If you ever want to experience a range of emotions all in a very short time, lose your job. I know because it just happened to me. Hence why I have time to write on a Friday morning.
The details are not important. What is important to me is that this time I was given the chance to say “thank you and goodbye” to my team and other coworkers. When I lost my I.T. job that opportunity was not afforded to me and — more than ten years later — that is the part that still annoys me more than anything. There’s something to be said for being allowed to leave with class, it’s just too bad it wasn’t on my terms and a little earlier than I would have liked.
So…those emotions I mentioned in the opening paragraph? Yeah, they are real and they hit hard and they hit fast. I admit I was in tears before I could get the sentence out of my mouth when telling the first person.
After that hit of sadness? Total euphoria came on the drive home.
Leaving a job is freeing in a way that cannot be described, especially at this age when you are in a position where you don’t necessarily need to rush off in a panic to find new work. As I described it, it is like clocking out to go on vacation, only better. Even on vacation, work has a way of creeping from the back of your mind into your conscious thoughts. In this modern world I don’t know if anyone ever gets to really disconnect from work. There are always emails, texts, calls, or a million other ways for your professional life to intrude on your personal time. In a flash that was all gone. Ten years of stress simply vanished. Even if you don’t feel it, there is a constant pressure that sits on your shoulders when you are employed. Much in the same way the atmosphere surrounds us and we don’t notice it unless it stops being there, walking out of a workplace and away from a job and thinking you might never need to go back is a stress relief almost beyond words.
As Emily drove me home, I gleefully deleted all the company apps from my phone. No more Microsoft Teams, no more Microsoft Outlook. All the email responses I was waiting to get from vendors? Someone else’s problem now. The clients who I was working with on tracking down parts? Sorry to leave you hanging, but someone else will take over it. All the automations I had built and was building using A.I. to give me deep visibility into our operations? I guess I don’t have to care now.
The euphoria continued as I thought about all the things I have wanted to do but have never felt that I had the time. Maybe now I will finally get my office organized and it will stay that way. I will finally have the time to workout and continue my weight loss journey after going as far as I could with diet alone. I will have the time to take longer walks with Mabel as she moves into the later years of her all-too-short dog life. I can get back to learning the ukulele which has been a goal of mine since our Hawaii trip four years ago. That metal model that has been sitting incomplete on my desk for several years? I want to complete it before the end of the year. I’m thinking of picking one room of the house and cleaning it each day. I’ll be able to cook meals and have them ready for Emily when she gets home each night. I’ll even be able to get back to blogging, although I hadn’t planned on transitioning DanOCan.com into a retirement blog. Is blogging even still relevant in 2026 or has everything become short form video now?
As the euphoria faded, a bit of disbelief crept in. We were at a function last night and were making small talk with someone at our table. Discussion turned to gas prices and commuting. I mentioned about our commute in the present tense, as if I was still working. It seemed too early to say “I’m retired.”
This brings me to another thing I have noticed, even though it has been less than 24 hours since the termination letter landed on my desk. People have odd reactions to someone who is thinking about retiring early. Why do we even think about retiring in our 50s as “early”? If you assume you only get eighty years of life, your 50s are already well beyond the halfway point of life. If that isn’t the time to start enjoying yourself, when will be? I get it, the money thing is a challenge. We’re certainly not expecting to live a jet set lifestyle, but that isn’t what has made us happy anyway. Don’t get me wrong, we love to travel and would love to see the world, but we’re just as excited by a road trip to see a forgotten grain elevator on the Saskatchewan prairie. Time is the one resource you cannot buy more of. Instead of questioning why someone who wants to stop working in their 50s and thinking it is odd, let’s flip the script. We should make “early” retirement the goal, the default condition. We should look at someone working into their sixties (or beyond in many cases nowadays) as the edge case, as the one we should feel sorry for.
That’s a lot of thoughts for the first few hours!
The first day of my retirement (there, I said it!) started early. Around 3:30am I awoke and immediately my mind defaulted into work mode. Thinking about the things I didn’t get a chance to complete. Try as I might, I couldn’t flush those thoughts away. I struggled to get back to sleep and then realized something — I don’t need to try and force myself back to sleep. There is no schedule anymore. I don’t need to try and salvage as much sleep as possible before the 6am alarm as there is no 6am alarm. (There will be on the days Emily has to work, but she had today off.) If I want to get up early, I can. If I get tired from it, I’ll simply take a nap in the afternoon. This is a freedom I probably haven’t experienced since I was a kid in school on summer vacation.
Don’t get me wrong though. There has been a little anger that has seeped in now and then. As much as I think I left on good terms and don’t hold any ill-will to the company, that anger still surfaces. I don’t think it is anger directed towards the company, but more anger directed towards myself. I think back on the things I have missed — family trips that I didn’t go on because it was a busy time at work and I felt I was needed there. The great walks and talks of Historic Calgary week which always seem to be happening at a time I couldn’t attend. All the things I willingly gave up for the good of my career when, in the end, my career ended up being just another line item on the expense side of a company ledger. I’ll probably have a lot of advice I’ll share over the coming weeks and months as I go on this journey, but my first official words of wisdom to the people still working: Don’t miss out on the important stuff. Your employer will replace you the day after you leave but you’ll never get back the things you’re missing out on. Sure, I get it — money is necessary and no one wants to do a bad job — but one day you’ll regret it.
Speaking of doing things, I am looking forward to having a social battery again! I have always been an introverted person and work was draining for me. By the time I had reached the end of the workday, I didn’t have a lot of energy left for dealing with people. I wanted to come home and hide in the basement to try and top up my internal batteries. Scheduling things on a weeknight was like booking me for a root canal. As a Scorpio I tend to keep a small group of friends who are really important to me and work was preventing me from truly being able to enjoy my time with them.
So, as of right now, it is pure optimism for what lays ahead. Follow along with me and let’s see where this new chapter takes us.
