A slow start to the third act

What does retirement really mean--to me?

For the past few years, I’d been looking forward—anticipating with eagerness—the moment I would be freed of institutional obligations and responsibilities. Each semester, after the first flush of excitement at meeting a new cohort of students, I would swing between the highs of an engaged and responsive classroom to the lows of wondering what relevance, if any, my teaching had in a world being overtaken by a reliance on the outputs of large language models.

In the Indian public sector, retirement is an automatic rite of passage that comes at a specific age, varying across sectors from 58 to 70, with academics in central universities reaching the point of superannuation at 65. I have colleagues in other parts of the world who have moved into emeritus status long ago but now, pushing 80, are still productive and very visible in academic forums, so clearly age is not a marker for the ability to contribute—intellectually and economically. There’s always been a sense that older people contribute emotionally and spiritually, of course. But age as a marker for anything, as we’ve learned in so many contexts, can be woefully inadequate, often putting people into boxes packaged with stereotypes. But tying retirement to age can build the perception that after this point, people are no longer useful to an institutional project, or an institution’s life, as it were.

While the date of my official superannuation was 30^th September 2025, and I had already gathered a bouquet of emotional accolades from colleagues, collaborators, and students, I had a few weeks more to wrap up my teaching and grading, and clear out my office, so I’d say it was a gradual exit, merging into the December holidays. When I carried the last few boxes out of my room soon after my last working day, almost everyone was away for the break, so even as I sensed a note of finality, there were no goodbyes being said.

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People had been asking, in the months leading up to that day:

What do you have planned?

How are you going to spend your time?

Or commenting:

I have no doubt you’ll be as busy as ever!

There’s no retirement for people like you! (and what kind of people is that?)

To be honest, I had this completely unsupported vision of slow mornings with coffee and the news, reading entirely for my own pleasure or curiosity, a lot of time writing only what felt compelled to write, taking afternoon naps, meeting people I had not had the time to catch up with, binge-watching Netflix without guilt...sounds like the perfect retired life, right? But also, even as I threatened to “quit academia cold” I found the tendrils of long-ago commitments still circling my fingers as I rested them on the laptop: reviews to be completed, chapter revisions pending, a few doctoral advisees yet to defend (and one, to submit), insistent invitations to speak at one event or another, and—most seductive of all—exciting proposals to engage further with ideas I had become invested in during the last few years of my academic career. Clearly, quitting cold was not going to be that easy...perhaps not even possible in the short term.

So, I found myself wondering, can one really think about retirement (in my business of academia at least) as a gated fence that one walks through and clicks shut behind you? Is a clean break even possible? But if one did want to do that, what exactly would it entail, and what accommodations—emotional, psychological, intellectual, and yes, financial—would that require?

I’ve had some conversations with older academics, some of whom carry the “emeritus” tag, and most of them have remained prodigiously active even after their formal retirement, continuing to serve not on committees and such only in their home institutions but also in national and international forums, and writing books, giving talks, and participating in round tables with unbounded energy, intellectual and physical. Clearly the mind does not stop, and it seems that it can will the rest of you to go on, too. One said her emerita status was a comfort, offering some continuity and sense of belonging while releasing her from the tedium of day-to-day responsibility and involvement. Another professor moved to a private university where superannuation is optional, “visiting” to teach and possibly guide research if he so chooses. One other, a dear friend and colleague, chose to “retire” early from a public institution but not from his career, moving on to rediscover the excitement of starting over, in a new place, and possibly, a different set of expectations for and from himself. [I guess that’s not even really retiring.]

