In Retirement, We Have More Time Than Ever. But We Want to Use It Wisely.

The first year in retirement is often the most difficult. But it also can be the most crucial, setting the stage for how you’ll fill the years ahead—both financially and psychologically. Stephen Kreider Yoder, 65, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, 66, in retirement in September. In this monthly Retirement Rookies column, they are chronicling some of the issues they are dealing with in their first year, offering their different perspectives on what can be a confusing transition.

Steve

For the first time in many years, time isn’t money.

That was never more clear one afternoon earlier this year when we were gazing down at the Mediterranean Sea while sipping coffee in a cafe in the town plaza in Bejaia, Algeria. We had no fixed plans for the day or the next week—just as planned.

We suddenly have time in abundance, now that we’re both retired, and we’re learning how to spend this currency that for decades has been so scarce. We can now linger where we want to be and dally over what we want to do.

Algeria was an ideal place to test this new reality. We had visited in 2019, but could afford only two weeks, what with full-time jobs—far too short for a country roughly 3.5 times the size of Texas. “We need more time there,” I said as we flew home.

This year, we could take nearly twice as long to immerse ourselves in what the country offered: a green coastal region that gives way to the golden Sahara; a mosaic of Arab, Berber, French and other cultures; Roman Empire ruins; good food and wine; some of the most hospitable people we’ve met.

We’ve been fantasising about this time in life since we got married. For decades, time was a rare commodity, and we had to spend a lot of money to acquire it. We paid an absurd price for a house in San Francisco, partly to limit our commutes. We often hired others to do tasks I enjoyed, like fixing our cars or restoring the trim on our Victorian.

“We need more time” was our constant lament, at no time more than during travel. We would shoehorn several countries into two-week tours. We liked to travel abroad on a low budget—it got us closer to the reality of wherever we were—but that took time, and we often didn’t have the luxury.

We have it now. Earlier this year, we rode the Amtrak California Zephyr to Iowa, rather than flying, to see my parents. It was about 48 hours each way, but what was the hurry? We got beds, three meals a day and a rolling display of Western America. We extended our stay with Mom and Dad to a full week.

Back home, I fired up the metal lathe to fine-tune a bearing-cup press I had made earlier—a bike tool that worked fine but which I had great fun fussing with for hours to refine it. I’ll soon solicit bids for scaffolding, so I can start restoring trim.

It’s beginning to occur to us: By saving money assiduously during our 44 years of marriage, we weren’t putting away only funds. We were also accumulating time to spend in retirement.

Money, at long last, is time.

Karen

I’ve never been more aware of the finite nature of time. We’re rich with it now, but there’s no guarantee how long those riches will last. At best, thanks to the longevity that runs in our families, we may have 30 good years of life left. That feels like a long time—and no time at all.

So I’ve been thinking: Maybe we should be budgeting our time like we budget money.

Should I, for instance, spend some of my newfound wealth of time on things I’ve loved to do all my life but had to cut back on while I was working? During the busy years of my career, I continued to make quilts, but had to leave many undone. I baked my own granola and whipped up many meals for friends, but found myself ordering out or picking up prepared foods from the grocery store to save time.

Yet now that I have the luxury of time, the opportunities to fill it have also grown. And that means I still find myself weighing how to spend it—and when to keep spending money instead. I still love to create things, for instance, but would I rather sew an original outfit from scratch or shop for a less-original affair and bank the time? We have time to do housecleaning now; does that mean we should stop paying someone else to do it once a month?

These aren’t easy questions. As a result, we’re talking about looking at all the large time expenditures on our list—travel, house work, volunteering, organising photos—and laying them out on an annual budget. That will help us use our time more wisely.

As we talked about in our last column, we also need to do a better job savouring—as opposed to just running through—the time we have. That hit home on our trip to the Algerian Sahara this year. We had blocked off a week to explore the desert, far longer than we would have during preretirement travel. We could finally take a leisurely pace, we told ourselves.

Yet we couldn’t shake the old urge to make each hour pay off. My question when we arrived the first night: “When should we be ready for breakfast in the morning?”

Our Tuareg guide, Habib, laughed. “You get up when you want,” he said. “In the desert, slowly, slowly.”

That became our mantra for the next days as we camped each night in a different swath of the wilderness. We sat around a low table for our morning coffee and baguette with fig jam. “Slowly, slowly,” Habib would say, and we would repeat it after him.

“Slowly, slowly,” he cautioned as we set off scrambling over rocks toward ancient pictographs. After lunch under a cool tree, we would chat and read and nap. “Slowly, slowly,” we would chant, and again in the evening as Habib stoked a small fire to heat tea, pouring it back and forth between two pots until it foamed into a thick, sweet brew. We brought that mantra home from Algeria. We’ve got time now, and if we budget it carefully, we can afford to spend it slowly, slowly.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

In Retirement, We Have More Time Than Ever. But We Want to Use It Wisely.

We have fantasised about this moment for decades. The trick is learning how to savour it.

Steve

Karen

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.