Things to Do in Retirement: 4 Ways to Be Extraordinary

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Travel, hobbies, volunteer work, extra time with family and friends – the things on this list sound wonderful to those who are about to retire. All are common things to do in retirement.

None of those things is wrong. But, for some people, they just fill hours instead of building a life of passion and meaning.

For some, that list is a yawn. The novelty of not having to work may last about two minutes. Then comes boredom. Retirement boredom, a common problem, can lead to loneliness, depression, and even bad physical health.

What if, instead of giving in to the mundane, you went a different way: toward the extraordinary!

Retirement doesn’t have to be only about years without work; it can also be about years full of possibility, challenge, intent, and fun that build on your life instead of just capping it off.

The things to do in retirement are personal

For each person, the inspiring, exciting version of retirement will be different, depending on a framework of personal interests, physical capabilities, family schedules, funds, and other factors.

Barring that framework, no one else has to understand why it matters to you. This is your life, not a performance. The only opinion that needs sign-off is yours.

No matter what your retirement framework, this article is your permission to push the boundaries and find YOUR version of extraordinary things to do in retirement.

Read on for a list of seven starter ways that we hope will inspire you.

Put your mind to work on real research

Retirement gives you back a valuable resource you can use any way you want: time. Time also happens to be a resource badly needed by research institutes. Find the right research match for you to create an epic retirement.

Contribute to actual NASA science from your kitchen table. NASA runs dozens of open citizen-science projects that require no science background, just your curiosity:¹

• “Cloudspotting” on Mars
• Hunting for undiscovered planets outside our solar system using NASA data
• Measuring snow on the ground using your phone
• Sorting galaxy images from the James Webb Space Telescope

More than 450 NASA citizen scientists have been credited as co-authors on peer-reviewed papers. This isn’t busywork. It’s an authentic contribution with your name potentially attached to it.

Help NOAA track the planet. NOAA’s citizen-science catalog includes a wide range of helpful services that volunteers can provide, such as:² 

• Counting humpback whales off Hawaii
• Reporting your own backyard rainfall through the decades-old Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network
• Tagging sharks along the Atlantic coast in a program that’s been running continuously since 1962.

Join Zooniverse and pick your obsession. Zooniverse is the largest platform of its kind, and in June 2026 its volunteers passed one billion classifications. Dozens of live projects range from clerical services to online observations, such as:³ 

• Transcribing handwritten 19th-century notebooks
• Sorting wildlife imagery
• Observing penguin colonies
• Discovering new galaxies

One Zooniverse-linked transcription effort, AnnoTate, showed volunteers transcribing historical handwriting with 95 percent accuracy compared to trained specialists.⁴ 

You can browse by interest — astronomy, ecology, medicine, the humanities — and easily switch if you get bored.

Turn your career into a gift instead of a memory. If decades of professional skill are sitting unused in your brain, skills-based volunteering puts it back to work. Organizations like Taproot Foundation, Catchafire, and Common Impact match retired website designers, marketing consultants, HR professionals, and others with nonprofits that need exactly that expertise but can’t afford to hire active professionals.⁵

One retired Microsoft program manager profiled by Fidelity Investments redeployed her project-management background into disaster-recovery volunteer work after Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Harvey, then into refugee resettlement work — work she chose specifically because, in her words, being retired meant she got to choose which ones to say yes to.⁶ 

Serve through a structured federal program. AmeriCorps Seniors — which includes the Foster Grandparent Program, the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP), and the Senior Companion Program — has connected people 55 and older with community service since the 1990s. RSVP alone places more than 480,000 volunteers a year with roughly 65,000 nonprofits, congregations, and government agencies.⁷

Master something that takes years, not weekends

Lifelong-learning lecture series are fine for an afternoon. A mastery project in retirement is different. You learn a skill deep enough that, even after 10 years in, you’re still finding new layers of competency, contribution, and fulfillment.

Get your ham radio license. Amateur radio has no age ceiling and no citizenship requirement, and the entry-level Technician license requires passing a single 35-question exam with no Morse code involved.⁸ From there it opens onto an entire world: 

• Emergency communications networks like SKYWARN through NOAA which counts more than 300,000 trained storm spotters nationwide⁹  
• Contacting operators on other continents
• Talking to the International Space Station through ARRL’s amateur radio program

Learn locksport. Competitive, ethical lock picking has an actual global community, national and international competitions, and a code of ethics its practitioners take seriously (pick only locks you own or have explicit permission to pick).¹⁰ It’s mechanical puzzle-solving you can do at your kitchen table, and it scales from a $20 practice set to serious competition.

Write your ethical will. An ethical will — sometimes called a legacy letter — is not your legal will. It’s a document, letter, or recording that passes down your values, your hard-won lessons, your family stories, and your hopes for the people who come after you, rather than simply passing down your money.¹¹ 

The tradition dates back over two millennia, and clinicians who work with this kind of writing have noticed something specific: the people most convinced their lives are “too ordinary” to be worth writing down are often the ones who produce the most cherished result — because in 75 years, the ordinary details of your daily life will be exactly what a great-grandchild wants most to read.¹²

Build a legacy project bigger than a letter. A memoir, a recorded oral history, a digitized family photo archive, a documentary pieced together from old home movies — these take time, which is precisely what you now have and didn’t before.

