You Don't Need More Purpose: An Honest Guide to Retirement for the Quietly Unsettled

The Retirement Brochure Promised Freedom

Nobody Mentioned It Might Feel Like Floating

You did what you were told.

You planned for this.
You looked forward to it.
You imagined the pressure lifting and life opening out.

And in many ways, it has.

But somewhere after the novelty wore off, another feeling crept in.

Not unhappiness.
Not regret.

Just a strange lightness — as if the ground you expected to land on never quite appeared.

The Part No One Warns You About

A few months in, you’re doing all the “right” things.

You’re staying active.
Keeping busy.
Saying yes when people suggest things.

And yet something feels off.

The days blur.
Busyness starts to feel suspiciously like work in disguise.
And you can’t shake the sense that you’re meant to be enjoying this more than you are.

That quiet mismatch — between what retirement is supposed to feel like and how it actually feels — is what this book is about.

What This Book Is (And Isn’t)

This is not another book telling you to reinvent yourself.

It won’t ask you to:

• find a passion
• build a second career
• optimise your mornings
• make these “the best years of your life”

You don’t need another project.

You need honesty.

This book says the thing most people only think privately:

Retirement can be disorienting.
The advice can be exhausting.
And nothing is wrong with you for feeling that way.

What You’ll Recognise Inside

This book explores why retirement can feel so unsteady — even when life looks fine from the outside.

You’ll see:

• why work wasn’t just a job, but a borrowed sense of mattering
• why endless leisure can start to feel like drifting rather than freedom
• why “staying active” often becomes the same old busyness in different clothes
• why bucket lists so often feel hollow

It also explains why so much retirement advice misses the mark — written by people who haven’t lived it, for lives that don’t resemble yours.

A Different Way of Thinking About Purpose

Instead of urging you to do more, this book offers a quieter idea.

Purpose not as output.
Not as productivity.
But as orientation.

A sense of where you stand, even when nothing dramatic is happening.

It explores:

• light structures that support life rather than consume it
• fewer, truer obligations
• the ordinary satisfaction no one boasts about

Not a new identity.
Just a steadier way of being.

Who This Is For

This book is for you if:

• retirement advice sounds like a second career you never asked for
• you’re tired of performing enthusiasm you don’t quite feel
• you want clarity, not inspiration
• you’d rather be yourself than the version magazines keep proposing
• you struggle to answer “How’s retirement?” without editing the truth

If you’ve felt quietly unsettled and couldn’t explain why, this will feel uncomfortably familiar — and reassuring.

The Promise (A Modest One)

This book won’t give you a grand plan.

What it gives you is something rarer:

Relief.
Recognition.
And the sense that you’re not drifting — you’re adjusting.

That this phase doesn’t need fixing.
It needs understanding.

And that, often, is enough.