There is a specific kind of tired that has nothing to do with the body. It shows up in people whose days are completely open and completely empty at the same time, and it does not respond to sleep.

I noticed it first on a Wednesday. Not because anything happened on that Wednesday—that was precisely the point. I had slept almost nine hours the night before, which is more than I'd gotten on any single night during my teaching years. I woke without an alarm. I made coffee in a quiet kitchen. I sat at the table with the newspaper I no longer really read and looked out the window at a street where nothing required me. And I felt a tiredness so heavy it sat behind my eyes like a stone.

It wasn't the tiredness I remembered from decades of standing on my feet in front of classrooms, or the tiredness of raising children through fevers and homework and arguments about curfew. It wasn't the tiredness of grief, which I know well enough to recognize by its particular weight. This was something else entirely—a tiredness that seemed to come from nowhere and respond to nothing. Not to sleep, not to vitamins, not to the long walks people kept suggesting. It was the tiredness of a life that had become structureless, and I didn't know what to call it until I stopped trying to fix it and started trying to understand it.

When Freedom Becomes a Void

I remember the year I retired—how I fantasized about open mornings, about days without obligations, about finally having the luxury of waking when my body decided to wake. I stopped setting an alarm because nothing required me to be awake at a specific time, and for a few months it felt like liberation. Then it began to feel like something else. Not sadness, exactly. Not depression in the clinical sense. But an ambient exhaustion that seemed to thicken the air in every room I entered.

The psychologist Martin Seligman, in his foundational work on positive psychology, identified what he called "the pleasant life" versus "the meaningful life." The pleasant life is about comfort, ease, the removal of stressors. The meaningful life is about engagement—about being pulled into something that uses you fully. What I didn't understand until I was living it is that you can have a perfectly pleasant life and feel absolutely hollowed out by it. Comfort without purpose doesn't restore you. It drains you in a way that mimics rest while delivering none of its actual benefits.

My days were completely open and completely empty at the same time. I could do anything, which meant I did almost nothing. The paradox of unlimited choice producing paralysis—psychologists have studied it extensively. But knowing the name of the trap doesn't spring you from it.

The Body Lies Down While the Self Disappears

There's a term I came across that changed how I understood what was happening to me. Researchers call it "languishing"—a concept the organizational psychologist Adam Grant brought into public conversation, drawing on work by sociologist Corey Keyes. Languishing isn't depression. It's not burnout. It's the absence of well-being—a kind of emotional flatline where you're not suffering acutely but you're not functioning fully either. You're just... present. Technically alive. Going through motions that don't connect to anything that matters.

I recognized myself in that description so immediately it startled me. I was languishing. I had been languishing for what I now realize was the better part of two years, and I had been calling it "tired" because that was the only vocabulary I had for a body that wanted to lie down and a mind that couldn't explain why.

The thing about languishing is that it's invisible. Nobody worries about you. You're not crying. You're not missing appointments—you don't have appointments to miss. You're eating. You're sleeping. You're answering the phone when your daughter calls on Sunday. You look fine. You are fine, technically. But fine has become a kind of coffin you climb into every morning and lie very still inside of, waiting for something to happen that never does.

The Architecture of a Day Without Stakes

When I was teaching, I used to fantasize about what I'd do with unstructured time. I had lists—mental lists, scribbled lists, lists folded into the back pocket of my work bag. I would paint. I would learn to cook properly. I would read all the novels I'd been saving. I would volunteer somewhere meaningful. I would walk every morning at sunrise.

What I did not anticipate is that desire itself requires scaffolding. You don't just want things in a vacuum. You want them in relationship to something—to a schedule that constrains you, to a life that demands you show up, to the pressure of limited time that makes leisure feel earned. Remove all of that, and the wanting drains out like water through a sieve. The hardest part wasn't finding something new. The hardest part was admitting I'd spent decades not wanting anything for myself.

