Frühjahrsmüdigkeit.

The German language has the best words. Kummerspeck (“grief bacon,” or the weight you put on from eating your feelings). Sehnsucht, or the deep and emotional craving for something far away or unattainable. And frühjahrsmüdigkeit, which I’ve been experiencing lately.

Frühjahrsmüdigkeit is translated as “spring lethargy,” the fatigue that some people feel in the springtime, particularly after a hard winter.

We’ve had two particularly crummy winters in a row, and a lousy spring/summer in 2023. For the most part, spring 2024 has been cold and cloudy.

Sure, we’ve had a few spectacularly sunny days – the kind that make me think, “I can live here despite the winters.” Mostly it’s been…frühjahrsmüdigkeit.

The result has been less time spent working (or blogging) and lots more time spent cocooning with DF. Garden plants are in the ground, the greenhouse is set up, and I’ve spent many hours reading in order to escape the outside world.

The world’s always been a mess, but lately it seems messier than ever. The Germans have a word for this, too: weltschmerz, or the pessimistic melancholy you feel when thinking about how the world is going instead of how you wish it were going. Times are I just want to stop looking at the news and spend more time making pies and trading Letterboxed* results with my daughter.

Part of this is likely due to age. I’m at the point in my life where I sometimes think, “I’ve made a living as a writer for 40 years now. Why am I still working?”

Well, because I went broke during the divorce and helping to support my daughter, and have had to build a retirement fund and rebuild savings. When is enough enough, though?

Questioning my choices

Short form: It’s probably enough already. We live fairly simply, DF’s house is paid off, and I do have savings and a retirement fund now.

Yet part of me still whispers, “Is it enough, though? Didn’t you just see chicken breasts for $8.49 a pound recently? Think the cost of living is gonna go down in the next 20 years? Do you want to be a burden on family and/or society? And for extra credit, who will you be if you’re not a professional writer?”

Good question, and not easy to answer. Most of my adulthood has been spent working first for newspapers and then for personal finance websites. In a career field where you’re only as good as your last deadline, there’s not a lot of time for quiet reflection.

And the past 22 of those years have been as a freelancer, which doesn’t have the structure of my newspapering days. Back then it was topic, deadline, research, interview, eventually go home. As a freelancer, my work lives in the home with me. While I worked quite a few nights and weekends at the newspaper, ultimately I could get those hours back in the quasi-legal form of “comp time.”

Vacations were built in, too; by the time I left the Anchorage Daily News, I was accruing six weeks of V-days a year. For the past 22 years, I haven’t had a single day of paid vacation. No paid sick days, either, or any other of the perks that make up the golden handcuffs of modern employment. 

To be clear: I’ve loved the flexibility of freelancing. But to paraphrase Danny Glover in “Lethal Weapon,” maybe I’m getting too old for this stuff.

Cutting back, but still here

Right now, the answer is to stay cut-back on paid work and accept the corollary of cut-back income. But again, how much do I need?

I’m nearing the end of my working life, an idea that’s a bit unsettling. On the bright side, I’m  getting a kick out of all that cocooning. DF and I do what we want, when we want, with occasional detours to help family and friends. If that’s retirement, bring it on.

But as St. Augustine might say, don’t bring it all the way on. I will keep the writing LLC open for a while longer, because even a small amount of freelance income will be helpful as the years go by and inflation keeps inflationing.

And I would like to keep this website up and running, even though I neglect it something fierce. Hearing from all of you makes me feel connected to the outside world. Learning from all of you makes me feel we have a fighting chance. Or maybe that’s just the sehnsucht talking.

Related reading:

*Letterboxed is a brain-stretching word game that you can play for free through The New York Times games page. It’s always challenging and quite often evil. Abby routinely gets it in two words, in part because she’s willing to stretch her brain for up to an hour at a time. DF and I tend to speed through it in a few minutes, which is why it takes us three words or, more often, four or five words. Lots of fun, even when your brain hurts from all that stretching.

