Retirement isn't supposed to be anything in particular. As commonly understood, it is a flawed concept at best. The only real retirement is death.
Our lives are a continuum, not a serious of connected sections with arbitrarily delineated sections.
Retirement, in its commonly used sense is actually a euphemism for 'no longer in paid employment'. As such, it is an extremely false delineator of a point in one's life.
Conditioning is insidious and powerful. Words and their definitions are powerful influencers which, all too often create false expectations or understanding. In my view, the way that retirement is used and understood contributes to the misconception of a sudden cessation of usefulness or even capacity.
In many societies and life-styles such a concept has little or no meaning. Activities for survival needs continue from childhood to either incapacity or death and all, small or large are valued.
As you suggest, how one uses one's time after "retirement', is what will give worth and satisfaction to that time in your life, just as it will during any time of unpaid employment.
Unfortunately, whilst retirements is generally seen as a deserved and privileged time by our society, being without paid employment when under the arbitrary age mandated for retirement is most often demeaned in association with laziness, lack of contribution, dependence on others or entitlement.
Such views of both are flawed. Life is a sandwich, with birth and death as its container and life between as its filling. Just as birth and death can be difficult or straight-forward, painful or comfortable, distressing or welcome; the same is true for the various ingredients that make up our lives, the filling.
Yes, at times, those ingredients may be stacked neatly in a particular pattern or order but just as often they will be a mixture that brings differing ingredients together creating a variety of tastes and flavours, some delightful, some much less so or even distasteful.
Hunger, scents, convivial company or even a recollection of how one enjoyed a previous sandwich of a particular sort can produce a magic of anticipation, just as first taste of some new variety may produce trepidation, hesitation or even reluctance but, if the challenge is accepted, often give amazing pleasure4 and delight at the new sensations experienced.
So are the moments in life, including when faced with times lacking paid employment. They, as you rightly say, offer all manner of opportunity for new and productive experience and to connect them with absence of activity, lack of capability, wasting of time or other negative notions is to fall into that trap of conditioned falsehood.
I was mandatorily retired at the age of 65. Since that time I estimate that I have been more productive, contributory and engaged in life - as opposed to its often unrecognised but deceptive substitute, paid work.
My feeling is that it would be beneficial if society and individuals within it, were to alter thinking about life in segmented terms and more often than not, economic ones, and re-adjust our perceptions of the relative value of how we live and contribute. It just may produce a more stimulating and peaceful - even more productive - world, where compassion, caring and contribution become the true delineators of success, as opposed to weath, fame and power.
