Goodbye Cubicle, Hello Life!

In July 2025, I reached a crossroads in my career. I had worked for Amazon for the past four years, and I enjoyed my job as a Field Finance Manager for one of Amazon’s warehouses, which are spread around the world. This was the first job where I truly felt like a member of the larger team, and I had a seat at the table, which almost never happens. Finance is more often an afterthought than one of the driving forces behind an operation, so being a member of the site senior management team was a big deal, at least for me. It didn’t make me feel important; it made me feel heard, and I loved my job.

There were cracks in the facade, though. Things were changing, and while at first I didn’t think they would impact those of us in the field, I found out in early 2025 that may not be the case. There was talk of moving the Field Finance Managers from the sites we’ve supported since they were launched to “hubs,” which in the case of my network, were located in Seattle, Dallas, New York City and Nashville. We were then told that in order to receive a promotion or to move to a new position in Finance, we would need to move to a hub.

My husband Chris also works for Amazon, and he is in Houston, where we both were raised and where our family lives. He is a level higher than me, and the idea of me being forced to move to a hub weighed on me heavily. I hoped that by keeping my head down, I could stay in Houston long enough for the idea of hubs died off, but then AI arrived at Amazon, and soon that became the obsession of senior managers.

Artificial Intelligence

When AI became the flavor of the moment, we were pressured to use it for everything, to innovate with it to “improve” our jobs. I felt like it was more like training AI to do my job, not make it better. Rumors began to fly that if you weren’t using AI to do your job, and to develop AI scripts that could make your job easier, you would not be eligible for raises. It began to take a toll on my mental health.

I don’t say that lightly. Between the push for AI, and the push for people to move to hubs, I began to have trouble focusing at work. I wasn’t sleeping and I was having panic attacks about once a week. Finally, in July, I broke down and talked with Chris about the toll it was taking on me, and how on edge I had been for months. He looked at me and said, “So retire. You won’t have to worry about any of that anymore.”

A Plan Forms

We’d known for a while that I didn’t need to work, although we weren’t quite in a position for me to leave at exactly that moment. I still wanted to get my truck paid off before I pulled the plug, and there were a couple of other things that we wanted to do, financially speaking. Still, the idea had merit, and we began looking at the financial impact of me leaving the workforce. It wouldn’t be an “official” retirement in that I won’t be eligible to draw social security for at least five years, so we wanted to be sure the economics would work.

After realizing that we could get the truck paid off by the end of the year, and we would be able to take care of the other financial items we wanted to square away, I made the decision to retire by the end of 2025. I set my retirement date for December 5, 2025, and let my manager know, informally.

We spent the next few months focused on taking care of the financial items we needed to put to bed, and we talked about how great it would be when I was able to stay home everyday. Chris is several years younger than me, so he still has a while to work, and I daydreamed about the complex meals and immaculate house we would have after I was no longer away from home all day, everyday.

The funny thing about daydreams is that all you see is the finished product; you rarely daydream about what it takes to get there.

Retirement, Unmasked

The only person I know who has retired and never went back to work was my dad, and he passed away in 2023. But I remember that about six months after he retired, I asked how he was enjoying it and he responded with, “I don’t know when I found the time to work.” Naturally, I assumed that meant he was enjoying not working, but I didn’t ask if that meant he was enjoying retirement, and it didn’t occur to me to ask him if the transition from working for the prior 40 years to being retired had been difficult. I really wish I had asked him; I might have been better prepared for retirement.

It never occurred to me that there might be a period of adjustment, or any sort of transition from working to not working. I thought it would be natural and easy, something that a person would easily take to, but it is none of that. I have been surprised to find that this is neither easy nor natural, and it feels … wrong. So very wrong, in fact, that I have been dealing with feeling rudderless for the last month, and I thought something was wrong with me. I never thought about doing a Google search on what it’s like after you retire. How hard could it be, right? Not doing anything sounds great!

Wow, That Fell Apart Quickly

Since I retired last month, I haven’t been overly motivated to do much, which was surprising to me. In the past, when I would be between jobs, I would use that time to clean house, take care of the day to day things that needed to be done with the kids, and generally become indispensable to the family. But this time, I wasn’t looking for a job and my two kids are grown. Oddly, I didn’t want to do a deep cleaning on my house, which is something I would do when not working in the past. Like I said earlier, unmotivated and worse, rudderless.

