I’m Not Employed, but I’m Contemplating Retirement
The freedom of freelancing means I can always unretire if I want to
My grandfather didn't get a gold watch when he retired. He got a poem.
An electrician by training, Pappaw had served as the maintenance man at a small Mississippi hospital. At his retirement party, some coworkers presented him with a poem called "Ode to John Ray." It hangs on my office wall today, and I still smile at this couplet: "Dressed in a uniform, neat with tie/Forgive us, oh Lord, for one more lie."
My father also didn't get a gold watch when he retired, nor did he get a poem.
My father also didn't get a gold watch when he retired, nor did he get a poem. (That's a shame since Dad's colleagues in the English Department at the University of Mississippi might have written a good one.)
No Gold Watch, Again
Now that I'm nearing 60, retirement lies in my (more or less near) future, and I will extend the family tradition of not getting a gold watch. That's fine; I'd rather have an Apple Watch Ultra 2 anyway. I also won't get a poem unless I write it for myself.
I've been a freelance writer since 1998, so I don't have an employer to give me a watch or colleagues to write me a poem. My clients are spread from coast to coast, as are my fellow writers. Some of these folks I have only seen in person thanks to Zoom or a similar service. Others I have only traded emails and texts with. (I'm still amazed that people will pay me thousands of dollars without having had a single phone conversation.)
I could retire by simply ignoring emails, turning down assignments and changing my LinkedIn headline to "Retired at Retired and Loving It." Or maybe "Gone Fishin'," as my grandfather would doubtless have written. But I'm honestly not sure how I feel about my career ending not with a bang but with a whisper, to misquote T.S. Eliot.
Going from working to not working would be almost as easy as changing the channel on the TV.
I'm not alone. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 25% of journalists are self-employed, as are 62% of people in the "writers and authors" category. That means a bunch of Americans will be in the same situation as me as they near retirement age. My professional organization, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, even holds virtual coffee chats for members who are retired or thinking about it.
As I've contemplated retirement over the last eight months or so, I have discovered three truths (besides the fact that I won't get a gold watch or a poem). First, for freelancers like me, retirement doesn't come with the rituals that full-time, in-person workers enjoy or endure. There's no office to clean out, no laptop to turn in, no exit interview to complete. No one is going to turn off my badge or shut down my email account. I can stop working when I choose, or I can keep working as long as I choose (or until my fingers forget how to type).
Which brings me to the second truth I've discovered: retiring as a freelancer will probably look a lot like working as a freelancer. Having worked from home since 1998, I'm accustomed to smoothly shifting from work mode to family mode and back.
My wife and I have the five cutest grandchildren on the planet — you could look it up! — and it feels totally normal to go from pushing kids on a backyard swing to dialing into a Zoom call, throwing on a collared shirt along the way, of course. So going from working to not working would be almost as easy as changing the channel on the TV. Ditto if I decide to ramp up my writing in the future.
Speaking of the future, the third truth I've learned is that there's no map for the road ahead. That means I need to spend some time contemplating what's next. At the moment, I'm leaning more toward unretirement than full retirement. As a first step, I've started turning down projects that don't interest me or that aren't worth the hassle, while pursuing new work that is meaningful and worth the time. (Next Avenue obviously made the cut.)
I'm hoping this approach leaves space for me to dabble and to dream. In fact, I'm looking at 2024 as a sort of gap year. I'm exploring my options and contemplating both how much I will keep writing in retirement and how I will fill up the free time as I scale back.
Who knows? I may even try my hand at poetry. I could do at least as well as the writers of "Ode to John Ray."
