Unemployment With A Party Beforehand

The cake from my "party beforehand"

One of the books I read shortly after I retired was Stumbling on Happiness* by Dan Gilbert a psychology professor at Harvard University.  In this book Mr. Gilbert says that one of the most traumatic things in the human existence is to be unemployed and that retirement can be seen as unemployment with a party beforehand.

Many times we identify ourselves by our employment.

I am a doctor.

I am a mechanic.

I am a salesman.

I am a welder.

I am a (you fill in the blank).

It gives us a sense of who we are and who those around us are.

But when we say we are retired, what does that mean.  Does it mean we used to be somebody but now we are unemployed?  How are we differentiated from those other unemployed people who are really looking for a job?   Are we different from them only because we were the honorees at a party on our last day of employment?

I like to think that now that I am retired I can be employed if I want to just for the joy of doing whatever it is I am employed to do.  Not because I am trying to make a living (even though any resulting money will be nice), but because I really like doing what I am employed to do.

Or of course I can avoid employment if I would rather.

The way I think about it, before retirement employment was a fact of life not a choice.  After retirement it is a choice.

*Gilbert, Daniel Todd. Stumbling on Happiness. Kindle ed. Random House LLC.