As someone who recently retired early, you really need to have a solid game plan on what you want to do with all the time you have. Spend a solid 3-6 months planning and mocking your post retirement days while still working.

The more detailed the plan the better. If you want to go to the gym, what will you do there and for how long and how many days a week?

If you want to have a tech side project, how many hours do you plan on spending on this project? And be reasonable. Don't trade one burnout over another.

If you are planning to learn something new, what are those? and don't just learn one thing. 8 hours plus is a crazy amount of time.

One of those plan should include making new friends post retirement, revolving around activities that are not work related.

It is far too easy to lose track of time without a brand new schedule to fill the void.

Go and read the book or audiobook "Younger Next Year" great book. Explains the biology of aging, how to delay/reverse it and how to retire well. Good background and good advice.

I've been retired for about 5 years and I am just as loony now as I was when employed. HN, my own silly hobby sites, flirting with the gals in town and wildlife keep me active.

It reminds of my grandparents that refuse to stop working my grandma 65 and grandfather 73. My grandma has like a stand where she sells candies and coffee and for her is just a way for socializing. And my grandpa he's still trying businesses out he thinks that there is still time for him to become rich, he's still very sharp and active he currently sells car tools and he's walking everyday

I was under the impression that you delay cognitive decline (and keep brain plasticity) by learning new things.

So you need to be learning new skills, trying new sports, entering new circumstances continuously. If you’re good at something already, it’s not enough.

Employment is one of many ways of keeping things fresh because it’s easy but I see no reason why you can’t keep yourself busy too.

Dementia, at least of Alzheimer's type, starts at least 20 years before symptom onset and is multifactorial, so much that no single factor plays a role ("explains the variability") more than 5%. Employment, as almost all other factors, like having family/kids, higher education, wealth etc etc, might be a correlative or a confounding variable, depending on the study design because the disease mechanisms are so long and convoluted.

In the egg and chicken dilemma, I believe that the cognitive decline causes the social inactivity and not the reverse. Get your retirement because that will not cause your dementia.

What many comments miss is that society is heavily structured around work.

If we didn't work, or simply worked far less, we wouldn't be atomized units not quite finding what to do.

There would be more structure of volunteering projects, cafés would be laid out for people having time, instead of for quick grab. Fastfood and drive through may end up being far less common.

Averages make sense only when the distribution looks like a normal.

But after 60ish the health of people has such a high variance that it doesn’t make sense to talk about the average retiree.

Some of them are healthy and sharp. Others have disabling health problems

Regardless of whether this is true I do think there is a risk of overdoing it.

My dad firmly believes in the "when people quit work they decline" theory. Which may be fair, but he's not in great health and still charging hard. Definitely think you can overdo that & end up working till you drop