Retirement, Hurry Sickness, and Strange Residue from Institutional Calendars

Retirement, Hurry Sickness, and Strange Residue from Institutional Calendars

It’s halfway through October, and I have that familiar sensation that the year is rapidly getting away from me.

September was here a minute ago. Now we’re halfway through October. November will disappear before I know it, and suddenly it’ll be December, with everybody running around buying cheese and crackers in case company drops by for a cup of Christmas cheer.

I’ve always felt this way about the last four months of the year.

It’s a peculiar combination of two seemingly contradictory sensations.

September feels like the beginning of something. October feels like we’re running out of time to finish it.

For most of my life, I had perfectly reasonable explanations for both.

September has always meant back to school, when I was a kid and then for my kids. Decades of new teachers, new schedules, new routines. Summer was over, and everybody had somewhere to be.

Later, work supplied its own calendar.

Fall meant budgets, year-end projects, planning for the following year, and the growing realization that anything we intended to finish this year needed a little stick, as the Brits say.

My former administrative assistant Laurie and I even had a name for the day after Labour Day.

New Year’s Day.

Everybody was back. Summer was over. Let’s go!

Except I’ve been retired for five years.

Nobody needs my budget.

There aren’t any year-end projects piling up on my desk.

My kids are long past school.

And yet, when September arrives, I still feel that familiar sense of beginning. By October, I can practically hear somebody firing the starter’s pistol.

Apparently, my brain thinks we’re starting a race that’s already three-quarters over.

And that contradictory sensation made me curious. So down the research rabbit hole I went!

Apparently, We Have More Than One New Year’s Day

The first thing I stumbled across was something psychologists call the Fresh Start Effect.

In 2014, researchers Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis investigated what happens around what they called temporal landmarks.

New Year’s Day is the obvious one.

But apparently, we have quite a few others.

Mondays. Birthdays. The beginning of a month. The start of a new school semester.

These three researchers found that people were more likely to engage in “activities associated with pursuing goals after these landmarks.” They examined things like gym attendance, searches for dieting information, and commitments to personal goals. You know, resolutioners!

The idea is that certain dates create a psychological dividing line between what came before and what comes next.

A chance to begin again.

Which made me laugh.

Laurie and I had apparently invented an extra New Year’s Day.

We didn’t need champagne or a ball dropping in Times Square.

We had Labour Day/new New Year’s and probably celebrated with too much coffee

After decades of school years and working years that seemed to begin in September, perhaps it’s not surprising that the month still feels like a fresh start.

The Fresh Start Effect offered a reasonable possibility.

There was just one problem.

It didn’t explain the other half of what I was feeling.

I felt rushed. It was as if somebody had announced that the leisurely part of the year was officially over and we were entering the final lap.

September said begin. October said Hurry the hell up.

The Fresh Start Effect helped me think about the beginning.

But why did I still feel the urgency of an approaching finish line when I no longer had anything I was required to finish?

So I kept looking.

Apparently, Retirees Don’t Escape the Calendar

This is where things got more interesting. In 2020, researchers in Denmark examined how retirees organized their time.

Not philosophical time. Actual time.

When they got up. When they ate. How they organized their mornings and afternoons. Whether weekdays and weekends still had different rhythms.

It turns out that retirement doesn’t necessarily turn life into one enormous Saturday.

Well, shit. I’ve written about that concept in an essay entitled, Every Day Is Saturday When You’re Retired. What a Load of Shit.

But the Danish researchers were interested in something beyond the routines individual retirees created for themselves.

They were looking at societal rhythms. And that sent me wandering in a different direction.

Work doesn’t just determine when you get up in the morning.

It helps determine rush hour.

Schools organize mornings, holidays, and summer vacations.

Businesses follow collective schedules. Clubs meet on particular days. Friends and family are available—or unavailable—according to their own obligations.

We live among millions of people following calendars that overlap with our own.

