This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemeita Vassu. Today, how to decide when it's the right time to retire.

Retirement is retirement. Retirement is one.

Retirement is one of life's biggest transitions.

There's a lot of talk about how to prepare for it financially,

not so much about what it means emotionally, mentally,

spiritually.

The identity part of it, the who would you be?

That's Steve Lopez.

He's a long-time LA Times columnist and the author of the book out now called Independence Day.

What I learned about retirement from some who've done it and some who never will.

See, when Steve reached his mid-60s, he started to think about retiring,

but he wasn't sure how to go about it. When to do it, whether to do it, how to go

from someone who loves his job to someone who doesn't work anymore. So, being the journalist that he is, he decided to take this on as an assignment.

He gave himself one year to decide whether or not to retire, and he talked to lots of different people. Some of them were still

working into their 90s, like Mel Brooks and Norman Lear. Some are happily retired and traveling the world.

Some are unhappily retired and realizing they should have given it more thought before taking the leap.

During the course of researching the book, I didn't know what the ending was going to be and so I went

from oh yeah I've got to retire to I'll never retire everybody I talked to made I

thought such a compelling argument I was in their camp until I woke up and then went and talked to the next person.

I started by asking Steve what got him seriously considering retirement for the very first time.

I left college on a Tuesday night in 1975

and I started work the next morning, three hours away from college in a small town in California,

...