Retirement Rebellion

In 2016, I took myself to North Wales for 30 days of silence.

No phone. No email. No conversation. Just the discipline of sitting with my own life and listening to what kept coming up.

Twelve stories surfaced.

Each one a moment I'd once called a crisis. Each one, looking back, a doorway to who I became next.

Spirit of Gratitude is what came out of that silence. A book about the obstacles we wish hadn't happened, and the lives they made possible.

If you're standing at the edge of something difficult right now, you might find more in here than you expect.

Available in paperback, Kindle and Audible: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Gratitude-Crises-are-Opportunities/dp/1989161154/

I've sat with hundreds of people on the other side of retirement. The shift you've just swiped through is the most consistent thing I've seen.

What surprises me isn't that it happens. It's how rarely anyone is prepared for it. Financial advisers don't mention it. Friends don't mention it. Even the retirees a few years ahead don't always recognise it in themselves.

So they reach the 12-to-18-month mark and assume something's wrong with them personally. Nothing is. They've hit a predictable stage in a predictable arc that nobody charted for them.

That's all this is. A chart.

Where are you in the arc? I'd be curious to hear in the comments.

I’ve never believed retirement should be treated as the finish line.For me, it is a turning point.

In my book Dare to Discover Your Purpose, I challenge the outdated idea that retirement is simply about slowing down, stepping back or filling time.

Because the real question is not just, “Can I afford to retire?

It’s: What do I still want to do, create, become or contribute?

If retirement has left you feeling restless, uncertain or quietly wondering what comes next, this book is a practical and thought-provoking place to start.

Discover Dare to Discover Your Purpose here: https://georgejerjian.com/books/

19 years ago a doctor gave me a month to live.

I'm still here. And what I learned in that month changed how I think about every decade that followed, including the one most people fear: retirement.

People Magazine published my story this week. It's not really about cancer. It's about what happens when the life you'd planned gets cancelled, and you have to build a new one from scratch.

That, it turns out, is exactly what retirement asks of you too:

A Man Was Told He Had 6 Months to Live. 19 Years Later, He Has Traveled the World and Crafted a New Career George Jerjian was told there was a 98% chance he had "possibly six months of life" left following a bone tumor diagnosis. A month later, a doctor told him the tumor was actually benign.

Every retiree I have worked with eventually describes the same thing. A fog.
Not depression. Not decline. Just a strange flatness, a sense that the colour has drained from life, and that something must be wrong with them.Nothing is wrong with them.

The fog is not your life ending. It is the disorienting, necessary gap between who you were at work and who you have not yet become. I spent a decade in it before I understood that.

If you are in the fog now, I want you to hear this: you are not finished. You are exactly where the next chapter begins.

Have you felt this after a big change in life? I would love to hear.

A fulfilling retirement rarely happens by accident.

It needs reflection. It needs purpose. And it needs a plan.

DARE to Discover Your Purpose is my 8-week digital course for retired and retiring adults who are ready to think differently about what comes next.

You can work through it in your own time, at your own pace, with weekly exercises to help you build a clearer vision for your next chapter.

Find out more here: https://georgejerjian.com/dare-to-discover-your-purpose-digital-course/

Retirement is often treated as a financial event but for many people, it is also an identity event.

A 2025 Retirement Adjustment Framework paper found that many retired adults experience an identity crisis after losing their work role.

It doesn’t surprise me.

When work ends, we can lose more than a salary. We can lose structure, status, routine, colleagues and a quiet sense of being useful.

That’s why the question is not just: “Can I afford to retire?”
It’s also: “Who will I be when my old role disappears?”

Retirement needs more than a financial plan. It needs a purpose plan.

Take my DARE Reinvention Quiz to discover what kind of next chapter may be calling you: https://georgejerjian.com/dare-reinvention-quiz/

At 69, I did something I had been telling my clients to do for years. I took a gap year.

Eighty days. Five countries. South Africa. Australia. New Zealand. Japan. Canada. Alone.

I left newly separated, half my savings gone and quietly terrified that I was too old for this. I came back with a book.

Odyssey of an Elder is what I learned about retirement, identity, and the courage to begin again when you thought your story was done. It is for every retiree still circling, still searching, still wondering what's next.

Swipe through nine of its ideas. The rest is in the book.

🔗 georgejerjian.com/books