The first year in retirement is often the most difficult. But it also can set the stage for how you’ll fill the years ahead—both financially and psychologically. Stephen Kreider Yoder, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, joined his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, in retirement a year ago. In this monthly Retirement Rookies column, the 66-year-olds chronicle some of the issues they are dealing with early in retirement.

Karen

In the kitchen, I look up at my woven companions—16 baskets atop the cabinets. They’re from a dozen countries, and they radiate warm memories.

But wait, do I need so many baskets? And 40 more are around the house, many as decorations or stored in closets.

I’m trying to get rid of stuff methodically early in retirement, and it’s beginning to feel like a steady job. There’s no urgency. But when the time comes for a smaller place, I want to be ready. That time could come any time.

I want to winnow our possessions before there’s a health crisis or moving van at the door, while I can do the hard work of organizing and categorizing, of identifying what I need long-term, what to disperse and what to pitch.

It’s partly psychological. As I age, I find I have less room in my head to keep track of things. And the sheer numbers of some possessions create a growing mental tension.

We were ahead of the game when we retired. We moved a dozen times in 44 years, each time purging a bit. Helping our parents downsize inspired us often to do a sweep of our own when we got home.

Now that we’re both retired, I’ve created some downsizing categories to keep me from being overwhelmed:

• Don’t use it, don’t need it. Old electronics and orphaned cords. Knickknacks without sentimental value. My 20 thimbles from around the world, only one of which I ever use. The 150 beautifully sharpened No. 2 pencils in a row of blue-and-white ceramic pots, one labeled “Pencil Collectors Society.”

I’ll use perhaps a dozen pencils the rest of my life. The others can be off to Goodwill now, along with everything else in this category.

• Things we use now but won’t in a smaller space. Some of the guest-room furniture, extra chairs, large house plants, the piano, a rusty wheelbarrow. We should do an inventory now and label what we’ll ditch when we move.

• Stuff only I can handle. My childhood report cards, recital programs, work accomplishments, letters and such are a priority for thinning out now. Nobody else can make sense of them, but it can feel like throwing away bits of myself.

“But Mom, you have to save all of that,” says our son Isaac. “It’s like your personal legacy.” Maybe I’ll keep more than I intended, for our boys to root through as a window into my youth. (But, I wonder, will they really care about those report cards?) At least, though, I should organize it.

• Family heirlooms and mementos. These, too, are hard to part with, imbued with family history and shared memories.

We aren’t antiquers, but we do have a few elegant old Japanese tansu cabinets the kids grew up with. And I have about 25 quilts, some I made starting at age 7, and many from family and friends. They are works of art and full of memories but too many to fit in a condo.

The boys say they want some but are still too mobile, so at least I should make a plan for who gets what.

• Things I want by my side through older years. Family photos. My Japanese pottery. Journals from our travels. My quilt frame.

And baskets. I have always cherished handmade baskets. My first is from South Dakota, where at 16 I learned willow-basket making from two local weavers. I can’t part with it.

When our son Levi is home, we eat sticky rice with our fingers out of little lidded Laotian rice baskets, recalling Laos when he was age 2 and clutched his sticky-rice basket as we bicycled around Luang Prabang.

In our guest-room closet is a Japanese backpack basket—a gift from a student’s family—whose weaver was a Japanese National Treasure. In my reading room is a basket we bought in a Philippines market in 1987, not knowing it was for a baby until locals pointed and laughed knowingly. It became a bassinet to our three babies, and it’s a treasure.

Five dozen baskets is too many now. How many is just enough?

Steve

A classical guitar in its case stares at me from a corner of the bedroom. “Play me,” it taunts, and I look the other way.

Maybe it’s time I got rid of my lonely 1972 Alvarez Yairi as part of our gradual downsizing.

A tougher thought: I should probably also downsize my pipe dream of someday playing a guitar even moderately well, along with dozens of other unrequited ambitions I’ve clung to for decades. And I’ve got a few erstwhile passions I might best surrender now as well.

Karen talks of ditching stuff, and I’ve got plenty of boxfuls to sacrifice—textbooks, decrepit power tools, hardware that definitely might come in handy some time.

I also should release one or both of my vintage Honda motorcycles, which I’m sentimentally attached to but haven’t ridden in ages.

But for me, downsizing is more than getting rid of stuff. It’s about getting rid of conceptions of myself—of who I was, who I am and who I want to be.

That is, I should sell my motorcycles not just because they take space, but also because I think I’ve permanently moved on from motorcycling, my passion for decades starting at age 12.

Same with my skis and skiing.

