After 40 or 50 Years of Deadlines, Bills, Bosses, and Alarm Clocks, Maybe Retirement Is Supposed to Feel Like This

This article is part of My Philippines Retirement, a collection of practical advice, personal experiences, cultural observations, and hard-earned lessons about retiring and living in the Philippines.

For most of your adult life, somebody else owns your time.

The alarm clock tells you when to wake up.

Traffic tells you when to leave.

Your boss tells you where to be.

Deadlines tell you when something has to be finished.

Bills tell you how much you have to earn.

The mortgage company tells you how much of that money you don’t get to keep.

The taxman tells you even more money you don’t get to keep.

Your kids need something.

Your wife needs something.

Your employer definitely needs something.

And somewhere in the middle of all that…

you’re supposed to find time to enjoy your life.

Welcome to America.

For forty or fifty years, Joe Everyman works.

He struggles.

He raises a family.

Pays the mortgage.

Pays taxes.

Saves for retirement.

Worries about getting laid off.

Worries about getting sick.

Worries about whether he saved enough.

Worries about whether Social Security will still be there.

And watches the calendar while quietly calculating:

How many more years do I have to do this?

When the Alarm Went Off at O-Dark-Thirty

I remember those mornings.

The alarm clock would go off at o-dark-thirty, and before my head even left the pillow, I’d already be thinking:

Man, I can’t wait until I’m retired.

I’m going to sleep forever.

Maybe I’d hit the snooze button.

Just a few more minutes.

Skip breakfast.

Grab a donut at work.

When I was younger, I always had a hard time shaking off sleep in the morning.

But it didn’t take long for something else to wake up.

The worries.

Before my feet even hit the floor, the day’s problems would begin lining up in my head.

Is this the day they fire me?

Is my boss going to bust my balls again about that project he gave me?

The suits from Corporate are coming today.

What new collection of horseshit orders and management buzzwords are they bringing with them this time?

How bad is traffic going to be?

My commute seems to get longer every year.

Is it going to rain?

Do I need the raincoat?

The umbrella?

Do I have enough gas?

What time do I need to leave?

And suddenly…

I was at work before I’d even left the bedroom.

That’s the part of working life we don’t always think about when we talk about stress.

The company wasn’t only getting the eight, ten, or twelve hours I spent working.

It was getting part of the morning before I arrived and part of the evening after I left.

The job followed me home.

It went to bed with me.

And apparently…

it woke up before I did.

By the time I showered, dressed, grabbed whatever passed for breakfast, and headed into traffic, my stress level was already climbing.

The workday hadn’t even started yet.

For years, lying there with the alarm clock screaming at me, I had the same retirement fantasy:

Someday I won’t have to do this.

Someday there won’t be an alarm.

Someday I’ll wake up whenever the hell I want.

Someday I’ll sleep forever.

The funny thing is…

retirement finally came.

I moved to the Philippines.

And I discovered I didn’t really want to sleep forever.

I just wanted to wake up without immediately having something to worry about.

Then one morning…

if he’s lucky…

it’s over.

No alarm clock.

No commute.

No performance review.

No quarterly target.

No meeting that should have been an email.

No boss explaining that everyone needs to “give 110 percent.”

No office politician plotting to take his job.

No promised bonus that mysteriously disappears.

No watching someone less capable get the promotion while you’re told:

“Your contribution is really valued around here.”

After decades of living according to everybody else’s schedule…

your time finally belongs to you.

For me, retirement brought another change.

I moved to the Philippines.

And if I had to put a completely unscientific number on it…

I’d say my stress level dropped about 90 percent.

Not because the Philippines possesses some magical anti-stress force field.

Life still happens here.

Problems still happen here.

Getting older definitely still happens here.

But most of the things that controlled my life for decades…

don’t control it anymore.

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Why I Stopped Looking at My Watch

I used to wear a watch because time mattered.

Work started at a certain time.

Appointments happened at a certain time.

Meetings happened at a certain time.

Flights departed at a certain time.

Deadlines arrived whether you were ready or not.

Being late meant something.

Then I retired to the Philippines.

Eventually I realized something strange.

I wasn’t looking at my watch very much anymore.

What was I going to be late for?

Coffee?

Lunch?

My afternoon nap?

The swimming pool?

There are days when the most important appointment on my calendar is deciding what I’m having for dinner.

That’s a surprisingly difficult adjustment for someone who spent most of his life being conscious of time.

You spend decades learning:

Hurry up.

Then retirement asks you to learn:

Why?

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The Day I Realized I Was No Longer in a Hurry

This realization doesn’t necessarily arrive on retirement day.

