My birthdate in the mid-1950s gives it away. Whether I like it or not, I’m a typical mid-century Baby Boomer!

Except for short bursary-related obligations to two employers early in my career, I’ve stuck—true to my generation—with only two employers throughout my entire working life.

Thanks to my academic qualifications and growing experience, I’ve always operated at middle management level or higher. I was consistently in a leadership role—heading up a department, managing staff who reported to me, and reporting to a senior manager myself. That was also the case in the years leading up to my retirement.

My life was typical of a corporate bureaucrat. Once you’re appointed to a position in a bureaucratic work environment, you become a corporate creature. To succeed in that environment, you have to be both a good boss (keeping your team happy) and a good employee (keeping your boss happy).

My performance, my team’s performance, and my boss’s performance were all managed through ongoing performance management processes. Although my employer introduced a new performance management system in the final years before I retired, I (and most of my colleagues, I think) remained quite skeptical about how objective it really was. There always seemed to be some level of subjectivity in how your performance—and that of your team—was evaluated.

Of course, the big benefit of this bureaucratic system is that you get a monthly salary and other benefits—often with annual increases. All that’s expected of you is to perform within acceptable limits and keep both your subordinates and your manager satisfied. In return, not only do your salary and perks grow over time, but so do your status and reputation.

As you climb higher up the corporate ladder, the pressure to consistently perform increases. Your role shifts from being a manager—someone who oversees and adjusts others’ work using established systems—to being a leader, who influences and even inspires others in more creative ways.

Some corporate workers are perfectly suited to this life for the long haul. For some, the salary, status, and perks make it easy enough to keep going all the way to the official retirement age. Others are more ambitious and keep climbing the ladder to increase their income and position even further before they’re eventually forced to retire.

But after enjoying the security of the corporate world for so long, even the thought of retirement can be daunting. How will you live? How will you maintain your standard of living? What about your status and reputation?

Still, once the daily routine, pressure, and challenges start to wear you down—and the job becomes less exciting—retirement starts sounding more and more appealing. You begin to realize your chances of climbing higher are getting slimmer. You get tired of the routine and the constant pressure to perform.

And then one day it hits you: Your job just doesn’t bring you satisfaction anymore. You start feeling like you’ve given so much over the years, there’s nothing useful left to give. You have lost your fire.

That’s when I began to seriously weigh up the pros and cons of retirement. The seed had already been planted! And once I started doing the financial calculations to see whether we’d be able to survive after retirement… well, the decision was basically made.

Thankfully, there’s plenty of information about retirement out there—both online and in books and blogs like this one—so you can learn from the experiences of others.

In the rest of this blog I’ll share my thoughts on what I believe is one of the most incredible experiences in a senior citizen’s life: Retirement!