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kokopelli
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26 Nov 2022, 7:10 am

While I would love to keep working until the day before I turn 100, that isn't feasible. Everything tells me that I'll have to retire by the time I'm 70 because of the government's socialistic support for my competitors giving them an enormous competitive advantage over my company. They never could compete with us until they were given millions of dollars in government grants.

So the question arises of how to spend my time in retirement.

I rarely watch tv which seems to be the principal occupation of many older retirees. I can go months between turning on the tv.

So what I decided was to go back and relearn all the math that I have forgotten and learn the math that I should have learned the first time (we never made it all the way through any textbook).

The nice thing about that is that I can start now, just not full time. So I started going through Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds as well as some individual topics that I have mostly forgotten such as Dual Spaces and the concepts of abstract vector spaces.

Also, maybe some physics as well. I have Feynmann's Lectures on Physics (three volumes) and I could easily spend three or four years just on that.

I'm starting to see that this is going to be harder than anticipated.

Has anyone else tried something like this? What do others here spend their retirement doing?



Mountain Goat
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26 Nov 2022, 1:53 pm

Not that age but the ones I know who retired started into model trains.


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Radish
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27 Nov 2022, 11:25 am

I retired early and have lots of hobbies. The problem is that they can be expensive and that I get bored with them after a few months or years having spent a small fortune on them. I think this may be a typical problem as Aspies tend to have special interests that last for X amount of time, then we get bored and move on to a new interest. My only advice would therefore be, dabble in lots of different inexpensive interests but only commit to more expensive ones if they capture your attention long term. PS. Do you want to buy a microlight aircraft? :lol:


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DeepHour
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28 Nov 2022, 1:19 am

^ I can relate to this. I retired at age 43, but have had obsessive interests most of my life, lasting from several months to several years. Many of them I return to, even after a gap of a decade or two.

Two or three years ago I got into old computers in a big way, and acquired about forty laptops, mainly from Ebay. I learned a hell of a lot about software related matters from installing various Windows and Linux operating systems, also about drivers etc, and about hardware such as RAM modules, hard drives, wifi cards and the like.

This interest has lapsed a bit in recent months, but I have noticed that the sorts of laptops that I was buying for maybe £25-£50 three years ago are now being advertised at around two to three times those sums on Ebay today, so maybe I've inadvertently made some good investments!


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Fnord
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28 Nov 2022, 3:08 am

kokopelli wrote:
Retirement -- What to do?
Farm-work.  Hiking.  Exploring the jungle out back.  Playing music with my neighbors.  Writing my memoirs.  Et Cetera.


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IsabellaLinton
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28 Nov 2022, 3:36 am

I retired in June after several years on Long Term Disability.

I don't force myself to do anything.
I take each day as it comes.
There's always enough (too much) to do, just for general existence and parenting.



kokopelli
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03 Dec 2022, 2:43 am

Radish wrote:
I retired early and have lots of hobbies. The problem is that they can be expensive and that I get bored with them after a few months or years having spent a small fortune on them. I think this may be a typical problem as Aspies tend to have special interests that last for X amount of time, then we get bored and move on to a new interest. My only advice would therefore be, dabble in lots of different inexpensive interests but only commit to more expensive ones if they capture your attention long term. PS. Do you want to buy a microlight aircraft? :lol:


We already have an ultralight. My older brother bought it something like 12 years ago and never got it ready to fly. The sole use of it is to push through the fourth of July parade with a four wheeler with a dog or kid to ride in the pilots seat.



kokopelli
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03 Dec 2022, 3:09 am

Fnord wrote:
kokopelli wrote:
Retirement -- What to do?
Farm-work.  Hiking.  Exploring the jungle out back.  Playing music with my neighbors.  Writing my memoirs.  Et Cetera.


I will probably spend the summer mornings gardening. We have it a little easier than most, though -- hook a plow to the tractor and plow the garden with it. When I was a kid, our garden was usually about an acre.

Also, raising poultry.

I spent the latter part of the summer of 1972 digging the outer foundations by hand. Then we'd run cement for the outer part of the foundation, use a backhoe to dig out a cone inside the outer part of the foundation, and then run cement in the cone. The problem was that my father and my oldest brother tried to skimp on the amount of cement to put in the mix and it resulted in a crumbly foundation that couldn't handle the load. That let water seep in as well as insects. So they gave up using the grain silos after one year.

