Retirement Takes Away Your Favorite Excuse
When you’re working, blame is always available. The job, the boss, and the workload stand between you and the life you imagine for yourself.
Retirement removes the target of blame, and that’s the scary part. Every unsatisfying day is now on you. It’s all your responsibility.
When the excuse disappears, you find out the job was never the only thing in the way. The blame had been protecting a flattering story about who you’d be, “if only.”
Retirement calls that bluff.
As Dan Haylett wrote in The Retirement Fix newsletter, March 29th 2026,
“And that’s scary because it puts all the responsibility on you, there’s no external enemy anymore, no system or boss or workload to fight against, it’s just you and your choices and your life and if it’s not working you can’t blame anyone else.”
Every complaint about the job, “if it weren’t for work,” smuggles in a fantasy of what you’d do with the freedom. When there’s no more job, you now have no one else to blame when that fantasy doesn’t become reality.
The Job Wasn’t an Obstacle. It Was an Alibi.
For many years, I worked as a sole practitioner with my own legal practice. I often blamed the time I needed to spend at work for not exploring the outdoors more.
I imagined that if I wasn’t working, I would have spent a lot more time hiking and backpacking, going on longer-distance hikes. I just didn’t have time because of the damn job.
The assumption was that if I didn’t have the job, I would have spent much of my time outdoors exploring the local area. The job, in that case, wasn’t only an obstacle. It was actually an alibi.
What I Actually Did When the Job Finally Disappeared
The big reveal comes after you retire. You find that when the excuse of a job disappears, the job was never the only thing that was in the way of your fantasy life.
When my job finally vanished for good, I didn’t become the relentless explorer I imagined. I hiked more for a few years, then settled into more of a homebody routine: writing my blogs, working from my computer, staying home more by choice. I still enjoy hiking, but it’s not my main focus in life or work like I thought it might be.
The job hadn’t been the only obstacle. My own preferences were.
Guilt as Information, Not Indictment
My blaming work had been protecting a flattering self-image: the outdoor explorer who was never quite the real me. Some of the obstacles were me, my real, quieter preferences. The blame had been protecting a story I had about who I’d be “if only.”
Losing the excuse produced guilt, not relief, because it revealed that this is who I am when I have choice, and that what I thought I wanted to do was partly untrue. The blame had been guarding a flattering self-portrait. Retirement pulled the frame off it.
This is guilt as information, not indictment. The discomfort is realizing that an old self-image is dissolving: fantasy Jim, outdoor explorer, always out seeing the world; Real Jim, a homebody and writer who builds a life around home.
Neither is wrong, but only one of them is actually me, and I couldn’t see it until the excuse was gone.
The reason the fantasy fails is that the person who made the plan and nursed the blame isn’t the person who shows up in retirement. You can’t blame the job for keeping you from a life the real you wouldn’t have chosen anyway. See my recent article: I Made A Retirement Plan for a Stranger: Me.
No One to Blame Is Also No One Holding You Back
After the reveal comes the reframe. “No one to blame“ and “no one holding you back” are the same fact, but two faces of that fact. That’s your opportunity to pivot from fear to opportunity.
It’s now possible for me to be open to doing new things that give me meaning and purpose, as opposed to dreams that I held on to while I was working.
While it’s scary, once you work through that scariness, it opens up so many more opportunities, perhaps in different directions than you thought it might.
You Don’t Have to Become the Person You Imagined
The version of you who nursed the blame and made the plan was doing his best with a story that turned out to be partly untrue.
You’re allowed to let him go. The homebody, the writer, the quiet builder of a life around home — whoever the real you turns out to be — deserves a retirement designed for him, not for the stranger you thought you’d be.
Start there, and the fear starts turning into something that looks a lot more like freedom.
Note: I wrote this blog post myself using my own words and thoughts for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, images and text improvements.
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