Being able to afford to stop working and enjoy retirement is something many of us daydream about while we’re in the office. But more and more people are deciding to return to work after having decided to retire – and become “unretirees”.

Some find they are bored; some need the extra money as the cost of living carries on rising; some discover a new passion which they turn into a new career. Yet, not everyone who goes back to work gets the sense of fulfillment they are looking for.

So, is this the age of unretirement? Two writers who have tried unretirement, and , give their perspectives.

It took me less than a week to realise that I had made a mistake. Sometimes, the things we think are missing in our lives aren’t always the things we really need.

In 2024, I retired early from a 20-year career in tech. While I loved my various roles at places like IBM, National Geographic Society and Capital One, there was always one career goal that lit me up: retiring early.

That’s not to say I wasn’t an ambitious employee; I just lacked direction. So, I adopted society’s default trajectory, climbing the corporate ladder from software engineer to vice president in a satisfying, linear way. At that point, I decided I’d climbed high enough, had enough money to live on for the foreseeable future, and left my stressful tech job with no regrets. I was 41.

My first month of retirement was a whirlwind of travel, a long break which would have been impossible while I was still working. My husband and I did a tour of the UK and a couple of weeks in Italy. This is what I pictured retirement being like: a non-stop parade of new experiences and extended travel. One big adventure after another. Instead, we missed home after three weeks and came back to settle into a new routine of regular mid-week board games, coffees with friends, reading, tea breaks, hiking and room for serendipity. It turned out to be enough. I was slowly (very slowly) learning how to relax after my relentless career. The first year after retiring was everything I dreamed it would be, and more.

But over time, without a job to distract me, I learned some things about myself. Most of all, I missed the socialisation I got at work. As a retired vice president, I went from a day filled with back-to-back meetings to one of pure freedom and maybe one appointment or coffee. It turned out, I liked all that talking and leading. I really missed solving tough problems and collaborating with a team of amazing people. The problems I had thought were stressing me out so much before retiring, in retrospect, seemed to be filling my soul with a goodness that I didn’t get when I retired.

I began feeling like something was missing. I had coffee with the CEO of a local start-up who wanted to hear about my work with a university. I told her about my feelings on retirement. She had a solution.

She offered me the chief operating officer role at her AI start-up, and I took it. I was drawn in by a great team, an interesting problem to solve and the chance to sink deeply into the new AI landscape. I was excited. After a decade of pursuing early retirement and almost two years of rest, I was weirdly eager to return to work and use some of the skills I’d worked so hard to build during my initial career. Part of me knew I was the same highly capable person. Another part worried my skills had atrophied; that the world kept moving while I sat comfortably on my couch reading a book.

That excitement only lasted two days. Almost immediately, my body remembered two things: how great it was to solve problems, and how traumatic it is to work long hours on goals that aren’t entirely your own. When you’re working for someone at an organisation, there are rules and expectations. I could take my afternoon tea break, but I’d come back to twice as much work. I could get the team organised and running smoothly, only to have the CEO come in and derail everything 15 minutes later. I stopped sleeping well, stopped playing board games with friends, and after a couple of months, stopped being happy.

I don’t like to quit things. So, I got that start-up organised with a road map and a solid foundation and then bowed out, this time with less fanfare, but far more gratitude than the first time I retired.

Before I unretired, I fixated on the things I was missing in my life and tried to find them again. I didn’t have these problems when I was working, so the solution must be to start working again, right? Working filled a tiny hole in my life, but then it took over everything else, causing the rest of my life to look more like a war zone.

Now that I’m re-retired, I don’t focus on what’s missing anymore. I focus on what I have. Freedom. Time. Personal projects. Mid-week game days. Tons of coffees. Flexibility.

That shift in focus has made all the difference. Would I ever unretire again? I’m not sure. Perhaps for the right adventure or cause, like moving to New Zealand or doing something serious about climate change.

What I do know is that running back to a life you left for good reasons doesn’t solve any of your current problems. It only makes more of them.