This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
Today, how to decide when it's the right time to retire.
Retirement is one of life's biggest transitions.
There's a lot of talk about how to prepare for it financially, not so much about what it means emotionally, mentally, spiritually.
The identity part of it.
The who would you be?
That's Steve Lopez.
He's a longtime LA Times columnist and the author of the book out now called Independence Day.
What I Learned about Retirement from Some who've Done it and Some who Never Will see.
When Steve reached his mid-60s, he started to think about retiring, but he wasn't sure how to go about it, when to do it, whether to do it, how to go from someone who loves his job to someone who doesn't work anymore.
So being the journalist that he is, he decided to take this on as an assignment.
He gave himself one year to decide whether or not to retire, and he talked to lots of different people.
Some of them were still working into their 90s, like Mel Brooks and Norman Lear.
Some are happily retired and traveling the world.
Some are unhappily retired and realizing they should have given it more thought before taking the leap.
During the course of researching the book, I didn't know what the ending was going to be.
And so I went from, oh, yeah, I've got to retire, too.
I'll never retire.
Everybody I talked to made, I thought, such a compelling argument.