Retirement Loneliness: The Day My Phone Went Silent and Nobody Called
I was a professional baseball player who became a corporate executive and retired at fifty-five. For two years after retirement, I searched for what to do next. At fifty-seven, I opened a health supplement store — not because I had a grand business plan, but because I needed a reason to leave the house and because my own health journey had taught me things worth sharing. Now, at fifty-nine, I am writing this from the other side of that silence. The morning after I retired, I woke up at 5:47 AM. Not because I set an alarm. Because my body did not know I was done. Thirty years of waking before six had carved a groove in me so deep that even freedom could not fill it. I lay in bed for eleven minutes, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the familiar buzz of my phone on the nightstand. The Monday morning flood of messages. The KakaoTalk group chats lighting up one after another. The emails marked urgent that were never actually urgent but felt like they were. The calendar notifi...