I started paying attention to which hours felt the heaviest. It was always mid-afternoon—around two or three o'clock—when the tiredness became almost unbearable. Not coincidentally, this was exactly the time of day that used to be my busiest. Third period, then fourth. Grading between classes. The hallway rush. The feeling of being needed in twelve directions at once. I had hated it then. I would have given anything for a quiet afternoon. Now I had nothing but quiet afternoons, and they were swallowing me.

What Purpose Actually Does to the Brain

I started reading about this—partly out of curiosity, partly out of desperation. Research from Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano, published in Psychological Science, found that having a sense of purpose in life was associated with reduced mortality risk across the entire adult lifespan. Not just reduced sadness or improved mood—reduced death. Purpose, it turns out, isn't a luxury or a philosophical nicety. It's a biological requirement. The body knows when it has something to show up for, and it responds accordingly. Remove the reason to show up, and the body begins to wind down in ways that feel exactly like tiredness but are actually something closer to withdrawal.

This is what nobody tells you about retirement, or about any major life transition that removes structure. The moments after retirement when loneliness hits hardest aren't the dramatic ones. They're the unremarkable ones. Tuesday at two in the afternoon. Saturday morning when you realize Saturday no longer means anything different from Wednesday. The slow erosion of temporal landmarks until every day feels like the same beige corridor stretching forward without end.

The Vegan Table Set for One

I went plant-based three years ago—late in life, I know, and for reasons that surprised even me. It wasn't a documentary or a health scare. It was the realization that I had been eating the same meals on autopilot for decades, and that autopilot was part of the problem. I needed something that required me to think about my choices, to be deliberate, to learn new things in a kitchen where I'd been going through motions for thirty years.

The shift helped more than I expected—not because of any nutritional miracle, but because it reintroduced friction into my daily life. Suddenly I had to plan meals again. I had to research. I had to stand in the grocery store and read labels and ask questions and feel slightly foolish at the age of sixty-something, learning how to feed myself all over again. There's a specific loneliness that comes from going vegan after sixty—every shared meal suddenly requires a negotiation. But there's also something else that nobody talks about: the way choosing your food with intention makes you feel like a person who is choosing, period. Like someone who still has agency over the shape of her days.

That friction—the inconvenience, the learning curve, the small daily problem-solving—did more for my tiredness than any supplement or sleep hygiene routine ever had. Because the tiredness was never about the body. It was about the self. It was about having nowhere to place my attention that felt like it mattered.

Rebuilding the Scaffolding

I don't want to pretend I've solved this, because I haven't. Some mornings the tiredness still finds me before I've finished my coffee. Some weeks it settles in like weather and doesn't lift until something—a phone call, an errand, a neighbor knocking with a question about her tomato plants—breaks the spell.

But I've learned a few things. I've learned that this particular exhaustion is a signal, not a sentence. It's the self saying I need to be used for something. It's the mind asking for stakes—even small ones. Even invented ones. It doesn't have to be a career. It doesn't have to be a cause. Sometimes it's just committing to bringing a plant-based dish to a community potluck and knowing that someone is expecting you to show up.

Research on social prescribing and community engagement in older adults confirms what I've felt in my bones: it's the combination of purpose and connection that restores energy. Not rest. Not relaxation. Not the absence of demand. But the presence of something worth getting out of bed for—even if that something is modest, even if nobody applauds it, even if the only person who notices is you.

I think about all the people I know—women mostly, women my age—who describe this same tiredness and are told to sleep more, exercise more, take magnesium, try meditation. And I want to say: this tiredness is not a deficiency of the body. It is the exhaustion of a life that has lost its shape. And the only cure I've found is to start building the shape back, one small deliberate act at a time—one meal prepared with attention, one morning committed to something other than survival, one Tuesday afternoon at two o'clock when you decide that you, and your hours, still matter enough to fill with something that asks you to be fully here.

The tiredness doesn't vanish. But it loosens its grip. And some mornings—more now than before—I wake up and the first thing I feel isn't the weight. It's the faintest pull of something ahead, waiting for me to arrive.