I retired at 44. Numbers worked out, spent years building toward it, made the decision deliberately. I'm not posting to complain about having achieved something good. But I want to be honest about something nobody really warned me about.
I still haven't fully mentally switched over. Every Monday morning I wake up and there's t his half second where my brain does the thing it did for twenty two years, like okay what do I need to prep for this week. And then I remember. And I feel relieved. But then about twenty minutes later I feel sort of directionless and I end up spending the morning doing small tasks just to have something to cross off.
The vacation feeling is the weirdest part. For the first two months I kept expecting someone to tell me the break was over. Not in an anxious way exactly, more like I hadn't fully internalized that this was just my life now. I'd finish a morning walk and think "okay, what do I do with the rest of the day" like it was a saturday and I had work on monday. I've been reading about this and apparently it's pretty common, the identity adjustment is real and it takes longer than people expect. My sense of self was pretty tied to my work without me fully realizing it, not because I loved the job but because it was the structure everything else organised around.
Things are getting better slowly. I've started doing some volunteer work one day a week which helps. I have a few projects I'm working on at home. The days feel more natural than they did at month one.\
But if you're in the planning phase and imagining that day one of retirement will feel like freedom, just know it might feel more like a very long sunday afternoon at first. Took me longer than I expected to actually believe this was permanent.