're falling away and now they are gone. And the goal is not to recreate your career, recreate your prior life.

[00:25:17] And one of the things I love about retirement is it allows you to have a rebirth, a new life, a different life. The life that maybe you thought, you know what, if I could start again, this is the life I've lived. But retirement gives you that opportunity. And the goal is to replace with that new life the things that work quietly gave you, but in a new way, right? A new identity, a new rhythm, a new purpose, maybe a new community, a new way to judge progress, and a new way to judge your importance and that you matter in the world.

[00:25:46] And a way, and finally, permission to use the money, the savings you spent building that life, right? Because the best retirements are not just financially secure. They are intentionally designed. And the people who tend to retire well are not always the people that end with the most money or even with the most money. They're the people who understand what the money is for. So before we retire, don't just ask, do I have enough? But ask, what am I retiring to? Who will I be? And the people who retire well are not always the people with the most money.

[00:26:16] They're the people who understand what the money is for. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this content, if you'd do me a favor and just leave a review on whatever podcast app you're using, Apple or Google or Spotify. And also you can find us on YouTube. Just search Foundry Financial or Retirement Made Simple. You should be able to find us by searching both. And then you can find our website at foundryfinancial.org. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.