Retirement might remove us from one of our own schedules, but it doesn’t remove us from the society that continues to follow it.

Retirement removes the one from your work environment, or your “institution.” It doesn’t remove you from time itself.

And perhaps that’s part of what I’m experiencing every autumn.

The schools still reopen. People still return from summer holidays. Businesses still plan for year-end. And stores are full of both Halloween and Christmas!

The world around me continues behaving as though the last quarter of the year is a race to the finish line.

Even though I’m no longer officially entered.

There’s Apparently a Word for Synchronizing Our Clocks and our Calendars

At some point in my wandering, I encountered another interesting word. Entrainment.

Broadly speaking, it describes the synchronization of one rhythm with another.

It’s used in several fields, including biology and the study of social rhythms.

Which got me thinking about all the rhythms I’ve spent decades synchronizing myself to.

School years. Workweeks. Summer holidays. Budget cycles. Christmas. Fiscal years.

For years, I didn’t simply recognize those dates.

I organized my life around them. Most of us do.

And some of those dates carried more than scheduling information. They carried expectations.

Monday meant getting back to work.

Friday meant the weekend was approaching.

September meant everybody was back.

October meant we’d better get moving.

December meant whatever wasn’t finished soon probably wasn’t getting finished this year.

Could decades of following those patterns leave behind a sense of urgency even after the obligations disappeared?

It seems plausible.

But there’s an important distinction here.

Entrainment is a real concept. Societal rhythms are real subjects of research. The Danish study offers evidence that retirement doesn’t necessarily disconnect people from collective schedules.

None of that establishes that retired people continue experiencing an autumn rush because their brains remember old year-end deadlines.

That’s my question, not the researchers’ conclusion. And I haven’t found research that answers it directly.

So, in the absence of a proper scientific term, I’ve decided to call it institutional calendar residue.

A Cindy-ism, not a diagnosis.

Decades of organizing my life around school years, budgets, deadlines, and annual routines seem to have left something behind.

The obligations are gone.

The sense of urgency apparently didn’t get the memo.

Apparently, There’s Such a Thing as Hurry Sickness

And then I came across another expression.

Hurry sickness. It’s a term coined by cardiologists back in the 1970s to describe a persistent sense of urgency—the feeling that there’s always something to do, somewhere to be, or not enough time to get everything finished. It’s not a formal medical diagnosis, but rather a descriptive way of experiencing life.

And I recognized something in it.

During my working years, the last quarter of the year really was busy. There were budgets to finish, projects to complete, and deadlines that weren’t going to move simply because I wished they would.

Feeling rushed made sense.

But now?

I don’t have those deadlines.

I don’t have the projects.

I don’t even have a boss.

And yet, every October, some part of me seems convinced that I ought to be getting my ass in gear.

Perhaps that’s the manifestation of what I’m calling institutional calendar residue.

The old schedules may have left behind expectations. And when the calendar reaches a familiar point, those expectations show up as a feeling of urgency.

What if I retired from the deadlines but not from the hurry?

Now, I’m not suggesting that I have chronic hurry sickness, or that researchers have established a connection between retirement, old institutional calendars, and seasonal urgency.

I’m simply noticing that the description comes remarkably close to the sensation I’m trying to explain.

The calendar remembers the deadline.

I remember the hurry.

Or at least, that’s what it feels like.

Leave It to the Germans

Naturally, my wandering eventually took me into the German language. I can’t explain why.

Apparently, there’s a word called Torschlusspanik.

Literally, something like gate-closing panic.

It’s generally used to describe the fear of missing an important opportunity before it’s too late, often in relation to age or life circumstances.

That’s not exactly what I’m experiencing.

I’m not worried that October represents my last opportunity to accomplish something meaningful.

But I do seem to hear a gate closing every December.

And some part of me thinks I should be running toward it.

Which is probably a ridiculous way of assessing time…a “rushing for the gate sensation” rather than actual reality.