Retirement has had a way of giving me permission to begin letting go—of my professional identity, my urge to do financial planning without help, the delusion that I’ll be fit forever. That permission makes it a good time for some wanna-do triage.

There are things I still intend to get to, now that I have more time. I want to weld better, brush up my Spanish, improve my swimming, study more history and learn to drive an 18-wheeler. There are activities we’re already stepping up, like traveling more in Africa, cycling around America, visiting family and seeking long-term volunteering opportunities that match our skills.

But finding time for all of it requires that I liberate other I-will-get-to-its that are increasingly a mental burden. I will probably never learn Arabic and should forgive myself of that, and French. I can get rid of the beer-brewing equipment I bought when I was 23 and discharge the notion that I’ll ever learn to use it.

I will probably never write a book; may I free myself from that weight? I hereby declare I can die happy enough without visiting Machu Picchu, the Galápagos or Rome as I’d once hoped to do. There are plenty of other places we want to go, and not time for everywhere.

Our house is a standing to-do list of fun projects I’ve put off and may never get to—or shouldn’t, lest I fall off a ladder and meet an untimely demise. Let’s just release some of those projects, too.

When I bought the Alvarez in 1981, my guitar teacher said I had talent. His kind words kindled my decadeslong conviction that I would learn to play it well, eventually. We moved to Japan the next year, and I took along the guitar but didn’t find a teacher—temporarily, I told myself.

The guitar moved with us many times until 2012, when Karen bought me lessons with a fabulous teacher for my birthday and I began learning again. I did pretty well, even playing in a few modest recitals. But I dropped it—temporarily, I said—when we moved out of town for a year.

Now there it sits. It’s time to set it free.

Or is it? I finally have the bandwidth. I just opened the case, and only one string is broken, a good omen. Maybe this time I really can learn to play it.

The U.S. has long been the lender of last resort to the world. During the emerging-market panics of the 1990s, the global financial crisis of 2007-09 and the pandemic shutdown of 2020, it was the Treasury’s unmatched capacity to borrow that came to the rescue.

Now, the Treasury itself is a source of risk. No, the U.S. isn’t about to default or fail to sell enough bonds at its next auction. But the scale and upward trajectory of U.S. borrowing and absence of any political corrective now threaten markets and the economy in ways they haven’t for at least a generation.

That’s the takeaway from the sudden sharp rise in Treasury yields in recent weeks. The usual suspects can’t explain it: The inflation picture has gotten marginally better, and the Federal Reserve has signalled it’s nearly done raising rates.

Instead, most of the increase is due to the part of yields, called the term premium, which has nothing to do with inflation or short-term rates. Numerous factors affect the term premium, and rising government deficits are a prime suspect.

Deficits have been wide for years. Why would they matter now? A better question might be: What took so long?

That larger deficits push up long-term rates had long been economic orthodoxy. But for the past 20 years, interest-rate models that incorporated fiscal policy didn’t work, noted Riccardo Trezzi, a former Fed economist who now runs his own research firm, Underlying Inflation.

That’s understandable. Central banks—worried about too-low inflation and stagnant growth—had kept interest rates around zero while buying up government bonds (“quantitative easing”). Private demand for credit was weak. This trumped any concern about deficits.

“We had a blissful 25 years of not having to worry about this problem,” said Mark Wiedman, senior managing director at BlackRock.

Today, though, central banks are worried about inflation being too high and have stopped buying and in some cases are shedding their bondholdings (“quantitative tightening”). Suddenly, fiscal policy matters again.

To paraphrase Hemingway, deficits can affect interest rates gradually or suddenly. Investors, asked to buy more bonds, gradually make room in their portfolios by buying less of something else, such as equities. Eventually, the risk-adjusted returns of these assets equalise, which means higher bond yields and lower price/earnings ratios on stocks. That has been happening for the past month.

Sometimes, though, markets can move suddenly, such as when Mexico threatened to default in 1994 and Greece did default a decade later. Even in countries that, unlike Mexico or Greece, borrow in currencies they control, interest rates can become hostage to deficits, such as in Canada in the early 1990s or Italy in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The U.S. isn’t Canada or Italy; it controls the world’s reserve currency, and its inflation and interest rates are mostly driven by domestic, not foreign, factors. On the other hand, the U.S. has also exploited those advantages to accumulate debt and run deficits that are much larger than those of peer economies.

There’s not much sign that this has yet imposed a penalty. Investors still project that the Fed will get inflation down to its 2% goal. At 2.4%, real (inflation-adjusted) Treasury yields are comparable to those in the mid-2000s and lower than in the 1990s, when the U.S. government’s debts and deficits were much lower.

