I don't know know what my status is these days.
I have been joking for a while that I'm 8 years into a 5 year retirement
program: when I turned 60, I told my Board that I wanted to retire by
65. I repeated that every year. I turned 68 in April and I'm not quite
retired.
When I'm feeling generous, I say that I'm on sabbatical: we lost a big
customer last December with a concomitant revenue hole. I volunteered to
take an unpaid leave so that my team could finish building some new
products without disruption (the alternative was to lay off a couple of
people and for me to try to jump back into day-to-day engineering
management). I expected it to last a couple of months; it's been six.
I am very much enjoying the lack of schedule pressure, and the freedom
from a constant tempo of meetings (and especially freedom from an
unending stream of petty HR/personality issues). But I feel more and
more detached from the company and team that I built.
I miss the paychecks, though. I wasn't quite ready to give that up.
I'm spending my time woodworking and sorting through my house contents -
after over 40 years - thirty in this house - I'm moving away from
Silicon Valley to Cascadia.
I suspect that I will be asked to return soon. It will be interesting to
see how I respond.
On 6/14/26 12:02 AM, Nandkumar Saravade via Silklist wrote:
I retired from a full-time, executive role in May 2021. After that I
do part-time advisory and board roles.
This is very flexible in its time utilization, light in terms of
delivery pressures, and more diverse I terms of the problems to solve.
Not to mention more remunerative.
I have mentored a start up, started writing more, spending quality
time with the family, become fitter and traveling more.
Retirement can be a better phase of life. So much more to do and so
much more time to do it in.
On Sun, 14 Jun 2026 at 11:28 AM, Ingrid via Silklist
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 14 Jun 2026, at 10:32 AM, Udhay Shankar N via Silklist
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 14, 2026 at 9:04 AM Deepak Misra via Silklist
<[email protected]> wrote:
I *"retired" *almost half a decade back, but prefer to refer
to myself as unemployed. I imagine (most probably wrongly)
that I will get sympathy when people hear this but the bigger
point is that internally the word retirement has a finality
about it tends to influence your thinking internally. What
does retirement mean anyway?
As I said in the earlier thread, my definition of retirement is
to do the stuff I've always done, without stressing over getting
paid for it.
By that definition, I've been retired for several years. This
does require that your daily needs can be met (if required)
through other means, such as income from investments.
One interesting learning is that NOT caring too much about
getting paid gives you the ability to say no to assignments which
will stress you in other ways - starting with the ability to
recognize such assignments.
Udhay
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I retired i.e. no longer do any work for money, three years ago
after a career that spanned the private sector, the non profit
sector, and the academy.
The greatest boon of retirement for me is having absolute control
over my own time. It was only after I retired that I realised that
we lose control over our time at birth and almost never recover it.
I continue to serve on a number of nonprofit boards, teach in a
couple of programmes for nonprofit leaders, write on the sector,
and am currently writing a book telling the stories of some of
India’s most impactful nonprofit organisations. These engagements
permit me to continue to stay in touch with, and have some
influence on, the sector’s evolution.
I’m able to fully indulge my love of live music across genres, to
travel at a more leisurely pace, to support my fiercely
independent 86 year old Mum’s limited needs, and to finally spend
time with my husband of 37 years, a practice we learned during the
pandemic.
The joys of being able to choose how, with whom, when, and why one
spends one’s time are, to me, unbounded.
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