When I finally had the idea to Google “Is there a transition period from working to retirement” I got a ton of hits. I found that I was not in the minority, and that many people have trouble with this new phase of life. Even more surprising for me, I found people who said that it took them two to three years to make a full transition. I found that it takes an average of six months to two years to make a transition from career to freedom, and that a lot of people never fully make it through before returning to work.

I was stunned. It could take me six months or longer to get past this feeling?!

Everything Comes to a Head

Even after doing some research and finding out that it could take at least six months to make the transition to retirement, or perhaps because of it, I felt even more stress at the thought of sitting on the couch for the next five months or more. After all, I had “allowed” myself a whole month to move from working to not working. Now I find it that it could take six months to a year?! I think I was a little ashamed to find out that it could take that long, and I didn’t really want to tell Chris, because for some reason, I had built the narrative in my head that this would violate some “agreement” we’d made about me retiring. I was still putting stress on myself, and the panic attacks were beginning to wear on me.

To be clear, at no point has Chris said that he expected anything other than for me to enjoy myself, and maybe to have some plans for dinner, even if that was nothing more than sandwiches or a frozen pizza. Even though we hadn’t used my paycheck for day to day living expenses, we still want to be somewhat frugal with money, so I do make dinner at home most nights. Chris still cooks on the weekends (he’s an excellent chef, and worked as one professionally for a while several years ago), and we split household chores, so while I’m now doing a bit more in that space, we are still pretty balanced there.

My feelings of failure at retirement have been right under the surface, and it all spilled over yesterday at lunch. We’d gone out for lunch, and I had been feeling restless for a few days, so I wanted an escape from the house. I can’t recall exactly what it is that Chris said, but I could feel the tears start, and I leaped up and went out to the car. Fortunately, we were done with lunch, and we were just waiting for the credit card to come back, so once it did, Chris followed me out to the car and apologized.

I don’t remember what he said, but Chris is usually unfailingly kind to me, so I don’t think it was anything really bad, but when emotions are close the surface, sometimes anything can set me off. I mean, in the state I’ve been in for the last few weeks, I will start crying at commercials (insert eye rolling smilie here). I finally broke down and told Chris about how I’ve been feeling, as well as my concerns. As usual, once he knew what was bothering me, he was able to help me start formulating a plan to work through this transition period. And most of it revolves around hobbies.

New and Resurrected Hobbies

Several of the articles and blogs that I’ve read in the last few days have suggested that to get through the transition, I should start a new hobby. I have considered gardening, and I’m doing the research to get started there. But I have several old hobbies that I am resurrecting too. I have been a quilter for the last 25 years, and I’m finding joy in that again. I love machine embroidery, and I’m getting ensconced in that, too. You can read about my crafty adventures here.

When my kids were babies, I dipped my toes into genealogy research, but I haven’t done anything with it in many years, and I am afraid that I’ve lost some of the documentation I had during moves and purges. I know that my computer records are severely lacking, though I have managed to keep my software updated. I have decided to start that research again, and to build it from scratch. When I first started my genealogy research, I did not have the funding to order records, but I have better resources now.

I also am a decent photographer, and there are many places locally I have never photographed. Several years ago, I started a series on county courthouses in Texas, where some of the most beautiful courthouses were built. I’ve considered a series on churches, so I may start that soon.

I’m sure other interests will surface, and I’ll try them. Some may last longer than others, but I’m a big believer in “You’ll never know if you don’t try.”

Why The Blog?

I am writing this blog to track my progress through the transition from work life to a life of relative freedom. Chris will still be getting up to an alarm clock, and I’ve found that I prefer to get up earlier rather than later, but that could change, I suppose. I want a place to document my journey, and if someone finds this blog and thinks it’s helpful or entertaining, then I will consider it a bonus.

But mostly, this is a place for me to track my progress to a life lived unconstrained by corporate guardrails, schedules, emails and Slack messages. I write this for me, but I welcome others who may be curious about life as a retiree, and those who have already walked the path. Writing is my therapy, and I invite you to draw back the curtain on retirement with me.