I don't think about slowing down. But my body does.
That's the tension I've been living in lately. My brain still runs at the same speed it always has — connecting things, making things, teaching, building, chasing the next interesting problem. My body has started filing complaints. Bad knees. Chronic pain. The kind of physical reality that nudges you toward a conversation you've been putting off.
Not a retirement conversation exactly. A quality of life conversation.
Because here's what I've figured out about myself after 66 years: I have never actually been motivated by money. Money has always been abstract to me — a thing other people seemed to understand intuitively that I had to translate through some other language to make sense of. What I'm motivated by is stimulation. Contact. Making things. The specific joy of a problem that doesn't have an obvious solution.
When I try to picture retirement — really picture it, not the financial projection but the actual day — what I see isn't a number in an account. It's proximity to my grandkids. It's a workshop with a 3D printer and a cement casting setup and a half-built horn-loaded speaker cabinet. It's somewhere with good food and parks and interesting people nearby. It's teaching, probably until I physically can't anymore, because the energy in a room full of ambitious young minds is one of the few things that reliably feeds my brain.
That's what the money is for. Not the money itself. The life the money makes possible.
The question nobody asks
Every retirement calculator I've ever seen asks the same questions. How much do you have. How much do you need. When do you want to stop working. What's your risk tolerance.
Not one of them has ever asked: what does a good day actually look like for you?
For most people — and I'd argue especially for ADHD people — that question is more important than any of the numbers. Because you can hit every financial target and still end up in a retirement that feels like slow suffocation. And you can have less than you planned for and still build something that feels genuinely alive.
The difference isn't the number. It's whether you've thought about what the number is actually supposed to buy.
What ADHD brains need that retirement planning ignores
Here's the thing about ADHD and retirement that nobody talks about: boredom isn't just uncomfortable for us. It's dangerous.
An ADHD brain without stimulation doesn't settle into peaceful quiet. It starts looking for problems to solve — and if there aren't good problems available it'll find bad ones. The research on ADHD adults in retirement is thin but the anecdotal evidence from the community is consistent: unstructured time without purpose is one of the hardest transitions we face. Not the money part. The meaning part.
So when I built the People, Place and Purpose section of RetireADHD I wasn't adding a nice-to-have feature. I was building the part I was most afraid of. The numbers were almost the easy part. Figuring out what I actually need to thrive — proximity to people I love, work that uses my hands and my brain, a place with enough life in it to keep me interested — that was the harder and more important conversation.
Three questions worth sitting with
Not a checklist. Just three things worth actually thinking about before the numbers become the whole conversation.
People: Who do you need around you to feel like yourself? Not who you think you should want — who actually feeds you? For me it's grandkids in Kentucky and Texas, ambitious young people in studios and classrooms, and the occasional outlier who sees the world sideways. That's not a nice extra. That's load-bearing.
Place: Where does your brain feel most alive? Not most relaxed — most alive. There's a difference. I know I need somewhere that's not too remote but not city-dense. Parks. Good food. Access to the kind of texture that keeps a fast brain interested.
Purpose: What would you keep doing even if nobody paid you? For me it's teaching and making things. Always has been. Retirement doesn't mean stopping — it means finally doing those things on your own terms.
If you haven't thought about these three things, the financial conversation is missing its most important context. Because the goal was never the number. The goal was always the life.
RetireADHD.com has a whole section built around exactly these questions. After you've looked at the numbers — go there. That's where the real conversation starts.
RetireADHD.com — a retirement conversation, not a calculation.