One solution to a social media dilemna

I have a problem with LinkedIn. For those whose use of social media is limited to purely 'personal use' tools such as Facebook, Plurk, or Google+, LinkedIn is a social media site for professionals, used mostly for keeping track of former coworkers/managers/employees, and for posting your own professional status updates.  I made fairly frequent use of it up to a year or so ago, and have a pretty good number of contacts.

It's pretty cool to be able to find people I worked with 20 years ago and see how their careers progressed, or to see where people who've left one employer turn up.  And of course it is a vital tool for someone thinking of moving on from wherever they are currently employed.

A lot of the people I worked with are connecting to each other, and I still get the occasional request to write a recommendation for a former employee or colleague.  Which leads to my problem.  In the past year I have truly moved on and away from the field I worked in for 20 years.  Most of the people who made up what I considered my 'social circle' actually fall into that grey area of work-friends: really neat people who are a pleasure to talk with but who have nothing in common outside of the professional sphere.

Now that I've left that profession, I find the majority of my contacts are just that: professional contacts who, it happens, are also pretty cool people and who I really enjoyed working with and knowing all these years.  But I chose to leave, and without a common profession we really have nothing in common strong enough to overcome that.

What I'm doing now is so different I can't really add it to my LinkedIn profile.  It just doesn't fit with the rest of my resume, you might say. I don't want to leave my profile with just an end-date, a point of departure without a follow-up arrival. At the same time I don't want to just delete my profile, because I still enjoy looking people up to see who's doing what now.  What to do?

I finally found the right solution for me.  I added a new "current position."  I am now officially:  Retired.