Lessons from 1 year of early retirement: emotional transitions and finding peace

It’s been a little over a year since I took an early retirement from my corporate career, and as is typical around milestones, I’ve been reflecting on this journey — the burnout that started it all, and the emotional transitions and mental shifts that I’ve encountered along the way. And while I do not regret my decision to quit the corporate world in the slightest, there are still some things that, despite my emotional and mental preparation, took me unawares.

But let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

The catalyst for early retirement: corporate burnout

Rewind to 2019. To an unrelentingly stressful job, thankless bosses, and my complete disillusionment with the corporate world. Everywhere I looked, I heard similar, often worse, stories from friends and acquaintances. The thought of switching jobs and the upward slog to prove myself all over again at a new company was enough to send me into a paroxysm of tears. But I didn’t have the financial freedom to just up and quit, so I kept soldiering on.

When the pandemic struck in 2020, the world turned upside down. For me, though, it was a reprieve. Working from home soothed some of my frazzled edges. Not having to fight through logjammed traffic everyday, the quiet cocoon of my home office, and my emotional support cats were a sanctuary that made things a little more bearable. I used those few years of working from home to build up my savings and revisit some of my long-ignored dreams.

By early 2023, I realized I had reached the stage that I had only dreamed of: I could walk away from my job at any time. I wasn’t by any means swimming in gold coins like Ebeneezer Scrooge, and I would have to budget and say no to some rather interesting things, but that was a trade-off I was more than willing to make.

Still, it took me another year, and a push to return to office, before I actually gathered the courage to put in my papers and say, “I quit!”.

The aftermath of the exit: emotional transition after retiring from corporate life

Quitting didn’t feel dramatic — rather, it was like a soft exhale.

I spent the first month post-early retirement at my childhood home, with my parents, sister, and niece, surrounded by the warm comfort of family, the joyful chaos of entertaining a 4-year old, and no responsibilities or decisions that needed my attention.

I didn’t miss my job or the structure it offered, yet.

But when I returned to my own space, I was confronted with the long stretch of unstructured time. I had no externally imposed schedule to follow, and I had made a conscious decision to eschew to-do lists and self-imposed productivity, at least for a few months. I wanted to embrace the simple pleasure of writing in the mornings, reading for long stretches of time, painting when the mood struck me, playing with the cats, and watching Netflix.

It felt, initially, like a soft landing. But soon, I started to feel an underlying sense of unease…the discomfort of just being, which was something I had yearned for, but once I had, I didn’t know how to…well…be. I felt the fears rising:

What if you never want to work again?

Aren’t you just wasting these years when you could be doing so many things?

What if you waste all of your days doing…nothing?

That voice was familiar, rooted in a lifetime of equating worth with doing and meaning with measurable output. I’d escaped the job, but I hadn’t yet escaped the internalized capitalism and drive for productivity that it had etched into my psyche.

Identity change in early retirement: navigating the space between stories

What I’ve realized is that retirement, especially early retirement, isn’t just a career exit. It’s a shift in identity. One that has no real blueprint because there aren’t too many people I know who’ve quit their careers in their early 40s.

I may have stepped out of a life I’d slogged through for decades and actively hated towards the end, but I hadn’t yet stepped into a new one. And in that liminal space, my emotions ran wild: freedom mixed with fear, joy shadowed by guilt, peace tinged with restlessness.

My friends were enamored with my days of supposed leisure, but they didn’t know that my inner task master was busy haranguing me, that I was plagued with self-doubt and a sense of drifting aimlessness.

I was writing, creating art, making delicious meals, finally tackling long-neglected tasks around the house, but my inner task master wasn’t pleased. I was, after all, doing most of these things even when I had a job. The only difference being that I was constantly stressed, whereas now I was, relatively, at peace.

Creating systems that work: establishing daily routines in early retirement

So I did the only thing I knew — I kept “office hours”, banging away at the laptop from morning to evening, browsing YouTube or going down multiple rabbit holes. These were things I usually did on the phone, where I have an in-built timer that ensures I don’t get lost in said rabbit holes for hours. Spending all that unchecked time on the laptop left me frustrated, feeling like I still didn’t have time to devote to the projects and ideas that were calling my name, which was bananas!