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People often talk about the “third act” of life, drawing broadly from narrative structures that move through a three-act structure where the third and final act leads to a climax or denouement. It’s used variously to mean the later years of life, or a shift in career after having been prepared (education, training), achieving some success or consolidation (adulthood, facing responsibilities, meeting challenges), to finally step back (or away?). We could also think of it as “stepping to/ward” something else, and an opportunity to pause and rethink one’s priorities, discover new energies, perhaps. Or bring in all those old desires, hiding like so many lost notes in the crevices of one’s desk that is overrun by books and files governed by the tyranny of deadlines. Finally, an opportunity to do embrace idleness (in the manner of Bertrand Russell) or doing nothing so that we re-capture time from the clutches of meaningless productivity (which Alan Lightman argues for in his book, In Praise of Wasting Time—with a nod to Russell). Both thinkers are not of course proposing that we “empty” our lives of activity, only that we engage more deliberately, slowly, even quietly, in ways that step away from enforced goal setting and the oppressions of what has now become an excessively quantified (and datafied) routine. The third act then becomes an opportunity to reclaim hope, desire, and forms of creativity that may not find expression in what one has seen as a job.

I watched first my father, then my husband, move into retirement with a kind of delight, proceeding from that last day of work into a gentler, slower pace of life that had many of those markers that I thought would populate my own post-university days. Mornings spent doing yoga, taking long walks, or playing tennis (okay, this last definitely not for me). Afternoons led by words that could go in uncharted directions, building stories and essays for the pure pleasure of it, no API scores or citational advantages involved. Evenings with friends and family, the occasional bit of culture that may be on offer in the city. Did that look like my future? Somehow, I had the sneaking suspicion that...maybe...not?

Much of this, of course, has to do with how one can and does use time. Amit Varma, writing recently in the context of a journey undertaken, invites us to think about thick and thin time, made so by the quality of its ‘expenditure’.

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So how have I been expending time, in the early days of this third act of my life? Am I ending up with more ‘thin’ time than ‘thick’?

It’s been close to four months since I cleared out of my office and brought those boxes home. [Confession: no unboxing has happened in this time.] I’m still waiting for the tendrils of past commitments to wither and fall away, but new things have knocked at my door and captured my attention and imagination, despite my original resolve to stay firmly free (something wrong with that phrase? isn’t freedom more about looseness than firmness?). I still spend a lot of time sitting at my desk, fiddling away on my laptop, attending meetings online, taking calls and answering emails—sadly I have not been able to attain Inbox Zero—and of course writing reference letters, and reviewing what seems to be an unending list of manuscripts. I also was able to give myself over to one passion project—the Hyderabad Literary Festival—without having to reorganize classes or manage university duties. And be available much more to family and friends.

I do understand that one does not really retire from the life of the mind—and I don’t think I would wish to do that. I still take great pleasure in engaging with young people about ideas, and still enjoy sharing something I have discovered, without the pressure of whether it is of any consequence or not. But this is—can be—an opportunity to more deliberately think through what brings me joy, or meaning, and try to make time for that.

How much of what I am doing is by choice, and how much of it is imposed or driven by a sense of obligation, I haven’t been able to actually decipher. Rather, I have not had the time to sit down and take stock (as evident from those unopened boxes)—or maybe it’s that I have not allowed myself to sit down and take the time to figure that out. I seem to be tethered to a way of life that demands productivity, that appends guilt to downtime in the real sense. What I mean is, retirement has allowed me to time for other kinds of demands—professional, personal, civic, social—but has it nudged me to think about what might be demands I can make for (and NOT of) myself?

For some listening:

People who’ve “reinvented themselves later in life” are profiled in the National Public Radio (US) series, The Third Act: https://www.wbur.org/tag/greater-boston-new-careers-reinvention

Retirement or Graduation? There’s actually a podcast titled “Humans against Retirement” that considers this question! Be warned, though, the conversation might veer a bit more towards financial planning, which may or may not be your main concern!

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss taps into the wisdom of older women, starting with Jane Fonda, moving through Isabel Allende and most recently, Cindy Lauper, on her podcast “Wiser than Me”. Even as one might note the relative paucity of voices of people of colour or those outside the American context, one can enjoy the banter of these women, many of whom are still considered feminist icons.