How Former President Barack Obama’s Mornings Look Like These Days
Since giving up the presidential office, Barack Obama’s mornings have been completely different from the years he’s spent as the commander-in-chief. He shares about his freedom from public service in a lot of interviews since.
“Now when I wake up, I can make my own decisions about how do I want to spend my time,” says the former president. As such, he can wake up as late as he wants. Sometimes, he even has the prerogative to sleep in if there’s nothing on his plate that morning. He also reveals to Prince Harry in a broadcast BBC Radio 4 interview that he found his post-presidential life to be “hugely liberating.”
Although this doesn’t mean he’s no longer active in the causes he championed as the president. In fact, he’s still quite active in promoting global education, providing a living wage for workers, and protecting the environment from overconsumption.
On the contrary, as a retired president, he now has to work doubly hard to accomplish his goals. The resources and platform previously made available to him as the leader of the free world are no longer at his beck and call.
Other than the resources, he also misses the fact that he never had to sit through traffic as the president. Nowadays, he has to fall in line at a red light, just like everybody else.
He says he also misses his team in the Whitehouse. “There’s a camaraderie and an intensity to the work. Everything you do every day, you know can affect millions or billions of people,” he declares. “To have really smart, focused people who are there for the right reasons and who over time have built up trust and have learned to support each other and rely on, I miss that,” the former president adds.
As for the job of being president, he also misses the impact it has but not so much the politics of it. Although he does acknowledge that there’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment when he gets to make things happen by successfully navigating the treacherous political waters of the USA.