Make copies and provide them to historical societies or museums where your ancestors lived. Use self-publishing software to create a private history book that sheds light on the past for your family’s generations to come.

When money becomes a hobby

For years, you’ve saved money and made many financial decisions. If you were in a financial vocation, you have learned a lot and taught others. In retirement, it might feel as though that chapter has come to an end.

But you can use those skills and continue building your interest in and knowledge of financial things by getting more, not less, involved in your own investments and sharing what you know with others.

Start an investment club with friends. A stock investment club is a small group — often friends, neighbors, or former coworkers — who pool modest monthly contributions, research companies together, and vote on what to buy and sell.

Better Investing, an organization that grew out of the original National Association of Investment Clubs, has helped more than 5 million people learn to invest this way and publishes step-by-step guidance for starting one from scratch.¹³ It turns investing into a social event.

Tour a mint, a mine, or a company you own a piece of. The U.S. Mint offers free public tours of its Philadelphia and Denver production facilities, where you can watch coins actually being minted and see the press they used to strike the nation’s first coins in 1792.¹⁴

If you hold stock in a mining, manufacturing, or consumer-goods company, look into whether it offers plant tours or investor days — many do, and seeing the physical operation behind a stock ticker changes how you understand the investment. It’s also a good excuse to take a trip.

Go to the annual shareholder meeting. As a shareholder, you’re entitled to attend your company’s annual meeting, hear directly from leadership about strategy and performance, and ask questions alongside other owners.

Berkshire Hathaway has turned its meeting into a weekend-long event with exhibits and a 5K run, but even modest companies hold a real meeting every year that individual shareholders are welcome to attend.¹⁵

Explore the history of gold and silver. If you hold physical precious metals in a self-directed IRA, you may find yourself curious about the history of metals in the United States. Search for precious-metals-related locations, tours, or special events:

• Relive Alaska’s gold rush
• Tour through Colorado gold camps
• Take a gold discovery tour at Marshall Gold Discovery in Coloma, California.¹⁶ 

Understand your investment even better. Learn all about the legacy of gold that began in the early days of U.S. mining.

Attend a coin and precious metals show. The American Numismatic Association maintains a public calendar of coin shows nationwide, from small regional club events to major national conventions, such as the annual World’s Fair of Money, where thousands of collectors and dealers gather to buy, sell, and swap knowledge about rare coins, bullion, and currency.¹⁷ It’s a social hobby with a financial edge — part flea market, part classroom.

Teach your grandchildren to invest — with real money. A high yield savings account, college savings plan, or custodial IRA allows you open and manage an account in a grandchild’s name, invest it in actual assets, and hand them the reins when they come of age. Beginning modest, consistent contributions early gives compound growth decades to work — a $10,000 investment growing at 6 percent becomes nearly $30,000 over eighteen years.¹⁸  

Better than giving money itself, this is something you can do together while providing a financial education. Choose a company, watch it move, and explain what’s happening.

Travel with an actual reason to go

Travel is one of the greatest benefits of retiring, whether it’s short trips close by or grand adventures across the world. No matter what level of travel you can afford or cope with physically, this is one of the things to do in retirement where you can easily add the extraordinary.

Micro-expeditions close to home. You don’t need a passport to explore somewhere genuinely unfamiliar. Nearly every state has a network of half-forgotten landmarks, such as ghost towns, abandoned mining camps, and overgrown historical sites that many residents have never bothered to visit.

California alone has a documented ghost-town road trip running from Bodie — the state’s largest unrestored ghost town, once home to 10,000 people and nearly 50 saloons — down through old silver camps and Death Valley mining outposts. Pick a state, pick a decade of history, and go find what’s left of it.

Theme your trips instead of your destinations. Rather than “we’re going to New England,” try “we’re visiting every covered bridge in three states” or “we’re doing a lighthouse-keeper’s tour of the Great Lakes.”

RV and road-trip communities have entire catalogs of themed routes:

• Architecture-based trips
• Trips built around a single historical trail
• Trips organized by nothing more than a shared curiosity

A theme turns a vacation into an exciting cross between travel, research, and scavenger hunt.

Become a heritage traveler. Heritage travel — also called genealogy or ancestry travel — takes you into actual villages, parish records, cemeteries, and town halls your ancestors knew.

It has become significant enough that Ireland, Scotland, and Germany maintain dedicated visitor centers and archives for it. Guided outfits now build entire itineraries — mapping ancestral towns, arranging archive visits, pairing you with a professional genealogist for a day.

Sizing it right for your retirement

Keep dreaming and thinking. Don’t discount anything just because you are going to retire (or are already retired). But plan realistically for your budget, logistics, and any physical and emotional requirements.

Keep it safe and doable.

Every retirement life offers options that are fulfilling and beyond the norm. What inspires you to be extraordinary?