Time moves completely differently when nobody's paying you to notice it
At sea, time was counted in watches. Four hours on, eight hours off, and you knew exactly where you were because the clock told you so, and the clock was the only thing that mattered. You couldn’t drift. You couldn’t lose track. The ship doesn’t wait for you to realise it’s lunchtime.
Retirement is the first time in my life where I’ve made tea and then completely forgotten about it.
It’s not a joke. It’s happened three times this week. I fill the kettle, put the tea bag in the mug, pour the water, and then sit down to finish reading something or look at a problem that’s been nagging at me, and the next thing I know it’s lunchtime or the light’s shifted or someone’s rung the bell at the door and I look at my desk and there’s a cup with a film on top of the tea, cold to touch, abandoned.
The first time it happened I thought I was having a stroke. I couldn’t account for two hours. Where had they gone? Not sleep — I was awake the whole time. Not distraction in any way that felt like distraction. It felt more like the hours had simply... dissolved while I was thinking about something else, and I came back to consciousness to find that the tea, a concrete marker of time, had betrayed me by going cold.
By the third occurrence I’d stopped panicking and started noticing.
What’s happening is that at sea, time was always someone else’s property. The company owned it, the schedule owned it, the regulations owned it. You moved through time the way a ship moves through water — you’re aware of every moment of motion because the motion is the job. You watch the watch change because your job depends on noticing. The absence of time-awareness isn’t an option. The clock is your employer in the most literal sense.
Retirement removes the employer. It also removes something more fundamental: it removes the external measurement of time itself. Nobody’s tracking whether you noticed the morning. Nobody’s watching to see if you stayed focused. There’s no role to play that requires you to be present for your own day.
What I’m discovering is that without that external structure, time becomes... optional. It stops feeling like something that’s happening to you and starts feeling like something you might drift through.
The tea gets cold and you don’t notice because you weren’t noticing in the first place. You were just thinking. The thinking used up the time the way it always does, except now there’s nobody paying you to notice that it’s happening.
Here’s the bit that actually matters — and I couldn’t say it properly until I’d let the tea go cold a few times.
Full subscribers get the rest: whether this is the freedom everyone promised or a symptom we’re not taught to recognise; what time actually is when nobody’s measuring it; and the quiet question underneath all of this — if you can lose a morning and not notice, have you actually experienced it, or just endured it without witnesses?
If any part of this has landed so far, this is the half worth paying for.
Not everything needs a subscription. If this one stayed with you, you can support it here: Buy me a Yorkshire Tea