At least it didn’t for me.

Your body retires before your brain does.

You still wake up thinking there’s something you should be doing.

You feel slightly guilty sitting around.

It’s Tuesday afternoon.

Surely there must be somewhere you’re supposed to be.

Something needs finishing.

Somebody must be waiting.

Then one day it hits you.

Nobody is.

You can drink another cup of coffee.

Sit on the veranda.

Read.

Write.

Take a nap.

Go swimming.

Talk to somebody.

Do absolutely nothing.

And nobody is going to call you into an office tomorrow morning and ask why your productivity was down 14 percent.

That’s freedom I don’t think I fully appreciated until I had it.

The Sleep Paradox

Here’s one of the strangest things I discovered about retirement.

For most of my working life, I dreamed about sleep.

Every time that alarm clock went off at o-dark-thirty, I had the same thought:

When I retire, I’m going to sleep forever.

No alarm clock.

No commute.

No reason to get out of bed.

If I want to sleep until noon…

I will.

After forty or fifty years of getting up when somebody else expected me to, sleeping late sounded like one of retirement’s greatest rewards.

Then I retired.

And something completely unexpected happened.

I didn’t want to sleep.

That’s what I call:

The Sleep Paradox.

When you’re working, you don’t have enough free time, so you dream about having more time to sleep.

When you’re retired, you finally have all that free time…

and suddenly sleep feels like it’s wasting it.

I wake up now and realize the day belongs to me.

Why would I want to sleep through it?

There’s coffee to drink.

Something to write.

People to talk to.

A veranda to sit on.

Maybe a swim.

Maybe absolutely nothing.

But whatever I decide to do…

it’s my day.

And at this stage of life, I’ve become much more conscious that the number of those days isn’t unlimited.

That doesn’t depress me.

It does the opposite.

It makes an ordinary Tuesday morning feel a little more valuable than it did when I was thirty.

When you’re young, you assume there will always be another Tuesday.

At my age…

every day is a blessing.

So I want to be there for it.

I spent decades wishing the alarm clock would leave me alone so I could get a few more hours of sleep.

Now nobody is making me get up…

and I get up anyway.

Maybe that’s the real paradox.

When I had to wake up, I wanted to sleep.

Now that I can sleep, I want to wake up.

I’ve developed a new retirement philosophy:

Sleeping is for dead people.

I’ll get plenty of it eventually.

Right now…

I’ve got things to do.

Even if one of those things is sitting on the veranda drinking coffee and doing absolutely nothing.

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Retirement Is the First Time You Own Your Time

Think about that.

As a child, your parents control your time.

Then school does.

Then your employer does.

Then marriage and children consume huge pieces of it.

Then mortgages, bills, obligations, appointments, responsibilities, and careers take their turns.

You may own a house.

A car.

A retirement account.

Maybe some investments.

But the most valuable thing you have…

your time…

belongs largely to everybody else.

Retirement changes the ownership.

For perhaps the first time since childhood, you can wake up and ask:

“What do I want to do today?”

And this time…

“nothing” is a perfectly acceptable answer.

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Learning to Be Comfortable Doing Nothing

Americans aren’t particularly good at this.

We’ve been trained to associate being busy with being useful.

“What did you accomplish today?”

That’s almost a moral question.

If the answer is:

“I sat outside, drank coffee, watched the world go by, talked to some people, and took a nap…”

some Americans would think you wasted the day.

I don’t anymore.

Maybe I finally learned something Filipinos understood before I did.

Not every minute needs to produce something.

Sometimes sitting on a veranda isn’t wasted time.

It’s just…

time.

And when you’re in your seventies, you begin to understand that time doesn’t always need a return on investment.

Sometimes you should simply enjoy having it.

“There’s a huge difference between having nothing to do and having nothing you have to do.”

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America Trained Us to Live Under Stress

Stress isn’t imaginary.

The body responds to it.

Chronic stress can contribute to headaches, muscle tension, sleep problems, digestive trouble, irritability, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and other problems. Over long periods, it can also contribute to serious health risks.

Moving to the Philippines isn’t medical treatment.

If you’ve got heart disease, high blood pressure, AFib, depression, or another medical condition…

bring your doctor into the conversation, not Chatrodamus.

But here’s what retirement can change dramatically:

the source of the stress.

You no longer have the boss.

The deadline.

The commute.

The office politics.

The quarterly report.

The threat of layoffs.

The missed promotion.

The impossible sales quota.

The colleague smiling at you while sharpening a knife behind your back.

The company announcing record profits while explaining there’s no money for raises.

