Introduction: Finding a Hobby for Life After Retirement
One of the major questions after retirement is how to spend your time.
Fishing is often mentioned as a popular hobby. It gets you outdoors, can be continued well into old age, and can be done alone. On the surface, it seems to have many qualities that make it ideal for retirement.
Yet I would hesitate to recommend fishing as a hobby for everyone after retirement.
It can be done entirely alone. It involves less physical activity than it may appear to. Chance plays a large role in the catch. Gear theories and fishing theories can easily grow into endless technical talk. And once you actually catch a fish, another question appears: what are you going to do with it?
In this article, I will look at these characteristics and consider why fishing may not be an ideal retirement hobby for everyone.
Chapter 1: Fishing Can Be Done Alone—and That Can Deepen Isolation and Make You More Set in Your Ways
Fishing is fundamentally an activity that can be done entirely alone.
With shore-based bait fishing or lure fishing, you can choose the location, prepare the tackle, cast, read the fish’s response, hook it, and land it entirely by yourself.
Even when using a charter boat, the boat and captain take you to the fishing grounds, but what tackle to use, how to work it, and when to strike remain decisions made by each individual angler.
This matters after retirement.
A person can continue fishing even after relationships with other people have largely disappeared. Even a cantankerous old man whom nobody wants to spend time with can still go fishing. And with enough years of experience, he can accumulate plenty of fishing lore to talk about as well.
Retirement is also a period when many of the relationships previously maintained through work begin to disappear. Spending large amounts of time in a hobby that requires neither cooperation nor dialogue with other people can deepen existing isolation and make a person even more set in his ways.
Some people genuinely enjoy being alone in nature.
Fishing can soothe loneliness for one person while deepening isolation for another. Because it involves spending so much time with yourself, your relationship with solitude is worth considering before choosing fishing as a retirement hobby.
Related article: Hitori de tanoshimeru shumi o motsu | Sekando raifu o yutaka ni suru gokui [Japanese article]
Chapter 2: Fishing Is Not an Ideal Hobby for Maintaining Physical Fitness
Because fishing takes place outdoors, it may look like a physically active hobby.
In reality, there is a substantial difference between the physical activity required to reach a fishing spot and the physical activity involved in actually fishing.
You may walk along a mountain stream, move across rocks, walk along a surf beach, or paddle a kayak to reach a fishing spot. Those activities can certainly require physical effort.
Once the actual fishing begins, however, body movement usually becomes much smaller.
To detect subtle changes through the rod tip or line and to control a lure or rig precisely, it is generally more useful to keep the body stable.
If you are breathing hard and your upper body is moving significantly, it becomes more difficult to detect delicate bites or maintain fine control.
On a boat or a pier, anglers may also spend long periods sitting or standing in almost the same position.
After retirement, maintaining muscle strength, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness becomes increasingly important. If fishing is your hobby, it makes sense to maintain a separate form of regular physical exercise.
Chapter 3: Treating the Catch as a Score Can Make Fishing Stressful
Rod-and-line fishing is fundamentally an inefficient way to harvest fish.
If your only objective is to obtain fish as food, buying them from a supermarket or fish market is more predictable in both time and cost.
Part of the attraction of fishing lies in the process leading up to the catch.
You look at the weather, think about the tide, choose a location, and experiment with tackle and technique.
And still, you may catch nothing.
At other times, a fish may take the bait even when you have done nothing particularly clever.
Fishing takes place in nature, which means chance has a substantial influence on the result.
If the number or size of fish becomes your main measure of success, every period without a catch begins to feel like failure.
Yesterday you caught ten fish; today you caught none. The angler beside you is catching fish while you are not. The fish are smaller than last time.
Once you begin making these comparisons, an activity meant to be enjoyable can easily become a source of stress.
As I discussed in another article, Choka zero demo nayamanai | Mosou to kufu de tanoshimu boto-zuri [Japanese article], the essence of fishing is enjoying the act of fishing itself.
Its very inefficiency creates room for play—a space in which you can simply engage with nature.
For people who enjoy that space, fishing can become an extraordinarily deep hobby.
Chapter 4: When Cause and Effect Are Hard to Verify, Fishing Theories and Lectures Can Multiply
Fishing is an activity whose pleasure can lie in the act itself.
At the same time, fishing offers an enormous amount of material to talk about.
Rods, reels, lines, bait, lures, rigs, colors, sizes, actions, depths, and locations.
The more experience you accumulate, the more things you have to explain.
Why a Meaningful PDCA Cycle Is Difficult in Fishing
A meaningful PDCA—Plan, Do, Check, Act—cycle requires a system in which factors other than the one being changed can be kept sufficiently comparable, allowing the results before and after the change to be evaluated.
In natural fishing environments, conditions that affect the catch are constantly changing: tide, water temperature, current, turbidity, wind, light, baitfish, the position of fish schools, and fish activity, among many others.
There are also many potentially relevant natural parameters, measured in different units and by different methods: temperature, current velocity, illumination, fish-school position and density, and so on.
Professional anglers working as tackle-company testers or instructors may be able to use fish finders, sensors, and other equipment to record and process many of these variables over long periods. Doing the same thing consistently as a recreational angler requires considerable time and expense.
Under those conditions, something happens:
“I changed the lure, and then I caught a fish.”
That observation then becomes:
“I caught the fish because I changed to this lure.”
And from there:
“The fish took it because of this color.”
“It reacted because of this retrieve.”
“The fish were in this particular mood today.”
The explanations accumulate.
Because chance plays such a large role in fishing, post-hoc meaning can easily become attached to what happened.
