We’ve turned the simple act of being alive into an extreme sport.

It feels as though retirement comes with a performance review.

Hello Friend!

This week’s digest circles around one idea: the strange pile of expectations waiting for us once we retire.

Apparently, we are still supposed to be doing retirement correctly.

We are expected to stay productive, stay interesting, stay active, reinvent ourselves, discover a new purpose, and for the love of God, take up pickleball.

Here is this week’s digest of the articles I wrote over the past seven days.

FEATURED ARTICLE: We Are Not Projects Awaiting Completion

Retirement is supposed to free us from some of the expectations that governed the rest of our lives.

Instead, we seem to have invented an entirely new set.

That is not self-improvement.

That is self-return.

We’ve turned the simple act of being alive into an extreme sport.

This morning I pulled out a notebook and started doing something I used to do years ago. I call it a brain drain.

I write down whatever is rattling around in my head. No structure. No grammar. No trying to make it profound. No turning it into content. I just let the thoughts fall out of my head and land on the page.

And it occurred to me how rare that has become.

We have managed to turn almost everything into a technique.

Even breathing has instructions now. Sleeping has protocols. Walking has targets. Resting has methods. Eating has systems. Thinking has systems. Healing has systems.

Somewhere along the way, we turned the simple act of being alive into an extreme sport.

There is always something we are supposed to be improving. Our bodies need optimizing. Our mornings need optimizing. Our sleep, diet, thoughts, relationships, finances, homes, wardrobes, and spiritual lives all apparently require constant renovation.

It feels as though we turned simply living into an extreme sport!

There is always something we are supposed to be improving. Our bodies need optimizing. Our mornings need optimizing. Our sleep, diet, thoughts, relationships, finances, homes, wardrobes, and spiritual lives all apparently require constant renovation.

God forbid a woman should wake up, drink her coffee, look around at her imperfect little life, and decide she is having a perfectly good day.

There is an enormous amount of money in making people feel perpetually unfinished. If we became content with ourselves, entire industries would break out in a cold sweat. They need us to believe that ordinary discomfort is evidence of personal failure. They need aging to feel like an emergency, contentment to look like laziness, and a decent life to seem like the embarrassing first draft of a much more impressive one.

Then! they sell us the solution. There is always another program, product, expert, supplement, routine, revelation, or six-step plan promising to lead us to the pot of gold at the end of the self-improvement rainbow. The pot of gold keeps moving because it has to. The moment we arrive, the selling stops. So the finish line is quietly moved again. We lose the weight, but now we need muscle definition. We heal one wound, but somebody discovers another one buried beneath it. We finally learn to rest, and then resting becomes another skill we are expected to master correctly. Even relaxation gets a performance review.

I don’t believe most people are naturally miserable. I believe we have been trained to distrust contentment.

We have been taught that accepting ourselves means we have given up and that enjoying our lives before everything is fixed demonstrates a troubling lack of ambition. Women have been especially well trained in this nonsense.

For most of our lives, somebody has been standing nearby with a measuring tape. Were we pretty enough, thin enough, agreeable enough, accomplished enough, maternal enough, desirable enough, useful enough? Then we reach retirement and discover the measuring tape is still there. Now we are expected to age successfully, remain productive, reinvent ourselves, find our purpose, preserve our youth, heal our past, and demonstrate that we are still relevant.

Apparently, simply being alive is no longer sufficiently impressive. Optimization does offer something seductive: the illusion of control. If we can fix enough things, surely life will stop frightening us. Surely we can protect ourselves from rejection, regret, illness, uncertainty, aging, and loss.

But life never signed that contract. No morning routine can make us immune to being human. No amount of inner work will guarantee that nothing painful ever happens again. There is no final, gleaming version of ourselves who will never feel confused, tired, lonely, angry, insecure, or afraid.

And when the promised transformation fails to deliver permanent peace, we rarely question the promise. We assume we didn’t work hard enough. That is the racket.

This is also why I want to be very clear about what I am doing here.

I write to encourage women to reclaim parts of themselves they may have set aside for decades. That is not the same as telling anyone she needs to be fixed. I am not standing here with another measuring tape. There may be absolutely nothing wrong with a woman’s life, and still she may feel a quiet discontent she cannot name. It may not mean her life is broken. It may mean there is something within her that never got its turn. A dream she postponed. A curiosity she stopped following. A part of herself that became inconvenient while she was raising children, earning a living, caring for other people, holding a marriage together, or doing whatever life required of her.

Reclaiming that part does not mean blowing up the life she has now. It does not even mean pursuing the original dream exactly as she once imagined it. She may no longer want the thing itself. What she may still want is the essence of it. Perhaps the old dream represented freedom, creativity, adventure, recognition, beauty, independence, or the sheer pleasure of making something that belonged only to her. She can bring that feeling into her life now in a form that fits the woman she has become.

That is not self-improvement. That is self-return.

I am not interested in convincing women that their lives are inadequate. I am interested in reminding them that contentment and desire can live in the same house. A woman can be grateful for her life and still want more color in it. She can love who she is and still wonder what else wants to come alive. She can enjoy retirement without declaring that every longing she carried into it has expired.

Growth born from curiosity feels entirely different from improvement driven by self-rejection. One says, “Who I am right now is unacceptable.” The other says, “There is more of me I would enjoy experiencing.”

At 71, I refuse to spend whatever time remains treating myself like a condemned building under perpetual renovation. I am not a project awaiting completion. I am not the rough draft of some future, superior woman. And neither are the women for whom I write. Nothing has to be wrong with us before we are allowed to reach for something that makes us feel more alive. We are not fixing ourselves.

We are remembering ourselves. And bringing some of those long-neglected pieces home

Anyway, if you like the idea of creating a retirement that feels more like your own life and less like somebody else’s list of expectations,

And you don’t want to spend these years being told what you should be doing, fixing, improving, or becoming,

You should become a paid subscriber to The Daily RE-Wire and join me for more conversations about reclaiming the parts of yourself that still want a turn.

And because I just turned 71, I’m celebrating with 31% off an annual subscription for a limited time. Paid subscribers get access to exclusive essays, community discussions, and behind-the-scenes deep dives into creating a vibrant, creative life after sixty. And of course don’t forget about the PREMIUM CONTENT LIBRARY = Free content and rescource guides for paid subscribers.

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Also this week...

There’s No Gold Medal for Best Retired is about the absurd pressure to perform retirement like another achievement.

Please Stop Handing Me a Fucking Pickleball is about the equally absurd assumption that there is one approved way to enjoy this stage of life.

Please Stop Handing Me a F*cking Pickleball Paddle

Both come back to the same thing: retirement is not another role we have to perform well.

It is ours.

And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.