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30 thoughts on “Frühjahrsmüdigkeit.”

  1. My husband has retired and we are relatively well off. I cringe at the the price of food but I still try to conserve on electricity and natural gas. I’m trying to reach out to other women to see if I can find a friendship or two but I’m mostly a loner. I’ve been taking part in some of my local library’s offerings and I was appointed to the library’s board of trustees. I’ve found some craft classes that the county parks department offers for $15 each, which to me is reasonable. Hubby and I can do things together now and we go visit our daughter in Annapolis. She’s in school, not the Naval Academy. It is very nice to have my husband home and his stress level has decreased so much that he’s so much more fun to be around.

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  2. Donna, you’re right where I was six years ago (when we retired, age 62). We’d spent so many years saving and scrimping, yet all I could do was worry that it wouldn’t last through our retirement years! I couldn’t figure out how to SPEND after so many years of frugality. lol

    We have an absolutely amazing financial planner and he got us set up in such a way that our money has grown. We have enough income from SS and hubby’s pension that we haven’t had to dip into our investments at all (yet).

    When a person lives a simple life like you do, it doesn’t cost all that much to live. I was surprised at how much our expenses decreased after we quit working. We still take a few trips each year, and spend less than $5,000 (one is a cruise).

    It’s been hard to quit feeling like I must have absolute control. When I look at the numbers, however, I remind myself that I can feel confident. We’ve planned, we’ve prepared. We’ll be okay! Even if SS goes bankrupt, we’ll be okay.

    I’d say that’s going to be the hardest part for you as well . . . taking the leap of faith. You can do it!

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  3. Donna, my husband retired first, and I followed as soon as I could. At 55
    I could access my company retirement at a lower amount than if I had waited until 60 or 65. We penciled out the expenses and felt it was workable. We had 36 years of “cocooning”, travelling, hosting grandchildren and simply enjoying life.. I highly recommend retirement!

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  4. Donna, thank you for sharing this. I was happy to read this, as I have been feeling extremely anxious myself. The past few winters here have been long. By October it’s been gray and spring doesn’t really come until almost May. Seems never ending. While I love to read by the fire, come March, I’m over it. We too live very carefully. Our home is paid off and we got both daughters through college (no parent plus loans, paid a little while they were in school). SUNY was a great value for them. I worked advertising in our newspaper market and thought that was where I would be until retirement. When the www came about, I had a manger in 1998 who told us “kids” that this “internet thing” was going to change the world and print would not survive. He was right. Ten years till we can retire and I feel less secure than when the kids were younger. Grocery shopping while never fun, now is even worse. I’ve actually taken pictures of cuts of meat to send my sister as the prices here in NY are insane ( at thanksgiving my ShopRite had a turkey with a $75 price tag !) The news each day is horrible and it seems the world leaders are all trying to outdo the other. Realistically, I know we will be ok, but the fear of not being able to retire comfortably or be a burden on our children is always on my mind. It helps to know that others feel the same. Enjoy the summer weather and know that several timely updates are better than nothing.

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  5. You perfectly nailed it again! Please keep sharing your thoughts and joy in the small and large moments of life. Knowing that someone else is having the same experiences coping with this stage of life, family and this crazy world is priceless!