After forty years…

the meeting is finally over.

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What Happened to My Tight Neck and Aching Back?

Maybe decades of stress followed you into retirement.

Mine certainly didn’t vanish the moment my passport was stamped.

But the Philippines has one particularly pleasant answer to tight muscles.

Massage.

Massage here isn’t necessarily an occasional luxury reserved for vacations and expensive spas.

It can be an affordable part of ordinary life.

That’s one of the unexpected retirement luxuries I wrote about in Massages in the Philippines: One Luxury I Never Expected to Afford—something that once felt like an occasional indulgence in America can become an affordable part of everyday life here.

So if forty years behind a desk left your shoulders somewhere around your ears…

there are worse places to retire.

I can’t promise a massage therapist will cure forty years of corporate America.

But she’ll probably give it a pretty good try.

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What Happened to the Sleepless Nights?

Remember lying awake thinking about tomorrow?

The presentation.

The deadline.

The mortgage.

The meeting.

The problem at work.

The problem at home.

The thing you forgot to do.

The thing you’re afraid might happen.

Retirement eliminates an astonishing number of tomorrow’s emergencies.

Now sometimes I wake up and think:

What do I have to do tomorrow?

Then I remember.

Nothing particularly important.

And go back to sleep.

That’s not a medical cure for insomnia.

It’s simply what happens when tomorrow stops threatening you.

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The Tropical Climate Doesn’t Cure Everything

Let’s get something straight.

Palm trees aren’t medicine.

Warm weather doesn’t magically repair your immune system.

And moving to the Philippines doesn’t mean you’ll never get sick again.

You will.

You’re retired…

not immortal.

But I do think environment affects how we feel.

Sunshine.

Warm weather.

Being outside.

Walking.

Swimming.

Social interaction.

Having fewer obligations.

Living at a slower pace.

Those things can make retirement feel very different from spending six months indoors waiting for winter to end.

Just remember:

the tropical climate also comes with tropical heat.

And humidity.

Lots of humidity.

Paradise still has an electric bill.

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Filipinos Can Be Pretty Good Medicine for Loneliness

One risk of retirement is isolation.

Work may have been stressful…

but it also provided people.

Coworkers.

Customers.

Conversations.

Routine.

Then suddenly that’s gone.

Move overseas and you add another complication.

Your old friends may be thousands of miles away.

Your children and grandchildren may be back in America.

That decision shouldn’t be taken lightly.

The Philippines worked especially well for me because I wasn’t building my retirement around constantly returning to America.

That’s not everyone’s situation.

But Filipinos are generally social people.

Neighbors talk.

Children appear.

Families gather.

Someone is always eating something.

That social warmth is part of what I explored in Why Are Filipinos So Happy and Cheerful?—one of the things that struck me after living here was how often people with far less material wealth than many Americans still seemed remarkably quick to smile, laugh, socialize, and enjoy the people around them.

And sooner or later somebody says:

“Kain tayo.”

Come eat.

You may arrive here alone.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to remain lonely.

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Cheap Booze Is Not a Retirement Plan

Here’s another side of having nothing you have to do tomorrow.

Nobody is stopping you from drinking tonight.

Alcohol can be inexpensive here.

That’s not necessarily an advantage.

A retiree with too much money, too much free time, and too little purpose can get himself into trouble anywhere in the world.

The Philippines is no exception.

Enjoy a beer.

Have a drink.

Relax.

But if alcohol becomes the activity instead of something accompanying the activity…

you may have replaced work stress with a much bigger problem.

And illegal drugs?

That’s one retirement experiment I strongly recommend you skip.

Philippine prisons are unlikely to appear in anyone’s list of the world’s best retirement destinations.

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Then You Discover Philippine Time

Now we need to discuss one thing that may actually increase your stress before it decreases it.

Philippine time.

If you’re an American who has spent his entire life being punctual…

this can drive you crazy.

In America, if someone says:

“Meet me at 4:00.”

You expect something resembling…

4:00.

Maybe 3:55.

Maybe 4:05.

Maybe 4:15.

If something happens and they’re going to be seriously late, they’ll probably text or call.

In the Philippines…

4:00 can occasionally be more of a philosophical concept.

You’re sitting there thinking:

It’s 4:45. Where the hell is everybody?

Everybody else is wondering why you’re upset.

This takes adjustment.

I spent most of my life being an on-time person.

Eventually I had to accept that constantly becoming irritated because another culture doesn’t treat the clock exactly as I do…

was defeating the entire purpose of reducing my stress.

