Hindsight 10: meaning, purpose, and identity

This is an addition to my hindsight series: things I should've known or needed to know when I first retired.  The "need to know" was exacerbated by the earliness of the retirement.  All I have to say is that people playing the FIRE game should be clear in their minds about what they are doing before they start.  Me? I was winging it and almost got burned. 

This blog  has been mostly about retirement finance, quantitative finance and trading, and some niche areas of financial economics, areas I knew very little about and in which I have had no formal training whatsoever. Hence the claim to amateur status.  The reasons for these interests are manifold and would probably make a good blog post some day. Not today.  Let's just say it is a personal quirk for which I have been criticized and and questioned by real people that are close to me. 

In some respects my critics are correct.  Retirement finance, radically unknown by a lot of people that really should know, is one of those necessary but not sufficient things.  Where the insufficiencies kick in is in an area I touched on in a recent post: meaning and identity.  It can be jarring to go from a structured career to, well to "fuzz." Who am I now? Think cocktail party: "So what do you do?" I never know how to answer that.  At 53 I just got quizzical looks and not zero times a little bit of judgement. Envy maybe too. But there is almost always a quick end to the conversation (except for FIRE candidates that enthuse) because there is no commercial identity and thus no advantage or edge to be explored by those still ambitious enough to look for advantages and edges.  I exaggerate a bit, of course, because I used to work in an aggressive field, but it at least felt like the above at times.  Entering my 60th year, bald and grey, it's a little easier. I'm older, more people understand, and my cohort is starting to look more and more like me.  And all of us in that cohort, if we are honest with ourselves, have probably struggled with the insufficiency I mentioned. Lucky are those that don't.  So, to repeat myself from my last post, this is the list of things above and beyond the retirement-quant stuff I do that I wish I had spent more time thinking about.  I'll give credit to Darrow Kirkpatrick and my twin sister for forcing me to confront this stuff.  Fortunately I am young enough to have a ton of time to work with this. My personal "workplan" and something that is more foresight than hindsight:

1. find and then re-imagine purpose again and again over remaining lifetime,
2. explore the elusiveness of "meaning" as time passes and age overwhelms,
3. re-forge one's ephemeral identity in a continuous process that really has no hard boundaries,
4. travel and learn and grow a personal universe, one tiny increment at a time,
5. throw something, anything, back to community and world,
6. stay healthy, 
7. meet new people whenever and wherever, 
8. foster the essential bonds of: brothers, sisters, children, significant others, and...friends