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  6. We were able to retire at 50 and did. largely due to the luck of investing $1000 in Amazon the year it hit the stock market and living modestly for all of our married lives. (Except for trips, where we don’t economize very much. If we want to see a play in NYC that cost $200 a ticket, we do.) And then we felt useless, non-contributing, and like our brains were getting mushy (even with the reading addiction we both have). So, we both started doing contract work in our respective fields and doing mystery shops and some eBay selling as fun side gigs. We still do some contracts but limited in scope and the time it takes to do them, and both of us have switched to doing some volunteer work. I still get this feeling that we are not doing enough for the world to justify our existence…and I live with a great deal of anxiety about the political conditions in our country. My parents ran from the Russian takeover of their country, right into the arms of Nazi Germany. They suffered very badly and then after the war lived in a displaced persons camp for 2 years before getting into this country. In the speeches of various politicians I hear the echos of what my father used to tell us happened in their country and that people just did not believe it could happen. They lost everything in the war and after that the inflation rate was so bad that money became worthless—so I often have to battle not spending wildly because it may all be taken from us by world events anyway. For myself and my husband, we are old and probably would not suffer much before we died, but I worry about younger relatives and friends and the country in general. I find it all so depressing and frightening that I listen to the news because I think that is part of being a good citizen, but afterwards I often wander about or work in the garden to soothe myself. At least Fairbanks, as usual, had the best summer weather in the state so being outside here is more pleasant than where you are. P.S. Glad to see a new entry today, I was hoping nothing terrible had happened to you.

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    • P.P.S. I want to add that the biggest benefit of our Amazon stock investment was that it helped us survive a catastrophic illness each without worrying about what the insurance would not cover. Most of it was eaten up by that so we had to rebuild our finances not once but twice. I evaluated whether we could retire by making sure we have enough in the bank to cover a bone marrow transplant if the insurance refused to.

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  7. Living where I do, I have the opposite problem with the weather — for us, its the never ending heat / humidity of summer. So we hibernate inside in the A/C from memorial Day all the way to Halloween, and sometimes later than that….. as it is entirely too hot to be out outdoors except at dawn!
    I don’t watch the news much, as it gives me anxiety…..

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  8. I suffer from occasional sehnsucht. I didn’t know there was a name for it. It’s something I can’t put my finger on, but I know it goes beyond nostalgia for me. It’s a deep emotional longing to go back to a time and a place in the past that is impossible to get to. It’s not that my life is bad. To the contrary, I have a loving husband and my kids and grandkids are healthy, I have lots of friends, great neighbors, we live comfortably but not extravagantly…I call it “low maintenance”…and I have no real complaints at this point in time besides a few health issues I’m dealing with, but they seem to be under control. In other words, I don’t want to change my life but I long to experience past times. A lot of it, I believe, has to do with missing my son, parents and the grandmother who helped raise us, who have all gone on before me. Maybe we all feel this at a certain point in life. Okay…enough with the wistfulness. Donna, I’m very happy to read your words again. I understand about cutting back on work after we’ve spent our adult lives, or at least a big chunk of it, in employment. I recently retired again for the third time and will hopefully stick with it this time. I turned 65 a few months back and it seemed like a good time to do it. My husband is very happy to have me around more and I have a few irons in the fire…working the elections here in town, volunteering at my church’s thrift shop and selling on Facebook Marketplace and a consignment store. We still save: 15% of any monies that come into the house, divided among three accounts, Christmas & Birthdays, Emergency and Regular Savings. I cook at home, we share a car and keep the heat down, use the library for borrowing books and entertainment with their free programs. It’s quite doable. Best of luck with whatever you want to choose and thanks again for sharing the word sehnsucht. I sincerely hope the fruhjahrsmudigkeit doesn’t hang around much longer.