Meanwhile, My Friend Barry Has a Year-End Corn Clock

And nothing says reality like corn! My friend Barry offered an entirely different perspective on the end-of-year passage of time.

In my early October newsletter, I asked whether anyone still experienced any of the annual rhythms left over from their working lives.

Barry told me he now judges the seasons by watching corn grow.

When he owned a cottage, he hated seeing the corn get taller. It meant summer was slipping away and cottage season was coming to an end.

Later, when he began spending winters somewhere warmer, the same growing corn meant something completely different. Then he couldn’t wait for it to get taller.

It meant he was getting closer to heading south.

These days, the corn helps him recognize where he is in the year. Sprouts mean spring. Tall green stalks mean summer. Husks signal late summer and early fall. Brown stalks mean the growing season is finished.

And then it starts again.

I love this.

Same corn. Different meanings.

The corn didn’t change its behaviour according to Barry’s circumstances.

Barry changed what the corn meant to him.

At one point, its growth represented something he was losing. Later, it represented something he was looking forward to. Now it helps him keep track of the seasons. His rhythm changed; mine hasn’t.

I’m still responding to an institutional calendar that no longer has much authority over my life.

Barry looks at the corn to figure out where he is in the year.

I know perfectly well where I am.

I just can’t convince my brain that there’s no deadline approaching.

So that raises a final question.

Why do some of the meanings we attach to time change when our circumstances change, while others seem remarkably difficult to shake?

Maybe We Don’t Retire From the Calendar All at Once

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the things that work once provided. And the things that we don’t necessarily notice until they’re gone.

Identity. Friendship. Status. Challenge. Competence.

Somewhere to be on Tuesday morning.

But perhaps the way we experience time belongs on that list too.

Not simply having more time. The way we divide it. The way we recognize it. The expectations we’ve attached to particular days, months and seasons.

Researchers have examined temporal landmarks, societal rhythms, daily routines, seasonal influences, and how our perceptions of time change.

But I haven’t found a neat explanation for the particular contradiction I started with.

Why does September still feel like the beginning of something?

And why does October still feel like the beginning of the end?

Maybe decades of school and work calendars have left their mark.

Or maybe the collective rhythms of the people around me continue to influence how I experience the year.

Maybe it’s a mixture of learned associations, cultural expectations, and the simple fact that December really does bring an extraordinary amount of activity.

Or maybe I’m making an enormous leap from one retired woman’s inability to understand how the hell it’s already October.

I’ve been known to do that.

Maybe Laurie and I weren’t joking quite as much as we thought.

So, I’m curious. What does your internal calendar still believe, even though your life has changed?

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Related Reading

If you enjoy following ordinary observations that turn into bigger questions, you might also like:

• The Pygmalion Effect and the New Reality of Retirement Expectations
• How Retirement Transition Through Continuity May Make Life Easier
• The Haircut That Finally Mafe Retirement Feel Real
• Identity After Retirement – Was the Elephant Actually Wearing Pyjamas?

Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior. Management Science.

The researchers examined how dates marking a new period can encourage goal-directed behaviour. This offers a possible explanation for why September still feels like a beginning, but doesn’t directly explain the sensation of year-end urgency.

Societies (2020), 10(3), 68. Research on retirees’ temporal rhythms.

This Danish research examines the organization of time in retirement, including daily routines and collective rhythms. It helps explain why leaving paid employment doesn’t necessarily mean leaving society’s schedules behind.

Seasonal Psychology Research. Research article available through PubMed Central.

An exploration of how seasonal changes in ecological and sociocultural conditions may relate to human psychology and behaviour. Useful background for considering why the meaning of autumn extends beyond changing daylight and weather.

Duden German Dictionary. Torschlusspanik.

A German expression for anxiety about missing important opportunities before it’s too late. Used here as a linguistic comparison, not a scientific explanation for the year-end rush.