Retirement and the Gentle Art of Doing Fuck All
There’s a popular idea that retirement needs to be filled.
You’re supposed to stay busy. Take up hobbies. Learn a language. Join a club. Keep moving. Keep improving. Keep proving, perhaps, that you’re still useful.
I’m not entirely convinced.
Ten years ago, if you’d told me I’d be filming the activity around a bird feeder on a small balcony in the Italian Alps, I’d have assumed something had gone slightly wrong.
If you’d added that I’d be planning a patio garden around pollinators, and had installed something called a “bee hotel”, I’d have been fairly certain things had gone very wrong.
And yet, here we are.
The Working Years
When you’re working, time is not really yours.
Even when you’re not at work, you’re orbiting it. Days are structured around it. Energy is spent on it. Your attention is mostly directed at things that need to be done rather than things that simply exist.
You pass things without really seeing them.
Birds, for example, are just… birds. Background noise. Movement in the corner of your eye while you’re thinking about something else entirely.
If a hawfinch had landed on a feeder ten years ago, I doubt I’d have noticed. If I had, I certainly wouldn’t have looked it up. I’d have had somewhere to be, something to do, something more important waiting.
Or so I would’ve thought.
The Shift
Retirement doesn’t arrive with a dramatic change.
There’s no moment where everything suddenly becomes meaningful and serene. It’s quieter than that.
What you get, mostly, is space.
Time that isn’t already spoken for. Attention that isn’t constantly being pulled in ten different directions.
At first, that space can feel like something that needs to be filled. There’s a slight pressure to “make use of it”, as if unused time is somehow being wasted.
Then, gradually, something else happens.
You stop trying quite so hard.
Doing Nothing
Before I retired, people would occasionally ask the question:
“What will you do with yourself?”
It’s usually asked with a certain tone, as if the correct answer involves a list. Hobbies. Plans. A vague commitment to staying “active”.
I didn’t have a list.
I had a much shorter answer.
Fuck all.
That was the plan.
The first couple of weeks were slightly odd.
Not in any dramatic sense, but there was a feeling that something had been missed. A low-level sense that I’d forgotten to do something important. I’d catch myself thinking there was somewhere I should be, or something I should have already started.
It takes a little while for it to sink in that there isn’t.
Nothing has been forgotten. There is no schedule waiting to catch up with you. There is no consequence for not being “productive” today.
That feeling passes fairly quickly.
After that, doing nothing becomes surprisingly easy to embrace.
I’d been working in one form or another since I left school at fifteen. Decades of being “productive”, turning up, getting things done whether I felt like it or not.
At some point, you’ve probably earned the right to stop.
Not temporarily. Not as a reward. Just… stop.
The interesting thing is that “doing nothing” doesn’t stay empty for long.
Once you stop trying to fill your time, things begin to fill it anyway. Not with plans or obligations, but with whatever happens to be there if you actually look.
Which is how you end up, quite happily, watching birds.
The Small Things
Once you stop filling every gap, things start to appear in them.
A bird lands on a feeder and, for once, you actually see it. Not just that it’s there, but what it looks like, how it moves, how it behaves. You notice that some are cautious, some are aggressive, some arrive like they own the place.
You look one up and discover it has a name you’ve never heard before.
A Hawfinch, as it turns out.
It comes back the next day.
That’s enough to make it a good day.
The same thing happens with other small, previously invisible things. Bees inspecting a hole in a bit of wood. Plants that either thrive or quietly give up depending on where you put them. The way the light changes on the mountains at certain times of day.
None of this is important in any grand sense.
But it’s not nothing either.
Not a Search for Meaning
I’m not doing any of this to give my life meaning.
I think I’ve done enough over the years to earn the right not to have to justify how I spend my time. There were decades of structure, responsibility, and things that had to be done whether I felt like doing them or not.
If I wanted to spend my days doing absolutely nothing, or playing video games from morning to night, I could do that quite happily.
Some days, I probably come close.
This isn’t about self-improvement or becoming a better person. It’s not a project. There’s no end goal.
It’s just what happens when there’s enough space for things to be noticed.
A Different Pace
What changes, more than anything, is the pace.
You’re no longer moving through the day trying to get to the next thing. The day isn’t something to be managed or optimised. It just… unfolds.
And in that slower pace, small things have room to matter a bit more than they used to.
Not in a life-changing way. Just enough to register.
A bird you’ve never seen before turns up and decides your balcony is worth a visit.
That’s all it takes, sometimes, to tip a day in the right direction.
No lessons. No advice. Just an observation.
Retirement, at least in my case, didn’t give me a new purpose.
It just gave me the time to notice things I’d been walking past for years.