Losing my sense of purpose past my 50th birthday
My wife and I are 50 years old; we are in good health. 1 of our children just started working after graduating from NUS, while the other will be starting his 3rd Year there soon.
We have sufficient savings and investments to contemplate retiring in the next 1 -2 years. Our home is fully paid for and we have another property that is giving us a good monthly rental.
We should be relatively stress free, and thankful that we may stop working pretty soon. Why then do I feel rather empty inside?
Is it common for those past their 50th birthday or near retirement to feel this way? It’s as if I have nothing to look forward to except for my children’s wedding and having grandkids. Is this part and parcel of ageing?
Netizens’ comments
- Yeap it’s pretty normal. My parents went through it a couple of years ago when my Dad was 55 and my Mom was 47. It was especially hard for them because they grew up poor and only started accumulating wealth in their 30s and worked their asses off and had no hobbies.
My Mom started focusing more on her career and moved to a more hectic job and started a side hustle buying and selling handbags. My Dad stayed at his current job which was pretty chill and started reading more, taking skillssfuture courses, cycling, and developing an interest in euthanasia of all things. - Sign up for stuff to never imagine yourself to do. I’m relatively unfit and old with kids like you. I signed up for an ultra marathon overseas to challenge myself. I spent time training researching, watching videos I never knew existed, learned about gear I never knew existed, made friends along the way and boy is this more fun than ever.
- My dad retired at about 55. He then went on to do a bachelor’s degree in TCM. Then tried to get a PhD but kept failing his thesis defence lol. Now that they’re empty nesters, my parents just travel around Asia and they’ve been on over 10 trips this year alr.
Your life may be very different now but whether it’s purposeful or boring is what you do with it. - Maybe you spent your life working to have a better life for your family and now that you’re approaching retirement age where everything is actually comfortable, you’re feeling lost?
My aunt and uncle were like that – they both retired fairly at the same time, plus their kids moved out so they kinda became empty nesters. Aunt went full into cooking and baking, uncle went into stocks, biking, gardening, etc.
There’s probably tons of things to do, what you’re really missing is the structured life – wake up, go to work, go home, sleep. Rinse and repeat. You’ll have to dig in and find hobbies you used to do or explore things you were interested in. If it helps, you can set a schedule for yourself – from x to y o’clock work on this, from y to z o’clock go there and do that.