Experience Can Be Mistaken for Statistical Certainty
After decades of fishing, people may begin to feel that the sheer quantity of their experience—“I’ve been doing this for thirty years” or “I’ve tried this hundreds of times”—guarantees the correctness of their conclusions.
Experience and statistical verification are different things.
Drawing causal conclusions from experience requires sufficiently comparable conditions and a method for evaluating the results. Treating a large number of experiences gathered under different conditions as though they automatically provide statistical certainty can turn randomness into an apparent rule.
To me, a fair amount of what is described as PDCA in recreational fishing looks more like pseudo-PDCA, with explanations attached to experience after the fact.
People accustomed to experimental systems or verification-based reasoning may also find this kind of post-hoc causal reasoning less intellectually satisfying.
In More Reproducible Activities, Results Speak Louder Than Technical Talk
One example of an activity with relatively little room for chance and comparatively high reproducibility is circuit time attack.
Circuit driving also generates plenty of theory: tires, tire pressure, suspension settings, racing lines, braking points, and much more.
But lap times are relatively reproducible.
If the same driver repeatedly drives the same car on the same circuit under similar conditions, the resulting lap times tend to converge within a reasonably narrow range.
That makes it much easier to compare the effects of changes in driving technique or vehicle setup.
And in the end, there is still a lap time recorded by that car, with that driver, on that circuit, under those conditions.
No matter how much theory someone explains, it carries little weight if the actual lap time does not support it.
I discuss my own comparison of real-world lap times in a GR Yaris 6MT and 8S-DAT in GR Yaris 6MT vs GR-DAT Lap Times ★ What a 0.795-Second Gap Says About My Driving
Fishing is different.
Even when someone catches a very large fish, it is difficult to separate the effects of skill, gear, location, fish-school position, and natural conditions. Personal theories about fishing technique and tackle are therefore relatively difficult to falsify.
I discuss the large role of chance and the weak link between effort and outcome in fishing in Tsuri, gorufu, shogi kara kangaeru guzen to hitsuzen — Shumi no kofukuron [Japanese article].
A Theory That Is Hard to Falsify Can Turn into a Lecture
In an environment where personal theories are difficult to evaluate objectively, fishing theories and gear theories can expand along with experience.
Enjoying a good catch, experimenting with equipment, and thinking about fishing technique are all part of the fun.
But the nature of the hobby changes when talking about your fishing theories and gear becomes more important than actually going fishing.
Once personal experience becomes the authority behind unsolicited lectures, and knowledge is used to establish superiority over other people, the hobby begins to drift toward showing off and one-upmanship.
Fishing provides fertile ground for the old man who spends more time lecturing other people than actually fishing.
And this brings us back to the problem discussed in Chapter 1.
Fishing can continue even when a person’s social relationships have shrunk. If that solitary environment is combined with personal theories that are difficult to falsify, existing stubbornness and isolation may deepen further.
For me, this is one of the major reasons fishing is difficult to recommend as a retirement hobby for everyone.
The center of fishing should remain the time you actually spend beside the water, rod in hand.
Related article: Tsuri ni seikai wa nai | Bungotachi ga tsuri o jinsei ni tatoeta riyu [Japanese article]
Chapter 5: The Question of What to Do with the Fish You Catch
Once you catch a fish, another question appears: what are you going to do with it?
If you take it home, you may need to dispatch it, bleed it, chill it, transport it, clean it, and turn it into food. Hygiene and freshness also have to be considered.
The more fish you catch, the more work follows. Once you consider how much your household can actually eat and process, there is naturally a limit to how many fish you can take home.
If you release the fish, you then have to think about how to return it to the water while minimizing damage.
Eat it or release it? If you take it home, how far should you process it first? What happens if you catch far more than expected?
The more strongly you pursue the catch itself, the larger this “what happens afterward?” problem becomes.
I discuss this issue in more detail in Kyacchi ando ririsu wa zankoku ka? ☆ Shizen-kai no hosho to seizon kanosei kara kangaeru [Japanese article].
Chapter 6: Fishing Is Hard to Recommend Unless You Truly Love Fishing
Seen this way, fishing is a surprisingly idiosyncratic hobby to begin simply because retirement has given you more free time.
The freedom of an activity that can be completed alone can also contribute to isolation and becoming increasingly set in one’s ways. Chance plays a large role in the catch, and the more one tries to explain that chance, the easier it becomes for attention to shift from actual fishing toward theories about gear and technique.
Physical fitness still requires separate exercise, and when you do catch a fish, the question of what to do with it remains.
That is why I hesitate to recommend fishing as a retirement hobby to people who do not already love fishing.
If the time without a catch, the time spent thinking about tackle, and the time simply watching nature are all enjoyable in themselves, fishing can become a remarkably deep hobby.
Related article: Choka mokuteki no pureja boto shoyu wa wari ni awanai | Rikutsu-Kone-Taro no iken [Japanese article]
Conclusion: If You Choose Fishing, Go Fishing
As with any hobby, what matters is whether you can find meaning beyond efficiency and measurable results.
Even when no fish are biting, there is still the sea, the wind, and an invisible world beneath the surface.
You stand there with a rod and spend time thinking about what may be happening below.
If that time itself is enjoyable, even a day with zero fish can have value.
I discuss this idea in more detail in Shinia dakara koso dekiru sakana-kusakunai tsuri | Shizen-kai de no jibun no genzaichi o saguru [Japanese article].
For someone who genuinely loves fishing, few hobbies offer this much depth.
Rather than beginning to fish simply because retirement has created spare time, spend that time fishing because fishing itself is what you want to do.
After retirement, that may be the best reason of all to choose any hobby.
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