A lot of retirees spend their days scrolling. I've been thinking about why.
First, when you leave work, you lose many things:
1) Structure -- You lose the rhythm of your days and weeks. The difference between a Saturday and a Tuesday is meaningless. You don't need an alarm, and you're not excited for 6pm.
2) Community -- Even if you work from home and mostly hang out with people on Zoom, that's still interaction. And when even Zoom goes away, the experience can be incredibly isolating.
3) Purpose -- Answering emails and updating spreadsheets is dragging, boring, monotonous work.
But if it's done for a bigger goal -- like, maybe to promote some piece of software that you think is actually pretty cool -- then at least you're putting something out there in the world.
You're a cog in a machine, but you're building something. Your machine makes something of value.
And so all of that goes away when you retire. And then what?
A lot of people grapple with this identity crisis if they've retired FROM something but not TO something.
That by itself is bad enough.
But then people often move when they retire ... because they went to Hawaii or Florida or Thailand or Costa Rica on vacation, and they think it would be fun to live there.
But by virtue of moving, they lose their friends and neighbors back in Milwaukee or Cincinnati or wherever they came from.
And so there's even further a lack of community.
All that scrolling -- it's not laziness. It's people filling a void that used to be filled by coworkers, routines, and a reason to get out of bed.
I talked about this on the Afford Anything podcast with retirement planning expert Jamie Hopkins.
Search "Afford Anything" on YouTube to find it.