They are something like this, but only three of them and a bit further apart:

Image

I'm thinking of filling the cones with dirt and fixing up the insides for chickens. I could, if I wanted, actually put a second floor inside to store feed. So I could have one for chickens, one for capons, and one for either geese or turkeys. The heavy duty metal would do a good job of keeping out predators.

I would just need to let them out in the morning and gather eggs and shut them in at night. I'm up in the air about whether to build a pen around them or let them free range all day anywhere they want on the farm.

I have considered fixing one of them up as a kind of a cabin to live. A diameter of about 18 feet and two floors would actually give an 500 foot cabin. Then put in some windows, run in electricity and water, insulate the walls, and put in a wood stove for heat.

The problem is that the farmhouse has no heat. We used to have wellhead gas for years, but the gas company shut it off a few years ago claiming that it had too much hydrogen sulfide -- we had it tested and it was actually quite low. Since then, the house is uninhabitable in the winter. With that wellhead gas, we never worried about efficiency and the insulation is minimal. It would be far less expensive to convert the silo into winter quarters than to put in a new heating system in the house. And, in the winter, the monthly cost of keeping comfortable would be far lower there than in the house.

If I could afford it, I'd tear the house down and rebuild it as an adobe house.

Since I can't afford this, it would be nice to have the silo as a cheap winter quarters. Just turn the water and power off to the farmhouse and move into the silo for four or five months.



ToughDiamond
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06 Dec 2022, 10:04 pm

I retired in December 2013 at the age of (just ) 61, so I've clocked up 9 years. I worked for an employer, so there were severe restrictions on the time I could be away from the workplace - I think 4 weeks was pretty much the maximum.

What I've done since retiring: Apart from travelling to the USA to spend lots of time with my girlfriend (who I married a few years later), I've pretty much done the same things as I was doing before (minus the stuff my employer made me do), only I'm taking it at a more leisurely pace. So that's recording, performing and jamming music, collecting and watching videos and records, a bit of cooking, a lot of messing about on the Web, walks, reading, and all kinds of little projects. For me, it's life as it should be, and I'm glad to have spent my 60s living on my own terms.

I was shocked to read on the Web that many retired people become depressed. It seems to be down to the loss of purpose, routine, and the sense of self-validation that a lot of people apparently get from their jobs. I always saw my job as more of a necessary evil and didn't define myself by it much at all, and I've always had many other purposes than doing that job. In fact I'm much more at home doing what I want to do in the way I choose rather than doing as I'm told. I suppose many folks just get used to being told what to do and lose the habit of self-motivation. Naturally self-employed people would have more to lose when retiring because of the essential dignity of much self-employment, being their own boss and all.

Another factor is said to be bereavement - common in old age - and loneliness. Mercifully they're not a problem for me yet, though I'm sometimes alone for too long and have felt at risk of depression from that. It's important to keep contact with friends. Also, the mind is said to deteriorate with advancing age, though again mercifully I've not noticed that yet, perhaps because I habitually think hard and deep, exercising my brain without even knowing I'm doing that. I like intellectual challenges and when there aren't any, I create my own. Physical deterioration presumably gets us all in the end, and with poor health there likely comes physical lethargy. So far, so good, in my case. I get some exercise practically every day but I probably need to do more. Luckily I get so involved in my projects that I forget to overeat.



IsabellaLinton
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07 Dec 2022, 12:56 am

^

I remember when I was leaving work on Long Term Disability because of my stroke, I had to see a Social Worker for part of my stroke therapy. The woman was concerned that I'd become depressed if I was home all day every day without any social contacts. I didn't know I was autistic at that time but I was imploring to her that I welcomed the opportunity to "do nothing" or self-direct my leisure time. She was incredulous at the thought because I was only 46, and she couldn't imagine a woman of my age without social stimulation. She tried to force me into all sorts of stroke survivors' groups, where the people met in a community hall to play cards or talk about their ... strokes? I actually registered for a stroke-swimming class just to make her happy but then I cancelled it when I got home. All of these activities would have required travel on wheelchair transit services because I lost my licence for four years. I remember feeling like a freak because I just wanted to stay home, and apparently that was unheard of.

All these years later I'm still thrilled to be home. I haven't felt understimulated for one minute of my time at home.



ToughDiamond
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07 Dec 2022, 2:34 pm

^
Yes, Aspies don't always seem to need company at all, so the loneliness problem doesn't necessarily apply.

