I've been watching men retire my whole adult life.
My father retired at 63. He played golf three times a week for about six months, then slowly went quiet. The structure that had held his days together for forty years — gone. The identity he'd built around being a provider, a professional, a man with somewhere to be — gone. He didn't know what to do with himself. Neither did we.
He's not unique. I've seen it happen to friends' fathers, to neighbors, to men at church. The retirement party comes and goes. The watch gets presented. The cake gets eaten. And then a kind of slow drift sets in that nobody really talks about.
I don't want that.
I'm 57 years old. Retirement isn't a distant abstraction anymore — it's a real horizon I can see from where I'm standing. And the closer I get to it, the more convinced I am that how you approach retirement matters just as much as how you've saved for it.
The Problem With the Standard Retirement Plan
Most retirement planning is almost entirely financial. Save enough. Hit your number. Cross the finish line. And that's important — I'm not dismissing it. But a savings account doesn't tell you what to do on a Tuesday morning when you have nowhere to be.
The financial industry has gotten very good at helping men prepare their wallets for retirement. Nobody seems particularly interested in helping them prepare their souls.
What does purpose look like when the paycheck stops? What happens to a man's identity when the job that defined him for thirty years is suddenly gone? What does God have to say about any of this?
These are the questions I can't stop thinking about. And they're not questions a financial advisor is going to answer for me.
What I'm Doing Differently
I'm approaching retirement as a beginning, not an ending.
Not a finish line — a starting line. A transition into something intentional, not a slow fade into irrelevance.
Practically, that means a few things for me:
I'm simplifying now, not later. My wife and I have started the slow work of decluttering our lives — not just our closets, but our commitments, our spending habits, our relationship with stuff. The goal is to arrive at retirement lighter, not heavier.
I'm asking God what He wants from this season. That sounds obvious for a Christian man, but I'll be honest — it's easy to plan retirement the same way you'd plan a vacation. Around what you want. I'm trying to flip that. What does faithfulness look like after 60? What does calling look like when you're no longer defined by a career?
I'm dreaming out loud with my wife. We talk about land. A garden. A slower pace. A life built around what actually matters to us rather than what the culture says retirement should look like. Those conversations matter. We're having them now, not the week after I hand in my notice.
I'm documenting the journey. Which is what this site is. I don't have everything figured out. Not even close. But I've found that writing it down — being honest about the questions and the fears and the occasional glimpse of clarity — helps me think more clearly. And maybe it helps someone else feel less alone in the asking.
An Invitation
If you're somewhere near where I am — approaching retirement, or already in it, and wondering if there's a better way to think about this season — I'd love for you to stick around.
I'm not an expert. I'm not a financial planner or a life coach or a pastor with all the answers. I'm just a 57-year-old married man trying to figure out what God has for him in the next chapter.
Come with me. We'll figure it out together.
If you're curious what the Bible actually has to say about this season — and why it never once uses the word retirement — that's worth a read too: What the Bible Actually Says About Retirement.
God bless,
Paul