About These Posts

Each day I add a new journal entry to my social media feeds. Here, I take that day’s entry and expand it through the lens of my Good Life Creed, which you can read about in my book Going Alone (available for free on this website). These dissections aim to connect ordinary reflections with the enduring objectives and principles of the Creed.

Journal Entry (10/04/25)

I woke this morning remembering it’s Saturday—and felt glad. Being retired during the week sometimes feels like showing up to a party too early, standing beside a full punchbowl before the other guests arrive, before the real energy begins. The weekdays belong mostly to the old and to mothers with small children. They’re fine company, but it isn’t quite the same as when the rest of the guests arrive to share the day.

There’s a quiet charm in the midweek world—the parks, lanes, shops, and cafés left to that permanent yet ever-changing class of retirees and mothers with small children. Still, it can feel like standing by the punchbowl, waiting, and realizing the company matters more than the punch itself. The rest are away, absorbed in the work and study that fill their days, and it’s only on weekends that the balance returns. By Monday, things settle again into the weekday rhythm. Yet Saturday mornings carry the joy of reunion, when we wake and remember: today, everyone’s here again.

Dissection

This reflection captures the subtle rhythm of social life in retirement—the quiet ebb of weekdays and the returning tide of shared company each weekend. It reveals how time continues to shape our experience of belonging, even after work and obligation are gone.

The Creed resonates here in three particular ways:

• #Time (The good and effective use of time): Retirement invites a new awareness of how time feels. The alternation between solitude and togetherness becomes part of how one learns to live well.

• #Balance (The Objective of Balance): There’s an easy acceptance in this rhythm—a willingness to find peace both in the quiet of midweek and the joyful reunion of Saturday.

• #Social (The Social Principle): The reflection honors our need for connection. Even in retirement, the instinct to gather endures as one of the deepest sources of human meaning.

Takeaway

The end of work doesn’t end our sense of timing. It simply changes the tempo. Retirement opens a new rhythm between solitude and belonging, where the weekend’s arrival still feels like a kind of reunion—with others, and with life itself.