Going out is also something we don't necessarily need. There are certainly many pages in the standard book of retirement activities that don't apply to me. I've got nothing against "seeing the sights" for example, and would very likely get pleasure from it, but for me it's often a pyrrhic victory. Before diagnosis I had a theory that most people were inflicted with a delusion where they cherished a simplistic image of reaching the pinnacle of happiness - sipping coloured drinks under palm trees on a sunny beach, only to find if they achieved it that the enjoyment lasted no more than a few seconds.

I'm the strangest case of a happy stick-at-home type that I know of. I voluntarily rattle about in my English home for months on end, then travel thousands of miles to my American home and rattle about in that one for months on end. I was very amused when an English friend who had missed me told me I'd been "gallivanting round the USA." I do get bored with staying in eventually, but I don't need many excursions to fix it, and a lot of that is about fresh air and keeping in contact with nature, though without a bit of contact with friendly human life I'd become very sad eventually.



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07 Dec 2022, 3:00 pm

If it weren’t for the fact I sold it over 10 years ago, I’d get the clarinet out and p!ss off the occupants of the apartment complex where I currently reside. (I got rid of the horn after I had a failed operation on my wrists because of carpal tunnel syndrome. While I’m no Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw or Woody Herman, I was fair to middling as a classical clarinetist. That’s what working in I.T., pounding on an IBM-style keyboard for 25+ years, did to me. As for singing, I’m pretty much past my prime, sadly.)



blitzkrieg
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10 Dec 2022, 7:10 pm

There are plenty of opportunities to stimulate & entertain oneself during retirement. I agree with some other posters in that staying at home doesn't have to be lacking in stimulation & that work is often a means to an end, rather than something that is required for happiness.

Where I live in the UK, government job centres promise improvements in mental health by obtaining employment - even for disabled folk. I believe that notion to be misguided.



Dial1194
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14 Mar 2023, 5:53 am

Your competitors aren't getting any more government money than you are.

As for retirement, look into evening and weekend classes, part-time casual university study, hobbies that you now have time for. All the books and other media you never got a chance to experience, you now can. All the places you never visited, you now can. All the things you never learned or got to see, you now can.



MatchboxVagabond
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26 Mar 2023, 7:28 pm

kokopelli wrote:
While I would love to keep working until the day before I turn 100, that isn't feasible. Everything tells me that I'll have to retire by the time I'm 70 because of the government's socialistic support for my competitors giving them an enormous competitive advantage over my company. They never could compete with us until they were given millions of dollars in government grants.

So the question arises of how to spend my time in retirement.

I rarely watch tv which seems to be the principal occupation of many older retirees. I can go months between turning on the tv.

So what I decided was to go back and relearn all the math that I have forgotten and learn the math that I should have learned the first time (we never made it all the way through any textbook).

The nice thing about that is that I can start now, just not full time. So I started going through Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds as well as some individual topics that I have mostly forgotten such as Dual Spaces and the concepts of abstract vector spaces.

Also, maybe some physics as well. I have Feynmann's Lectures on Physics (three volumes) and I could easily spend three or four years just on that.

I'm starting to see that this is going to be harder than anticipated.

Has anyone else tried something like this? What do others here spend their retirement doing?


You can also volunteer to do something of interest. Being OK, or even happy, alone doesn't automatically mean that the other benefits of being out and about aren't relevant.

In a lot of cases the only necessary requirements to volunteer are a clean background check and willingness to commit to doing so for a period of time. Which usually isn't long enough to be a real problem, it's probably less of a commitment than switching jobs is.

Personally, when I do get to be retirement age, I won't be retiring. I've just seen what happens when I'm on break between school sessions and that would be a depressing way to spend the rest of my life.



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26 Mar 2023, 8:43 pm

only recently have i decided to use the R word, after having been unemployed for the most part since 2005. 18 blinkin' years already! :o i remember the first day i didn't have to drive back in to work, i just sat in blissful silence and inactivity, just staring off into space. i had the rest of my life available to just me and me alone! i just puttered around secure in the knowledge that i escaped the rat race. at that time my mom and dad passed away, and after tying up all the loose ends of their decedent affairs, i went house-hunting for the first time, spending all the time i needed to select an optimally cheap [for 2008 at the height of the last market] final place to live until i myself push up the daisies. i went to the ocean a few times, just beachcombed without a worry in world. listened to LOTS of music. puttered around the house, tinkered with my audio setup multiple times and multiple ways. i often used my music to listen to my audio equipment. did lots of wrong-planeteering to the tune of 6 figures worth of posts.