The Retirement Honeymoon Phase Is Real — And So Is What Comes After
I gave three weeks' notice before my last day of work, which meant I had three very long weeks to think about what was coming. And still, when the actual last day arrived, I sat there and asked myself a simple question I somehow didn't have an answer for: what am I going to do tomorrow?
Nothing. I had nothing. It felt, in that moment, almost like just another day off — the kind you'd taken a hundred times before, except this one didn't end. And right behind that feeling came another one I didn't expect at all: guilt. A quiet, nagging sense that I should be working right now, that sitting still like this wasn't allowed. Which made no sense — I'd earned this, I'd planned for this, I wanted this. But there it was anyway.
That contradiction planted the seed for everything I've written since: I shouldn't feel guilty about this. And yet I clearly needed some kind of plan, because I didn't have one, and the not-having-one was exactly what the guilt was reacting to.
The Honeymoon Phase
Here's the thing nobody tells you: you get a honeymoon phase in retirement, and it's real. I walked off a cruise ship in Barcelona with no agenda at all, and for about a minute, it felt like the entire world fit in the palm of my hand.
I saw the Eiffel Tower. I saw Big Ben. I stood in front of Dracula's castle in Romania like a kid who'd wandered into a storybook. Berlin, London, Paris, one after another, each one a place I'd only ever seen in photographs before. There is a version of freedom you feel in that moment — total control over your life, your choices, your destination — that nothing else really replicates.
That whole arc — the honeymoon phase, and exactly what shows up after it fades — is what I dig into in The Usable Years — click here to see where the story goes next.
But here's the part nobody tells you about the honeymoon phase: the thrill wears off. Not because anything is wrong with the places, or with you. It's just the natural course of the thing. I'd see something incredible and think, that's incredible — and almost immediately behind that thought came the next one: okay, saw it. Now what. It's not that the wonder wasn't real. It's that wonder is a novelty, and novelty has a shelf life built into it whether you want it to or not.
The Moment It Actually Hit Me
It wasn't a slow fade for me. It hit like a rock, on the flight home. I was sitting in the airport, waiting to fly back to the United States, and it landed on me all at once: I'm about to be home. And then what? I didn't have an answer. I'd scratched the itch — genuinely, thoroughly scratched it — and now I needed something more, and I had absolutely no idea what that something was.
I think almost everyone who gets a real honeymoon phase in retirement eventually sits in some version of that chair.
It's Not Just About Travel
Maybe travel isn't your honeymoon phase at all. Maybe it's finally redoing the kitchen, the bathroom, the whole house, room by room, after years of saying you'd get to it someday. Maybe it's golf, every morning, exactly the way you always pictured retirement. None of that is wrong, and none of it is silly. But the same arc plays out no matter what fills the honeymoon phase. Remodel enough rooms and eventually you run out of rooms. Play golf every single day and eventually — I promise you, eventually — some morning you're going to want something else, even if you love the game.
That's the gap this book is trying to help you see coming, instead of discovering it the hard way, in an airport chair, with no plan for what's next.
The Bill Comes for Your Body, Too
There's a second cost to the honeymoon phase that I didn't expect. When I travel, I want to actually be part of the place, not just look at it through a car window, so I don't rent cars much. I walk the cities. That's part of what makes it feel real. But it's also hard on the knees, hard on the ankles, mile after mile, day after day. And when you're eating everything, drinking your share, moving through time zones instead of routines, the weight creeps on while you're not looking.
The honeymoon phase doesn't just spend down your sense of novelty. It spends down your body a little too, quietly, while you're having the time of your life. I don't say that to talk anyone out of it. Have it. Really have it — you earned it. I'm only telling you so you're not blindsided the way I was.
So here's the question this chapter leaves you with: if the honeymoon phase isn't the destination — if it's just the opening act — then what actually comes next?
That question — what actually comes after the honeymoon phase ends — is the one The Usable Years spends the rest of its pages answering. Get the book here and start figuring out your own answer before you're the one sitting in that airport chair.
The honeymoon phase isn't the problem. Not having a plan for the morning after is.
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