I sleep well every single night. That's the part that scares me. Because the exhaustion isn't coming from poor rest. It's coming from waking up and realizing I have to do another day that looks exactly like yesterday.

I sleep through the night now. Seven hours, sometimes eight. No tossing. No waking at 3 a.m. with my heart hammering over something I said in 1987. The sleep is deep and unbroken and — if you believed the wellness articles — it should be fixing everything. I wake up and the bed is barely disturbed. My body rested. My mind quiet. And then I sit on the edge of the mattress and the weight settles in, not in my bones but somewhere behind my sternum, because I know exactly what comes next. The same thing that came yesterday. And the day before that. And the fourteen days before that.

I'm sixty-seven years old. I retired from teaching three years ago. And I sleep beautifully every single night. That's the part nobody warns you about — that the exhaustion can live right alongside perfect rest, like two tenants sharing a house who never speak to each other.

When Rest Isn't the Answer

For decades, I told myself the tiredness was because I wasn't sleeping enough. Thirty-two years in a classroom will do that — the alarm at 5:15, the grading until midnight, the Sunday nights spent unable to fall asleep because Monday was already breathing down my neck. I was convinced that if I could just sleep, really sleep, the fog would lift. That retirement would hand me back the version of myself I'd been before the job hollowed me out.

But the fog didn't lift. It changed shape. It became something thicker, slower — not the frantic exhaustion of having too much to do, but the dull weight of having nothing that requires me. I stopped setting an alarm three years ago, and at first it felt like liberation. Now it feels like proof that the world would spin on just fine without me ever getting out of bed.

There's a term for this in psychology: existential fatigue. It's not clinical depression — though it can live in the same neighborhood. It's the bone-deep weariness that comes from a perceived absence of meaning. Your body functions. Your health panels come back fine. You eat well — plant-based for four years now, since my daughter-in-law quietly changed how I thought about food — and you move your body and you hydrate and you do everything the magazines tell you to do. And still. Still, you wake up tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

The Architecture of an Empty Day

Here is what my days look like: I wake up. I make coffee — oat milk, no sugar, the same mug I've used since 2011. I open the kitchen blinds. I water the pothos on the windowsill, which is thriving because it's the only living thing in this house that needs me on a reliable schedule. I check email. There's nothing urgent. There hasn't been anything urgent in three years.

I eat breakfast. I clean up. I might walk to the mailbox. I might not. I read for a while — usually something I've already read, because new books require a kind of forward momentum I can't always find. Around noon I eat again. The afternoon stretches out like a hallway with no doors. By evening I'm watching something on television that I won't remember by morning, and then I go to bed and sleep perfectly, and the whole thing begins again.

The sameness isn't the problem. Or rather — the sameness is the problem, but not in the way people think. It's not boredom. Boredom implies you want stimulation and can't find it. This is something quieter. It's the slow erosion of feeling like your days are building toward anything. Research from psychological science has shown that having a sense of purpose is one of the strongest predictors of well-being in older adults — stronger than income, stronger than social network size, stronger in some studies than physical health. When that sense of purpose dissolves, what's left isn't nothing. It's a very specific kind of something. A presence disguised as absence.

I spent thirty-two years needed — fiercely, exhaustingly needed. Students who couldn't read. Parents who needed reassurance. Colleagues who relied on me for coverage, for mentorship, for the emotional scaffolding that nobody ever names as labor. And now I am needed by no one on any kind of schedule, and my body doesn't know what to do with that information except be tired.

The Guilt of Good Health

There's a strange guilt that comes with this kind of exhaustion. Because I know — I know — how many people would trade places with me. I have a pension. I have a house that's paid off. I eat well. I started eating plant-based after my daughter-in-law gently suggested I try it for thirty days, and those thirty days turned into four years, and my bloodwork improved so dramatically that my doctor actually paused during our last appointment and said, Whatever you're doing, keep doing it.

So I'm healthy. I'm rested. I'm financially stable. And I wake up every morning with a weight in my chest that I can't explain to anyone without sounding ungrateful. That's the trap — the suspicion that you have no right to feel this way. That exhaustion is reserved for people who are actually doing something.

But that's not how exhaustion works. Self-determination theory, one of the most well-supported frameworks in motivational psychology, argues that humans have three fundamental needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Retirement can technically satisfy autonomy — you're free, after all. But competence and relatedness? Those often evaporate the moment you clear out your desk. You go from being someone who knows things, who is consulted, who matters in a daily institutional rhythm, to someone whose greatest daily achievement is remembering to take the recycling out.

What Nobody Tells You About Sameness

When I was teaching, sameness had a texture to it. Monday was different from Friday even when the lesson plans were identical, because the students were different on a Monday than they were on a Friday — heavier, sillier, more fragile, more defiant. The sameness had people in it. It had interruption. It had the particular chaos of thirty-one eleven-year-olds who hadn't eaten breakfast.

The sameness I live in now has no people in it. Or rather — it has people at a distance. My son calls on Sundays. My daughter-in-law texts me pictures of the garden she's building. My neighbor waves from her driveway. But none of it requires me to be anything other than present, and presence without purpose is just waiting.

I read somewhere — and this stayed with me — that social isolation and loneliness carry health risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. I'm not isolated, exactly. I have people. But there's a difference between having people and being woven into the daily fabric of other lives in a way that makes your absence noticeable. I've started arriving everywhere early — the grocery store, the doctor's office, the Wednesday plant-based cooking class I signed up for at the community center. I tell myself it's because I like being punctual. But the truth is that leaving the house feels like an event, and I want to stretch it out as long as possible.

The Body Keeps a Different Clock

My body sleeps well because there's nothing keeping it awake. No deadline. No worry that hasn't already been worried into smooth stone. No anticipation. And anticipation, I've realized, was the thing that used to make sleep feel like a bridge to something — a tomorrow that held possibility, even if that possibility was just the controlled chaos of a classroom.

Now sleep feels like a reset button on a machine that runs the same program every day. Efficient. Clean. Pointless.

I don't say this for pity. I say it because I think nobody talks about this particular kind of tired — the kind that doesn't respond to melatonin or lavender or a better mattress, because the problem was never physical. The problem is waking up and knowing. Knowing the shape of the day before it arrives. Knowing that nothing in the next sixteen hours will surprise you, challenge you, or need you in a way that makes your heartbeat change rhythm.

Where the Light Comes In

I don't have a neat resolution for this. I distrust neat resolutions — they belong to people who haven't sat with something long enough to know it doesn't resolve.

But I will say this: the plant-based cooking class helps. Not because of the cooking — though I've learned to make a cashew cream sauce that would have stunned my thirty-year-old self — but because of the woman who stands next to me at the counter and tells me about her late husband's terrible jokes while she juliennes carrots. Because of the instructor who calls me by name and remembers that I don't like cilantro. Because of the small, ridiculous competence of learning to fold spring rolls at sixty-seven and having someone say, Those look beautiful.

These are tiny things. They wouldn't register on any wellness checklist. But they interrupt the sameness. They put a door in the hallway. And some days — not every day, but some — I wake up with something that feels less like weight and more like a quiet, cautious lean toward the morning.

I still sleep well every night. I still wake up knowing the shape of the day. But I'm learning — slowly, imperfectly — that the shape can be changed from inside. That community doesn't have to be dramatic to be real. That purpose doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it just stands next to you at a cutting board and asks if you'd like to try the miso glaze.

Sometimes that's enough to make tomorrow look slightly different from today. And slightly different, at this point in my life, feels like everything.