I have been thinking more about the partner who became indignant when I suggested he might experience uncertainty in retirement. It isn’t what he had planned for his next stage that stays with me - time with his children, travel, charity work - but rather the weight he placed on it. My strong feeling was that he needed the plan to be enough. And perhaps that's the issue.

I've been reading Didier Eribon's book about old age, loss and identity. One passage stopped me, not because it's about death - though it is - but because it captures something I see regularly in career transitions. Eribon writes: "We are not quite the same person depending on whom we are with: a relative, a close friend, a colleague from work." Our identity, he argues, is plural and composite - constituted through relationships and the roles we play with different people. When those relationships end, we lose not just the person but the role itself. And with it, part of who we are. Applied to professional life, this explains something I've noticed but struggled to name. When people leave long careers - particularly senior roles in firms or organisations - they don't just lose a job title. They lose the version of themselves that existed in relation to colleagues, clients, the organisation itself.

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” Bertrand Russell*

In my last Reflection I asked: useful to whom? The question behind the question was really about measurement, and who gets to do it. Russell’s observation takes that somewhere else. It doesn’t ask whether time is useful. Rather it asks whether it is enjoyed. Which is a rather different standard.