But I didn’t yet know how to create structures with spaciousness. It took a conversation with my friend Ishieta’s mother over brownie fudge sundaes on a cool winter afternoon to help me see the in-built structures I already had in place. She gave me some excellent ideas on how to use those structures to create daily routines with spaciousness, which helped me build what I now of think of as a soulful system that gives me a gentle framework to scaffold my days.

But knowing how to create routines wasn’t the cure-all that I initially thought it would be.

I’m still grappling with finding ways to weave flexibility and spaciousness with the ability to follow-through on the ideas, projects, and courses that I want to pursue.

The alchemy in progress: how to live with unstructured time after leaving your job

It’s been a little over a year now, and I’ve grown much more comfortable with unstructured time. The wide-open days that once felt disorienting now feel like a gift. I no longer wake up in a mild panic wondering what I should do with my day, though every now and then, my inner taskmaster still resurfaces. Usually on days when I feel like I didn’t do “enough.”

What’s interesting is how “enough” keeps shape-shifting. One week, it’s about finishing a course, the next it’s about painting more, writing more, doing something more. I have a growing library of classes, some half-done, some barely started, and part of me believes I should be able to tackle them all at once.

But I’m learning that the point of this life isn’t to simply tick things off a never-ending checklist. It’s to appreciate the gifts that I have, this life and spaciousness that I’ve created, and to take things at my own pace.

These days, joy looks like painting with no goal in mind. Meeting myself on the journal page. Asking an open-ended question, pulling a tarot card, and sitting with the answers it evokes. A slow morning coffee while catching up on Substack. None of it is grand or impressive, and yet these are the threads that hold my days together.

When my inner task master becomes loud, asking “What did you even do today?”, I try to meet it with a new ritual: my ta-da list. It’s a running record of what I did that wasn’t part of my daily to-do list: a class I watched, a long-pending task I completed, a piece of art I created, a delicious meal I cooked.

The crisis of being: overcoming guilt and self-judgement in early retirement

One of the strangest discoveries of early retirement has been this crisis of being. I realize now that I was far better at enjoying leisure when it came as a reward, after a hard day’s work, on weekends, during vacations. Now that leisure is the default setting, it can feel…unearned.

It’s such a curious thing: when I was working, I longed for long, slow mornings and unhurried days. Now that I have them, I sometimes feel like I should be “busier”…doing more with my time. It’s as though I swapped one kind of striving for another — the corporate ladder for the ladder of self-improvement.

Purpose, I’m finding, is not a static thing. It keeps shifting and asking to be redefined. Some days, purpose looks like following a thread of curiosity, other days, it’s simply being present to the life I’ve created — to the cats sprawled in a sunbeam, the coffee cooling beside me, giving in to the pull of a book I’m reading.

What I’m learning about early retirement

If there’s one thing I wish more people understood about early retirement, it’s that the emotional work doesn’t end when you leave your job. In many ways, that’s when it begins. You gain time, yes, but you also lose the structure, the validation, and the external markers of progress that were all you knew so far.

What feels good when you’re working — rest, leisure, doing nothing — can feel strangely hollow when you’re not. It takes time to rebuild your sense of self on a more solid foundation, to learn that rest is not a reward, it’s a rhythm.

I don’t have neat takeaways or tidy conclusions. I still struggle with questions of meaning and purpose and productivity. But I also know this: I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.

Because underneath the doubts, the haranguing of the inner taskmaster, the guilt over unfinished courses, there’s a deep and steady joy, a peace that was so sorely lacking especially during the last few years of my corporate career.

So yes, I still have a bit of mindset and emotional work to do, but that doesn’t negate the truth that I am living life on my own terms — imperfectly, joyfully, fully. Neither does it negate the transformation that is still underway…the slow alchemy of turning doing into being, and striving into soulfulness.