Maybe I’m Retired. I Just Don’t Like the Word.

The other night we had several friends over for dinner.

All of them were “retired.”

Retired from careers. Retired from long routines. Even retired from 30 years of competitive tennis.

And yet, listening to them talk, I was struck by how alive they sounded.

One friend is finally reading all the books he has wanted to read for decades. Another still practices as a psychologist, but now in a way that feels more intentional and fulfilling. A third has built an entirely new rhythm of life — deeply involved with a museum, learning Spanish, experimenting with AI, exploring what else she can become.

There was joy in the conversation.

Curiosity.
Movement.
Expansion.

Not retreat.

And somewhere during dinner, I found myself wondering whether my husband Andrew and I are actually “retired” too — we just refuse to use the word.

Because if retirement means freedom to design your days around meaning, learning, relationships, contribution, creativity, and adventure…then perhaps we already live there.

We still run our business.
We are writing new books.
I’m speaking across North America — in fact, I’m heading to Canada today.
We travel constantly and have explored more than 40 countries.
We read voraciously.
Ride our e-bikes.
Spend time with family and friends.
Build new ideas.
Learn new technologies.
Stay endlessly curious about what’s next.

So what exactly would we retire from? Much less to?

Perhaps this is why the word itself has always unsettled me.

Words matter.

The language we use shapes the stories we tell ourselves. And the stories we tell ourselves shape the lives we create.

For many people, “retirement” still implies stepping away, mostly from “work.”

But also:
Away from relevance.
Away from contribution.
Away from ambition.
Away from growth.

But increasingly, I meet people who are doing something very different.

They are redesigning.
Reimagining.
Reallocating.
Reprioritizing.

They are not ending their work lives and moving into new stages.
They are editing them.

As a corporate anthropologist, I often observe that culture teaches us how to move through life stages. For generations, retirement was presented as a finish line — work hard, stop working, disappear quietly into leisure. Ah, that time sitting on the porch,; playing with the grandkids; enjoy lunch with friends.

But perhaps that model no longer fits all of us and who we are becoming.

Maybe this next chapter is less about retiring and more about choosing. My husband called his “rewiring.” But I like thinking about our freedom to now choose our life:

Choosing what deserves our energy.
Choosing how we spend our time.
Choosing relationships over status.
Curiosity over routine.
Meaning over momentum.

Maybe the problem is not the stage itself.

Maybe it’s the word.

And perhaps the better question is this:

If you removed the word “retirement” altogether…what would you call the life you are living and creating now?

Your thoughts?

Maybe the biggest challenge is not learning how to retire.

Maybe it is learning how to describe ourselves once work is no longer the primary lens through which we define who we are.

So let me ask you:

If you removed the word “retirement” from your vocabulary entirely…
what would you call this stage of life?