Still, sometimes bad news accumulates below investors’ radar until something brings their collective attention to bear. Could a point come when “all the headlines will be about the fiscal unsustainability of the U.S.?” asked Wiedman. “I don’t hear this today from global investors. But do I think it could happen? Absolutely, that paradigm shift is possible. It’s not that no one shows up to buy Treasurys. It’s that they ask for a much higher yield.”

It’s notable that the recent rise in bond yields came as Fitch Ratings downgraded its U.S. credit rating, Treasury upped the size of its bond auctions, analysts began revising upward this year’s federal deficit, and Congress nearly shut down parts of the government over a failure to pass spending bills.

The federal deficit was over 7% of gross domestic product in fiscal 2023, after adjusting for accounting distortions related to student debt, Barclays analysts noted last week. That’s larger than any deficit since 1930 outside of wars and recessions. And this is occurring at a time of low unemployment and strong economic growth, suggesting that in normal times, “deficits may be much higher,” Barclays added.

Abroad, fiscal policy has clearly begun to matter. Last fall, a proposed U.K. tax cut triggered a surge in British bond yields; the government scrapped the proposal, then resigned. Italian yields have risen since the government last week delayed reducing its deficit to below European guidelines. Trezzi said that for the past decade the European Central Bank had bought more than 100% of net Italian government bond issuance, but that’s coming to an end.

Foreign investors, worried about inflation and deficits, have been selling Italian bonds, while Italian households have been buying, Trezzi said. “With a weakening economy, it is unclear for how long…households can offset the selloff of foreigners.”

Investors looking for U.S. political will to rein in deficits would take note that both former President Donald Trump and President Biden, their parties’ front-runners for the 2024 presidential nomination, have signed deficit-busting legislation and that both of their parties have pledged not tocut the two largest spending programs, Medicare and Social Security, or raise taxes on most households.

They would also notice that the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives was just ousted by rebels in his own party because he had passed a bipartisan spending bill to prevent the government from shutting down. True, the rebels wanted less spending. But shutdowns, Barclays noted, represent “erosion of governance.” This isn’t how a country trying to reassure the bond market acts.

It’s one thing to work long hours. It’s another to surrender your free time to swirling thoughts of office predicaments and projects hanging over your head.

Many of us can’t let work go. It’s sinking our mental health and damaging our relationships. We need to shift the approach in our heads.

Joe Mellin thought maybe a week alone in the woods would do it. He journeyed by plane, bus and minivan to a remote pocket of Colorado for a program that coordinates solo wilderness excursions. Armed with a toothbrush, a journal and some dried split peas, the 41-year-old hunkered down to meditate and find out who he was.

Turned out, he was someone who really liked obsessing about his job.

“I was literally saying, Joe, you’re in Colorado, you’re off work, you’re in the middle of a forest, stop thinking about work,” the Washington-based tech worker recalls. By hour 36, in the quiet of his sleeping bag under the moon, he gave in. Soon he was sketching PowerPoint presentations in his journal, filling 20 pages with notes before he was finally able to let go.

Whether you’re on a spiritual quest in Colorado or at the playground with your kids, internally troubleshooting next week’s client pitch or entertaining revenge fantasies about a colleague, there’s a cost.

“You’re getting aggravated anew each time,” says Guy Winch, a psychologist and author who fashioned a TED Talk on the subject.

We often think we have to fix our jobs to relieve our work stress. “You might,” he says. “But fix you first.”

Break the cycle

Start by tracking how much time you’re spending ruminating about work, Winch says. For many of his patients, that’s 10 to 20 hours a week—after-hours. (At the office, we’re generally too busy doing the job to perseverate about it, he says.)

To stop the cycle, tax your mental capacity with something more complex than Netflix or a walk. Try a memory task like naming all 50 state capitals or recalling the items in your fridge, Winch suggests. Two to three minutes is often enough for a reset.

Then, channel what you had been obsessing about into something useful. Ask yourself: What’s the actual problem to be solved? If you’re worried about workload, can you delegate to teammates or decline meetings?

If there’s nothing to be done about the situation—some co-workers are just annoying—try to find the silver lining, Winch adds. Maybe this is the spark you finally need to find a new, better job. Maybe you’re building skills that will help you in the future.

When you are your job

We’re bombarded with emails, Slack messages and back-to-back Zoom calls during the day, so it’s no wonder we can’t turn off our brains when we shut the laptop. We mentally brace for pings of all kinds, even when they’re not coming.

And some of this is on us. So many employees have tied their identities to their jobs.

