If you’re wondering what the next chapter after your career might look like, or you’re already there, this conversation is all about embracing "the after-work" years as a time of excitement and fulfillment.

I sit down with Don Akchin, the author of "The AfterWork: Finding Fulfilling Alternatives to Retirement." We talk about the realities of retirement today, pushing back against the myth that it’s supposed to be an endless vacation. Instead, Don and I talk about why most Americans can’t—and maybe shouldn’t—aspire to a life of nonstop leisure.

Through his own story and research, he shares how retirement can actually be the start of something new: a time for creativity, personal growth, and renewed purpose, whether that’s through volunteering, part-time work, or picking up new hobbies.

Moments

00:00 "Writing Challenges and Support"

05:45 Leisure Doesn’t Equal Happiness

06:46 "Happiness Beyond Financial Planning"

10:16 Earning in Retirement Insights

14:48 Volunteering Options for Everyone

17:08 "Retirement: A New Beginning"

Here are three key takeaways:

• Retirement isn’t the end—it’s a new beginning. As Don shares, most of us have 20-30 years post-career that can be used for growth, contribution, and self-discovery. The idea of endless leisure is neither realistic nor truly fulfilling for most Americans.
• Fulfillment comes from engagement, not just relaxation. Whether it’s volunteering, part-time work, or pursuing a lifelong passion, purpose and connection are central to happiness in our later years.
• It’s okay to take risks. The pressure is off! The “after work” years are an opportunity to explore, make mistakes, and try out new paths without the stakes being as high as before—embrace it.

Email me, Lisa Stockdale, anytime at aginginfullbloom@gmail.com

Aging in Full Bloom with Lisa Stockdale is sponsored by HomeCaire. We believe every patient should get the personalized care they need, in the way they want it. Every caregiver should feel supported, valued, and motivated. We see each person as their own entity, with unique needs, desires, and skills. Our goal is to best support our family as they reach new milestones.

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Listeners, welcome to Aging in Full Bloom. And today our guest is Don Action, who has written a book called the After Finding Fulfilling Alternatives to Retirement. Welcome, Don.

Thank you, Lisa. It's wonderful to be here.

Thank you. When did the book publish?

This September.

So quite recently, like.

Yes.

And sometimes when listeners are listening, they don't know when we recorded, but we are at the 1st of November. So the book is relatively new. And the comment that you wrote to me was you said, I make the case that retirement as a time of non stop leisure, which you call pina colada fever dream, is out of reach for 90% of Americans as well as a waste of 20 to 30 extra years post career that you've been gifted with. So talk to us about. Well, first let me ask a few questions. You have retired, I assume?

I have. Indeed you have.

Okay, that helps because sometimes I have interviewed folks who are writing about retirement and they haven't done it. And then I'm never interested in what they have to say.

I can honestly say I know whereof I speak.

Okay, good, good. That does make a difference. And what have you learned? What can you share with us that will be insightful?

Well, I think what inspired me to write the book in the first place was my own disappointment with my retirement because it was not how I imagined it was going to be.

What did you imagine it was going to be? A pina colada fever dream?

Well, I was thinking of it more like an endless summer vacation.

Okay, fair enough.

That sounded, that sounded really good. And I was just going to sit back and become a novelist, which is what I had been wanting to do since I was a seven or eight year old. And I tried that for the first four years and I found that yes, I could write novels. No, I could not get them published.

I'm sorry, that's not funny.

Yeah, well, it's, it's the odds and, and it's, it's very hard. Yeah. But even more compelling to me was the fact that I had no idea quite how lonely it would be to write for a couple of years at a time and not get any feedback until the end and to, to sustain that effort without knowing if I was writing trash or, or the great American novel. So about the time I had put in four years, I latched onto a, an online coach, a creative coach, and she had formed a group of people who were other creatives and she met on regular basis and gave informational lectures. But more than that, it was also a group and a feedback group so that we had things to Share. And I said, oh, this is great. And I joined up. And within a couple of months, someone in the group said, well, you know this feedback problem.

Maybe you should write shorter stuff. And I said, duh. And why didn't I think of that? And I began writing weekly columns, columns on a substack, a newsletter about aging, which I call the End Game. And I've been doing that for four and a half years now. It's been wonderful because I don't have to wait two years. I get feedback every week from readers who have comments about what I've written. And we engage in a conversation and a dialogue, which is just wonderful. As a writer, you want to know that somebody's reading it and you hope that they're enjoying it.

