Retirement is something earned through dollars, but spent in time.
How much time depends on when you retire and how long you live. But as MIT AgeLab director Joseph Coughlin has pointed out, two-plus decades of retirement adds up to about 8,000 days. That’s roughly the same amount of time from birth to legal drinking age, from age 21 to midlife and again from midlife to the traditional retirement age of 65.
Essentially, retirement amounts to roughly one-third of your adult life. And with longevity rising, the next generation of retirees may have even more days to fill.
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Not accounting for all that time and planning for it may lead to heightened anxiety and a diminished retirement. It explains why, according to a 2025 Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies survey, nearly a fifth of retirees fear being unable to find meaningful ways to spend their time and stay involved.
The preciousness of time has been a conundrum since antiquity, as Stoic philosopher Seneca observed: "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it."
In other words, time in retirement may need to be planned with as much intention as your money.
Why the time plan matters as much as the money plan
However anticipated, retirement is a transition. It’s a shift in identity, routine and relationships.
Research from the Retirement Coaches Association confirms how often that transition catches people off guard. Roughly 76% of retirees say they’ve seen someone struggle with the transition, 43% say adjusting to retirement was harder than they expected, and 45% say it took longer than expected. Perhaps most striking, 40% of pre-retirees expect their social connections to increase in retirement, but 84% of actual retirees report a drop in social interaction once retired.
"Retirement is empty, meaning there is nothing there, so you have to fill it up with things that are important to you," says Robert Laura, co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association. "If you don’t take an intentional approach to doing this, other things will fill it up — and a new retiree can quickly feel out of sorts. People end up busy, but it’s not meaningful, and it becomes draining over time."
Nancy Schlossberg, a longtime professor and author of Revitalizing Retirement, frames it even more bluntly: "Retirement is not the issue. It’s what comes after."
Build your time plan around what makes you feel you matter
To make the time matter, experts say, comes down to you making yourself matter.
Schlossberg, now 96, has spent decades studying how people navigate transitions. After all that research, she lands on one word as the key to retirement satisfaction: mattering.
"The bottom line is whether you still feel you matter," she says. "It’s feeling that you are still significant, that you are still relevant, that people still listen to you."
In fact, research suggests a higher sense of purpose is linked to various health benefits, including a lower risk of death.
Schlossberg practices what she preaches. She runs a weekly group at her senior friendship center called Aging Rebels, where members discuss the realities of getting older. "Being an aging rebel means you’re going to have disappointment," she says, "but you’re a rebel – you’re not going to give up."
Laura sees the same thing from the coaching side. When retirees lack a sense of purpose, he says, "things get ugly real fast. They lose purpose, feel invisible and feel like they don’t matter."
"[When you retire,] you’re not a new version — it’s more like you, times two." — Nancy Schlossberg
Finding your own path
How you make yourself matter is deeply personal.
"There is no one right way," Schlossberg says. "I have a friend who’s a glider. She has no agenda; she gets up in the morning, and she’s very happy with no schedule. I couldn’t live with that. For some people, it’s having no agenda. For some, it’s a mission. For others, it’s searching for the right niche."
Laura agrees that personality drives the path. "When people retire, they sometimes think they’re going to be a new and better person. But you’re not a new version — it’s more like you, times two." A "Type A" professional, in other words, doesn’t suddenly become someone who takes things as they come.
So, how do you find your own path? Here are two simple exercises that can help:
No regrets exercise: Laura suggests a method you could call the "no regrets" exercise: write down what you don’t want to regret not doing in the next year, three years and five years. "Regrets help highlight what people value," he says. "If we turn a potential regret into an intention, we can help them start moving toward it." A useful side effect, he notes, is that most regrets have little to do with money, which often lowers retirees’ financial anxiety in the process.
Design an internship: Schlossberg, meanwhile, offers an alternative to generic volunteering: design your own internship. Pick a field you’ve always been curious about and create a short-term role for yourself in it. "Find out what someone has been passionate about, or what they think they could be passionate about, and set up an internship," she says. "I’ve seen short-term internships lead into full-time roles."
Whatever path you choose, Laura says, the trap to avoid is mistaking busyness for meaning. "People don’t have a time management issue. It’s usually a priority management issue."
Or as Schlossberg puts it: "The main point is not to give up. You try something, it’s not working — okay, you've learned something. You keep trying until you find what’s right for you."
Next Steps: Develop a Time Plan in Retirement
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