“They’ve defined their whole value this way, so it makes it that much harder to let go of things,” Rebecca Zucker, an executive coach, observes of some of her clients. “Something that goes badly at work can feel annihilating.”

Lauren Orcutt, a 36-year-old in Sacramento, Calif., loves being a copywriter. Some of her friends and family don’t love constantly hearing about it, she says.

“I think about it so much, it just comes out,” she explains.

She’s often up at 3 a.m., galvanised by an idea for a new blog post or needled by the realisation she messed up an email. “I kind of felt like I was working all night” for months, she says. Her sleep suffered.

To reclaim her brain space, Orcutt started jotting down her thoughts in a lavender notebook she now keeps on the nightstand. Mistakes that are plaguing her get their own page, which she rips out in the morning.

“I am going to throw it away and move on with my life,” she says. Even capturing the good ideas calms her, helping her drift back to sleep.

Reprioritise your life

Ruminating about work can make it hard to fall and stay asleep, and damage our mood and mental health, says Verena C. Haun, a professor at the Julius Maximilian University in Würzburg, Germany, who studies psychological detachment from work. Depleted, we often perform worse at work the next day.

She suggests marking the transition from work with a simple ritual, like washing out your coffee cup or changing clothes. Find a hobby, or three, that make you truly forget about work while you’re doing them. Set a goal, say, an hour spent gardening, especially on stressful work days.

You can’t think about work when you’re trying not to crash a boat, Jackie Hermes, the chief executive of a marketing firm, says she discovered. When the onset of the pandemic caused her business’s revenue to drop 40%, she rethought her relationship, once all-consuming, with her job.

“Is this really what I’m dedicating my entire life to?” she asked herself.

She doesn’t work less hours now, but she has changed how she thinks about work, allowing herself more flexibility and trying new things in her personal life. During the day, she’ll sometimes pop into the boating club she recently joined or catch a Milwaukee Brewers game at the ballpark.

“Work isn’t the only priority anymore,” she says, noting that so much about our jobs is out of our control anyway.

Now she tells herself, “I’m not behind. It’s always going to get done.”

Our future looks increasingly robotic—whether we like it or not. But the investment craze in robotics stocks may already be getting ahead of itself.

The latest example: South Korea’s Doosan Robotics, whose shares nearly doubled in value on their first day of trading Thursday. The company, which is part of the conglomerate Doosan Group, raised around $300 million from an initial public offering, making it Korea’s biggest IPO this year so far.

Doosan makes collaborative robots, or cobots, designed to work together with humans on factory floors. Such robotic helpers are most suitable for smaller companies that may not be ready to automate their whole production line but use cobots to automate processes better done by machines. Apart from its heavy-duty industrial robots, Doosan also makes variants that can serve coffee—and beer.

Doosan isn’t the only robotics company looking frothy of late. Shares of its smaller peer Rainbow Robotics, which is backed by Samsung Electronics, have more than quadrupled this year. Samsung raised its stake in Rainbow to 15% in March.

To be fair, there are plenty of good reasons to be optimistic about industrial robots. Poor demographics and poisonous immigration politics in most advanced economies will mean weak labor-force growth in the future. Robots rarely go on strike. And in the U.S., the enormous surge in manufacturing investment—courtesy of the Inflation Reduction Act and other industrial policy bills—means demand for manufacturing workers could remain strong for quite a while. Reshoring to advanced economies is another tailwind for robotics.

In 2022, almost 60% of Doosan’s sales came from North America and Europe. Though cobots are still a small part of the overall robot market—accounting for 7.5% of industrial robots installed in 2021, according to the International Federation of Robotics—shipments have been growing faster than the market as a whole. Installations for all industrial robots grew 5% year on year to a record high in 2022.

The company is the seventh-largest maker of cobots globally, according to its prospectus. But since the top two companies, Denmark’s Universal Robots and Japan’s Fanuc, dominate the sector with nearly half of the market, Doosan’s market share amounted to only 3.6%.

Doosan has been growing fast: Its sales more than doubled to around 45 billion won, the equivalent of $33 million, in 2022 from 2020. But it isn’t cheap. With a market capitalisation of around $2.5 billion, Doosan now trades at 74 times last year’s revenue. Fanuc trades at just 4.7 times revenue. Doosan is also unprofitable, though its chief executive expects it to move into the black next year.

The robot craze, like the artificial-intelligence craze, is grounded in real technological trends—and demographic ones too. But like human workers, not all robot firms are created equal. Jumping aboard the robot stock bandwagon at any price might not serve investors over the long run.