And that worked for me. So I took that lesson of retirement not being what you think it is. And the more research I did about it, the more I realized that I was not unique. The landscape for retirement had totally changed from what I was expecting. And to be succinct about it, what our grandparents and our parents experienced just isn't there for us unless we have a couple million dollars socked away. And most Americans don't. And as a result, we're not going to have endless leisure. We're not going to be on the golf course, we're not going to be having those pina coladas.

Most likely we will do okay, but quite likely we may have to work part time or we may have to keep working. But what is even more compelling to me is the fact that we're going to live longer. We're going. The odds are that with the medical advances that have been made by the time we reach retirement age, it's not the end of the road at all. We still have 20 or 30 more years ahead of us, and that's just a long time to not do anything or to be engaged in leisure. When most of us are in good mind and good health and have a lot, we can still contribute. So that was the basis for the book.

And I think you make a valuable point, and you can tell me if I'm misrepresenting your words, but leisure does not equal happiness. We think it does. We think it does when we don't have time for it or when we plan for it all year. And the vacation is the two weeks that you get to breathe out of the year, but in fact, it does not. One of the reasons that I ask you to be on as a guest, we get people 10 or 12 emails a week from different topics and One of them is always retirement. There's a lot of stuff about financial planning and blah, blah, blah, and every book has been written about that. But the other thing that caught my attention was that you acknowledge that 90% of Americans do not have the resources to live a life of leisure for 20 or 30 years even if they wanted to. And I'd argue that once you get into it, you're going to find out you don't want to.

That's not where happiness or fulfillment come from. But even if you wanted to, you couldn't. And that resonated with me because, you know, the average American is listening to this podcast, not someone who even has had the opportunity to plan for retirement for many, many years and has the financial piece all gift wrapped. So thank you for acknowledging that. So many people do not. I don't know why, but they just gloss right over it. So you found your jam is in writing a weekly column. Yes, that's what I'm hearing, exactly.

Okay. And I also love that you make this point that writing is a lonely endeavor. Maybe because my son is a writer and he's doing the whole novel thing, and sometimes I just want to shake him and say, don't you understand this is lonely? We need feedback. We need to be engaged and connected and socialize with other people. And, yeah, writing a novel doesn't always allow for that. So tell me about your weekly column. What was the last topic you wrote on?

The last topic that I wrote on, gosh, let me think about it. I just. I just found it today. Oh. Was about wisdom and whether as we get older, we attain it or not.

Do we?

It all depends. The. The opportunity to attain it is that we have a lifetime of experiences to draw from. The question is, what do we do with it? Do we reflect on those experiences and draw some lessons out of them for ourselves, or do we just let them by and make them stories? And that seems to be the difference.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Not everyone who's older has wisdom to share. Maybe they have wisdom and they don't want to share it. I don't know. Or maybe they actually didn't. They're not wise. So that's another.

Yeah, my. My final comment on that is that we can be wisened and still not be wise.

Yeah, true. True enough. True enough. So what else do you want us to know about the book?

Well, here's. Here's what I think is the key here. Retirement has always been about the end of the road. And what I. I don't call it Retirement, I call it the after work, because to me, it's not the beginning of the end at all. It's the beginning. It's the beginning of something new and exciting if we wanted to use it for that. And what has changed everything is the fact that we're living these longer lives.

It really has. Well, first of all, on the negative side, it's made retirement unaffordable, because if you're saving for 10 years, it's fine, but if you're saving for 30, it's really a problem. But on the other hand, when you have that much time in front of you, why not start something new?

Yeah.

Why not build on something you've always wanted to do since you were a child? And it's a great opportunity.

Yeah. When I started, not this podcast, but a live radio program that I used to do prior to the podcast, and now we've been doing the podcast. How long have we been doing this, Brett? Seven, eight years. But people used to worry about were they going to outlive their money. And the answer is yes. Now we know the answer is yes, you probably are. So might want to be thinking about ways to earn money in retirement. Maybe ways that are more fulfilling than what you previously did, or ways that are as fulfilling if you were lucky enough to do something that you loved well.

And as you pointed out, Lisa, I have a book that has nothing to do with finances. And for a long time, retirement planning was a synonym for financial planning.

Yes.

And it does not have anything to do with the. The emotional or the psychological changes that you can come to expect when you retire. They are very hard to see in advance. I can. I can testify to that. You have to step into it and. And experience it before you realize how very strange it is compared to what you've been doing. And for a lot of people, the transition from a long career to not working at all is.

Is very difficult psychologically.

Yeah.

They find out that they thought they were well organized, but without a secretary, they're not. Or they thought they knew exactly what they wanted to do, but now they're without any structure at all.

Yeah.