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  9. I thought you were retired already! LOL well i’m quite a few years away from retirement (20 to be exact but who’s counting) LOL but I hope to take all the life lessons and wisdom in as long as you’re willing to give them. It has helped thus far though I’m not as frugal as when i first found you via googling how to survive on $10000 a year. At the time I was a newly divorced single mom with two kids. I was making $500 bucks every two weeks so $1000 bucks a month $12000 or so give a take in a year. I had no clue how to budget because my ex-husband was the main breadwinner. I asked a coworker to help me set up a budget on excel spreadsheet and i got to googling and came across your article. You gave me the little bit of hope I needed that I *could* survive. That it was possible not only that but I could thrive, be happy, and live life after this divorce which is exactly what I needed at the time. Then I went down the rabbit hole to try to find anything written by you and found you on MSN Money, Get Rich Slowly and even found blogs like the Simple Dollar and Abby’s site. After you got let go from MSN Money I still followed you on Get Rich Slowly until JD Roth sold the site (only to buy it back lol) subscribed to emails and giveaways even won a couple of times. Your little tidbits helped me stretch that foodstamp budget, or made me think outside of the box like getting paid from focus groups (good money when i could get it). It motivated me and taught be about Buy Nothing groups to get rid of stuff or find stuff when needed. It changed my perspective on life and being frugal. Save on some things and spend on what you want. Didn’t have to be frugal 24/7. That’s no way to live. And over the years changes jobs my income increased but i still lived pretty similarly with that frugal mindset. I hoped to one day meet you or Abby when you’re were down visiting the lower 48 or mainland as us in Hawaii say but if it never happens I’ve enjoyed you and Abby so much over the years. Your knowledge as been invaluable to me. I want to tell you your writing as had an impact in this world. Please continue to show us your garden because I enjoy those posts.

    Yours truly,
    Alicia

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    • That’s so sweet of you to say! I’m glad I could offer tips, but remember: You were the one who did the work.

      Will try to get the garden photos up more regularly. They sure are fun to shoot, and to share.

      Thanks for being such a consistent reader and commenter.

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  10. Nothing to do with this post, but I’ve just come back from a 10 day holiday in Alaska.
    I don’t know how you do it!
    First up – every single person we spoke to said how expensive it is to live there, where everything has to be barged or flown in. Some of those coastal towns are isolated!
    But the weather too, It was the beginning of June – still snow everywhere! As an Australian, this was a shock to the system.
    It’s a beautiful part of the world and the wildlife is amazing – but life seems hard there. I felt like it takes a special breed to be an Alaskan.

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  11. I have really, really missed your blog posts! I am glad you are not going through some kind of horrible illness, save for the depression and stuff — that’s bad enough! In your absence, I have found Frugal Girl and Non-Consumer Advocate and their communities or “Commentariats” (as FG posters call it), which partly fills the gap.
    Last spring, I told myself that I have a pretty good life, substitute teaching and working retail on the weekends. Now that school is out, I work retail 4 or 5 days a week and that keeps me in touch with others. We have an old fashioned general store type setup, where I get to talk with the folks coming through my checkout lane. It’s a neighborhood store and we all know each other, even if we don’t know the names. Church is another place where I get not only spiritual help, but get to socialize. I’m taking 2 courses, a Bible study and a Faith and Fiction book club group. We’re reading the gospel of Luke, and To Kill A Mockingbird, respectively. When school resumes, I am well known as a subbie (usually work 5 days a week in various classrooms) and I have been asked if I’ll go full time as a teacher’s aide. I’m still considering it — more money but less freedom.
    I’ve been really pinching pennies these last few years but I live in a paid-for house. Sadly, I totaled a car and now have to do car payments again — that was not part of the plan! But my annual SS payments will total the yearly income I used to make in my professional career. Sounds good except when you look up the amounts on the inflation calculator — according to that, it will only be half the buying power I had back in the day. Two other pensions and my pay at two jobs (only one if I accept the teacher aide job) will help a lot. I have no hobbies and live alone so it’s OK that I’ll be working at least a couple more years, if not more.

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    • Sounds like you’re making smart choices, and they are paying off (so to speak). If you enjoy the substitute teaching job, by all means stay with it. As you note, it’s not cutting into any hobbies and will make you feel more confident in the face of inflation.

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  12. First, Donna, thank you for this thought-provoking post–and for the incidental German lesson. I’m half German and should know the language a lot better than I do, but the English/Scottish/Ulster Irish half of my ancestry won out in the influence department, for various reasons.

    Second, whatever else you do, please don’t give up the blog. As other commenters have noted, it’s important and has been missed during your absences.

