I retired at the start of last year. I'm in my mid-50s. I hang out here much more than I did before retiring as a way to keep up with things. And I comment far

I retired at the start of last year. I'm in my mid-50s. I hang out here much more than I did before retiring as a way to keep up with things. And I comment far more often since retiring. I am glad I retired when I did. I feel like I have less free time than I did in my career - and I was overly busy during my career. But that's because I've filled my time with learning and projects. I've slowly been learning not to put the same pressure on myself to get projects done that I did during my career (that was a real problem when I first retired). As I get better at giving myself some space, things get more fun / fulfilling. Even though it feels busier, it feels far less stressful. My projects are mostly home maintenance / upgrades. I'm also spending some time on code + music... a couple of my friends are musicians who have helped inspire me to learn more on the music side. I enjoy playing with sound synthesis in code. I haven't made anything I'd think of as music yet, but that might come someday. I also volunteered to take over all the tech at our tiny town's all-volunteer library. Little did I know that the previous person had written their own library management web-app in bash scripts, but it's quite robust. The thing I was most afraid of missing before retiring was mentoring. There are specific people I really enjoy mentoring. I talked to one of them about my fear and they asked if we could continue after I retired. It hadn't even occurred to me that there was such an option (of course there is!). So, I do 3-5 video chats a week with mentees (3 are weekly, 2 are monthly, and others are ad-hoc). My rule is that they have to be people I wouldn't take money from - that keeps my retirement honest. And the line between mentee and friend blurs significantly now, which is even better. Those people are keeping me young (they are all 25-35 years old) and reminding me how nice it is to be retired as they tell me about stressful situations at work.