And so very often people experience not sure what their purpose is anymore or not, or being guilty that they're not working. And because they've been told all their life that work and productivity is good and laziness is bad, and they even feel guilty about enjoying leisure when they have it. So these are the kinds of issues that come up, and I've tried to delineate some of those so that people are not totally shocked, or if they're already in retirement and they're feeling some of this, they can look and say, aha. So that's what I'm going through. And it's not just me.

Yeah, yeah. So many of these themes are repeating. I just interviewed another author named Tom Marks. So some of what he says is very similar to what you are saying, which makes sense because we are recounting the human experience and there's always. We have much more in common than differentiates us. I'm a firm believer in that. So alternatives to retirement. One of the things that you threw at us in the verbiage that you sent me was this idea of volunteering.

Talk to me about that.

Well, for people who are looking for a reason to get out of bed every day, volunteering serves a lot of important needs. It puts you in contact with other people and. And socializing seems to be very important for longevity. It gives you a chance to work sometimes with people who are younger, which is also useful. And you get a chance to apply skills that you've honed to help an organization that doesn't have those skills and that needs them and doesn't have an easy way to acquire them. There are lots of nonprofits that can use someone who's. Who knows how to put a financial plan together or who knows how to go out and find funds, who can write grants, who can work well with kids, who can figure out why things aren't getting done when on paper they should be getting done and they're not process that sort of thing. All of those skills are very useful.

And even just the ability to be a human being and work with other human beings is something that is very fulfilling or can be.

Yes. And I think when I talk to seniors, older adults, about this notion of volunteering all the time, and so a lot of times they roll their eyes at me and I'm like, well, what do you think it is? You know, what do you. And they don't realize all the options. Like, if you, you know me personally, I'm not going to go read to kindergartners because, you know, their kindergartners aren't my thing. I mean, they were when my child was a kindergartner, but he's not anymore. Now my son teaches school and that's his jam, you know, and he wants me to get involved in that way. And I'm like, could you find me something different? And there are lots of options if you like animals, you know, there are shelters that need volunteers. You can be Pivoting off of your intellect or the success that you had when you, before you were in the after work, when you were in the work.

But not necess. Doesn't have to be that. Sometimes it can just be doing. You can go help somebody build a house, Habitat for Humanity. There's all kinds of options out there. And if you haven't tried volunteering, please do. I think you're going to be amazed at how fulfilling it is when you do something that you enjoy.

And I think some people also use volunteering as a chance to explore other parts of life that they haven't tasted before.

Yeah.

And see if they like them for sure.

And you talk about, or maybe you want to do some part time work in a whole new field. How would you choose the field? Is it something that you've always like had in the back of your mind or.

Well, it could be. Or it could be, you know, that it's a hobby that you've always had and you want to see if you can monetize it. There's pros and cons to that. I mean, I've also talked to people who monetize their hobby and decided that was a mistake and they go back to doing it for the love of it because they didn't, they didn't like turning it into a business that wasn't what they were doing it for. But we all have our own drivers and motivations. But the idea is there's so many, there's only so much life that you've had a chance to experience up to this point and why not open the door to find some different avenues.

Yeah. Yes. I love it. It's a great insight and I hope that our listeners are hearing what you are saying. Retirement isn't the end. It's a new beginning, new opportunities that, you know, like, for me personally, I would like to do something about the homeless situation. I don't have time to work on that right now and I don't have the expertise to know what in the world how to solve that problem. But when I get, when I, when I'm in the after work, maybe I will.

Maybe I will then.

The other thing that I think people need to understand is that it's okay to take risks because there's so little riding on it. You know, when you were an adult and doing adult things, you had to take care of the family and you had to make sure the mortgage got paid and you had to go to work every day and if you failed, my goodness, the world could collapse.

Yeah. There were consequences.

All of those pressures are gone now. You know, hopefully you got your kids out of school, you've paid their financial aid notes or foisted it on them.

Right.

And. And it doesn't matter. And you can make mistakes or you can try something. You can volunteer for an organization and find out it's not a good fit and step away and say, okay, that didn't work. No loss. I'll try something else. Yeah, it's okay. So there's freedom.

It's a great opportunity to make mistakes and not feel bad about making them because pressure is off.

Yeah, there's some freedom to keep learning because. Yeah, we're always learning. All right, Don, what do you want to leave our listeners with?

Well, I just think that they need to know that the after work is not the beginning of the end. It's the beginning of something new and exciting. And I hope everyone takes full advantage of their after work years to find something fulfilling for themselves to do.

Yeah. In the afterwork, do you. And be willing to figure out what that is. You might not know till you get there. Listeners, as always, thank you for listening. Till next time. May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be forever at your back.