    Third, along with you and some of the commenters, I’m at a crossroads in my life and contemplating next steps. In my case, it’s been a year since my DH died (on 6/4/23), and I feel ready to move on to other things but am still working out what those might be. I retired the minute I turned 65 in August 2020, after 36 years as a telecommuting copyeditor for a small publishing company, because DH needed me–and although I still miss some of the “old guard” among my co-workers, I feel no desire to do any kind of paid editing, for my former company or anyone else. Been there, done that.

    So I’ve been living as simply as possible on my SS and the last few payments on the mortgage DH and I were holding for the friends who bought his half of the last five rental properties he co-owned. Once the last payment on that is made in October, I expect to start dipping lightly into my investments–which, so far, aren’t doing too badly. But, as others have noted, that may change.

    In addition to pushing my limits on frugal living, I’ve been doing some volunteer work for my beloved JASNA (the Jane Austen Society of North America) and continuing in my longtime role as the benevolent despot (aka Neighborhood Watch chair) of my street. But, to borrow what Lindsey has said so well above, I still get this feeling that I’m not doing enough for the world to justify my existence. Working on this one.

    Finally, in common with many of you, I’m deeply uneasy about the present and probable future state of the world, unless a lot more people wake up to what’s going on than seems likely at the moment. Me, I’m pushing 70 pretty hard and have no children, so neither I nor any direct descendants will be around to see the worst of what may happen. But I do worry about everyone else.

    Anyway, Donna, thanks for being here, and please keep posting.

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  13. I just retired a few weeks ago. I am definitely suffering from sehnsucht and sadness because the plan had been for my sister (who passed away two years ago) and I to retire together and travel. So now I’m figuring this retirement out. Celie (Simpsy Lynne).

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  14. Late to the party again! I am always happy to find a new article in your blog.
    My husband and I had made plans to retire at 65, but an issue caused a set back in our retirement funds. We retired at age 70, a year ago. We have both kept busy with outside activities, where we give back to the community. An outstanding financial advisor has been a great help. We continue to be frugal with our money, but have loosened the purse strings a little, mostly doing projects around the house that needed to be done. It sounds like you are one foot into retirement already, and when you make the final leap you will be ready, both financially and emotionally. Remember to take care of yourself. This next step is taxing.

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  15. I think I have a combination of kummerspeck, frühjahrsmüdigkeit and weltschmerz. Been feeling all this angst lately, just couldn’t put a name to it. Cut back on blogging from two articles a week to once a week, still doing freelance, plus a day job. Need the health insurance so I can’t leave the job. You’re one of a handful of blogs I still follow after all these years. Thanks for sharing Donna.

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  16. I’m in an opposite situation; I just started my first paid job in 14 years- and it’s full time! We’re all adjusting to Mom’s new schedule but I love it and the money nerd in me is super excited to be contributing to a workplace retirement plan again. Although, I confused payroll when I opted for 100% contribution to my Roth 403(b). We don’t need my income so Mom is padding her retirement! Definitely a bit of bag lady syndrome.

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  17. I’m in an opposite situation; I just started my first paid job in 14 years- and it’s full time! We’re all adjusting to Mom’s new schedule but I love it and the money nerd in me is super excited to be contributing to a workplace retirement plan again. Although, I confused payroll when I opted for 100% contribution to my Roth 403(b). We don’t need my income so Mom is padding her retirement! Definitely a bit of bag lady syndrome.

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    • I have suffered off and on from Bag Lady syndrome, and it stinks.

      The new job is a new challenge for your family, but your kids are smart and resilient. I predict success and growth all around.

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  18. It may cheer you to know how fondly some people on the Frugal Girl blog are commenting about you and hoping you feel up to blogging more in the future.

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  19. I saw an article recently that mentioned Surviving and Thriving. It has been some time since I have checked in and that was the reminder I needed to see what you’ve been up to. Like other commenters, I have so enjoyed your blog over the years and hope that you will feel like continuing to share your particular take on the frugal life. You are a dear friend that I haven’t met, but I know we are kindred spirits. Best regards and write soon.

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