I'm done! (as of last Friday.) It's funny how much COVID-effects blurred the line between retired/not-retired for me. This week, as a retired man, I've done some mid-day walks/bike-rides/grocery-trips with my wife, and then spent a good bit of time in our home office messing around in front of a computer. Which is exactly the life I've been living for the last year anyway! Ok, so one of our bike rides was a bit longer than normal and took us to a brewery, but really, since I've been 100% WFH anyway, and my job was flexible enough to allow mid-day excursions even when I was working, very little has actually changed in my day-to-day existence. I think things would feel a lot different if I'd had a 2-hour daily commute at a job where I was constantly speaking with people; the transition would have been much starker (and maybe scarier!) in that case.
The wildest part of my transition: my (big) ex-company uses a social-media-like platform as its main internal communication tool. It has user-created, non-business groups, one of which is dedicated to Mustachian early retirement. I know, pretty awesome (and bold!) all on its own. But wait! Two weeks before my last day, I decided to make my first (and last) post there, announcing that I was at least one person succeeding at the group's goal (the company is pretty young, so many of the group members are earlier in the accumulation/apirational stage). Overnight, that post became the week's 4th most-liked post on the entire platform! Like, it was more popular than posts from VPs making cool announcements to the entire company! So MMM should be proud that his message, which in its purest form is targeted explicitly towards high-paid workers at a company like mine, has definitely been heard, and even celebrated, inside such companies.
In that vein, I was clear and upfront with everyone, both in my professional and personal life, about it being an explicit "retirement". And I haven't heard a single note of skepticism, cynicism, or jealousy. I think it was the most-liked post I've ever made on my personal social media too. Maybe some of that is because I've always been relatively open about my plans, and surely reactions will vary between people and companies, but my broad advice from my experience would be: feel free to be more up-front with people, you might be pleasantly surprised at the reactions! (not to mention I subsequently got a decent amount of questions from people newly-interested in Mustachian concepts).