I had to learn the same lesson about noise in The Sounds of the Philippines: How I Learned to Stop Fighting the Noise—sometimes reducing stress isn’t about changing the Philippines; it’s about deciding which things are no longer worth fighting.

The solution?

Stop looking at the damn watch.

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Mamaya Na Lang

The Philippines has another useful concept for the recovering American workaholic.

Mamaya na lang.

Essentially:

Later.

We’ll do it later.

Americans hear that and immediately become nervous.

Later when?

3:00?

Tomorrow?

Thursday?

2028?

Relax.

It’ll get done.

Probably.

And if it doesn’t…

there’s always tomorrow.

I’m not suggesting you abandon responsibility.

Bills still need paying.

Visa extensions still have deadlines.

Doctors still have appointment times.

Airplanes generally don’t subscribe to Philippine time.

But not everything is an emergency.

That’s a lesson Americans may have to relearn.

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What If Retirement Makes Me Bored?

We’ve all heard stories.

A man works his entire life.

His career becomes his identity.

He retires.

Suddenly he has nowhere to go.

Nobody needs him.

He’s bored.

Within a year or two, his health collapses.

Whether those dramatic stories are literally true isn’t really the point.

The fear behind them is real.

What happens when the thing that gave your life structure disappears?

That’s why I don’t think retirement should mean simply stopping.

It should mean changing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

I write.

I read.

I spend time with people.

I enjoy my surroundings.

I follow things that interest me.

I have routines…

but they’re my routines.

There’s a huge difference between:

having nothing to do

and

having nothing you have to do.

That may be one of the most important distinctions in retirement.

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Retirement Isn’t a 30-Year Vacation

I don’t think the secret is pretending every day is a vacation.

Vacations eventually become boring too.

You need something.

A hobby.

Writing.

Golf.

Photography.

Volunteering.

Travel.

Family.

Friends.

A garden.

A dog.

A project.

Something that gives your day a little structure without turning it back into employment.

The goal isn’t to eliminate purpose.

It’s to eliminate unnecessary pressure.

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The 90 Percent Rule

Did moving to the Philippines medically reduce my stress by exactly 90 percent?

Of course not.

I didn’t arrive with a stress meter.

It’s my way of describing the difference between my old life and this one.

I still have problems.

I still worry occasionally.

I still get annoyed.

I still deal with bureaucracy.

Brownouts happen.

Internet connections fail.

People arrive late.

Things break.

I’m still getting older.

None of that changes the bigger picture, which is why Why Retiring to the Philippines Was the Right Decision—for Me explains how the advantages and disadvantages eventually added up to a retirement life that simply works better for me.

The Philippines didn’t eliminate life.

It eliminated a lot of the things that used to make life feel like work.

That’s different.

And for me…

it’s been enormous.

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Maybe This Is What Retirement Was Supposed to Be

Joe Everyman spent forty or fifty years doing what he was supposed to do.

He worked.

Raised a family.

Paid taxes.

Paid bills.

Met deadlines.

Showed up.

Put money away.

Took care of everyone else.

Maybe when he finally reaches retirement…

he doesn’t need another race to run.

Maybe he doesn’t need a second career.

Maybe he doesn’t need a calendar filled with activities just to prove he’s still productive.

Maybe he has earned the right to sit somewhere warm…

drink his coffee…

look at the ocean or the mountains…

and not feel guilty because he’s doing absolutely nothing.

I can’t promise moving to the Philippines will reduce your stress by 90 percent.

I can only tell you what happened to mine.

I stopped worrying about deadlines.

I stopped rushing.

I stopped caring whether every minute was productive.

And somewhere along the way…

I stopped looking at my watch.

Maybe that’s not laziness.

Maybe that’s retirement.

And maybe…

after forty or fifty years…

we’ve earned it.

“After forty years…the meeting is finally over.”

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Your Turn

If you’re already retired, when did you finally realize you weren’t in a hurry anymore?

Did retirement lower your stress…

or did you discover that you actually missed the deadlines, routines, and structure of working life?

And if you’re still working toward retirement:

What is the first thing you’re looking forward to never having to worry about again?

Tell us in the comments.

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Bunker Rule

Retirement isn’t a competition to see who can do the least—or who can stay the busiest. Some people need a full calendar. Others need a hammock. Share what works for you without telling somebody else they’re doing retirement wrong.

Bunker Notice

The “90 percent” in this article describes my personal experience, not a medical measurement or health claim. Moving to the Philippines doesn’t cure heart disease, anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, or other medical conditions. Retirement may remove many sources of everyday stress, but medical problems still belong in a conversation with a qualified healthcare professional.