I am sixty-nine years old, retired, and living in Vietnam with my wife Hau.
That sentence still surprises me when I read it back. Sixty-nine. Vietnam. Retired.
I spent most of my working life in corporate roles that took me across Asia and beyond – the kind of career where you measure your worth in results and your time in flights. I was good at it. I believed in it. And then, like most things, it ended.
Retirement, I assumed, would be easy. I’d earned it. How difficult could it be to simply stop?
Harder than I expected. And richer, too.
The first thing I learned was that I had built my identity almost entirely around being useful in a particular way. Take that away, and you spend a fair amount of time staring at the ceiling, wondering who exactly is staring back.
The second thing I learned was that this is completely normal – and almost nobody talks about it.
So I started writing. Not advice. Not a programme. Just honest letters from this side of a working life – the confusions and the small discoveries, the mornings that feel like loss and the afternoons that feel, unexpectedly, like grace.
I live simply. We eat well. I walk most days. I write and I read. I stay curious – about this country, about the people in my life, about what this season still has to teach me.
I am Singaporean, of Indian, Sri Lankan and Arab heritage. I have lived in Vietnam for over twenty years, and it has shaped me in ways I’m still figuring out.
Be Happy Retired exists because I wanted to write the thing I couldn’t find to read. I hope you find something useful in it. Or at least something honest.
– Farook