I've been on a 1-year sabbatical as of 4 June 2021. Not the exact same as early retirement but I bet the motivations / experiences probably have parallels. I'll note my own responses as someone 1-month into a period of no work:
> Let’s talk a bit about the idea of loss. Having a sense of loss is not restricted to things that you like or love.
I don't feel that much yet, but intuitively I see how it might creep up in the coming months.
> When most people ask you what you’re going to do with your free time, they typically see you sitting at home, alone, in an empty space.
Personally, I absolutely do not have that problem and is probably why I knew I could take the leap. There is SO much that I want to do and work on, I don't even think a year is enough time.
> folks who cruise into post-employment life with a firm vision of how things are going to look tend to do better.
One thing that's helping me a lot is that I pick a focus for each week. Last week I worked on my grandpa's autobiography (he told me stories and I turned it into a coherent chronological text and I'm now in the process of making a website out of all the stories, supplemented with historical photos). One week is a decent amount of time to make progress and then by the end of the week I start to get bored and get to transition to something else which keeps it exciting and fun. I also lined up a long list of goals before the sabbatical started.
> My favorite method was created by Ernie Zelinski, author of several early-retirement lifestyle books.
I'm not seeing anything on this author. Does anyone have a link to his most popular work?
> We sort of know what we want to do, but when given a full day with no obligations, it’s common for us to fritter hours away.
So far, this is not as much of a problem for me as I expected. It's not hard to focus on things that are interesting to me. I'm actually more aware of wasteful habits (Instagram, HN) because I know that I only have a year to really do all this sabbatical stuff.
The TL;DR is that it was great for the first few years. He started diving deep into his writing passion and notes that he was very happy. Later, his writing hobby slowed and his partner became increasingly dissatisfied with their retirement lifestyle. Sadly, he talks about slowly losing friendships, losing interest in his writing, and eventually losing his marriage over FIRE-related lifestyle choices. I'm sorry it didn't work out for him, but it's an interesting contrast to this prior post about how he imagined his FIRE lifestyle.
Some of that is probably just the age-group. I've become disconnected from many of my friends over the past 10 years as well, and I certainly haven't retired.
> Let’s talk a bit about the idea of loss. Having a sense of loss is not restricted to things that you like or love.
I don't feel that much yet, but intuitively I see how it might creep up in the coming months.
> When most people ask you what you’re going to do with your free time, they typically see you sitting at home, alone, in an empty space.
Personally, I absolutely do not have that problem and is probably why I knew I could take the leap. There is SO much that I want to do and work on, I don't even think a year is enough time.
> folks who cruise into post-employment life with a firm vision of how things are going to look tend to do better.
One thing that's helping me a lot is that I pick a focus for each week. Last week I worked on my grandpa's autobiography (he told me stories and I turned it into a coherent chronological text and I'm now in the process of making a website out of all the stories, supplemented with historical photos). One week is a decent amount of time to make progress and then by the end of the week I start to get bored and get to transition to something else which keeps it exciting and fun. I also lined up a long list of goals before the sabbatical started.
> My favorite method was created by Ernie Zelinski, author of several early-retirement lifestyle books.
I'm not seeing anything on this author. Does anyone have a link to his most popular work?
> We sort of know what we want to do, but when given a full day with no obligations, it’s common for us to fritter hours away.
So far, this is not as much of a problem for me as I expected. It's not hard to focus on things that are interesting to me. I'm actually more aware of wasteful habits (Instagram, HN) because I know that I only have a year to really do all this sabbatical stuff.
[1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/prologue