Why do I believe that I’ll never really retire, in the general societal sense? I might have touched on this in previous entries but let’s go deeper here.
Retirement is a phase of your life that you don’t need to have a job because you’re financially well off enough to do whatever you want. “I’ve accumulated enough money to live off that for the rest of my life.”
That may have been the case for previous generations but I think it’s getting more delayed or not even happening at all. It may not be happening at all because people can’t financially afford to or they just don’t want to.
So we’re not saying retirement is time bound because some people retire at 70, some at 30, so it’s not dictated by age.
Is retirement financially driven? Can people retire only once?
I think most people would say yes, but Idk if I’d agree (to the 1st question, and to the 2nd question actually). But let’s just say you took a 1-year gap from work to do a sabbatical. Just travel the world. Would that be considered a brief retirement? I’d say so. A retirement from what you were doing previously. A retirement from potentially what others have constructed as what your life should look like.
If someone said no to that ‘only once’ question, then they’d disagree with my statement there. So fi we go under the definition that you can only retire once (YORO), then we’re saying there’s a definitive point in someone’s life where someone is not retired, then becomes retired.
Hmm, what about in sports though? People have retired and come back from retirement, sometimes multiple times, on many occasions. Favre, Jordan, Gronk.
What about outside of sports? Idk of any examples off the top of my head in business, e.g. who’ve done that. But I have to think there’s been a non-zero number of that. I think music or comedy is an industry that you can retire, then unretire. Then re-retire.
Then there are people who retire in a profession or a career but then start a new career in something else. So I think we may have to distinguish between legal retirement and career retirement. Because legal retirement is more or less the age you can withdraw funds from your 401k or IRA. Or that may be the implicit definition that people may have. Or at least a benchmark against which to measure their progress. So in that case, you can only turn 65 or whatever age once in your life.
But people who retire before then can’t pull their funds out (without a fee). So those people, they have enough money to retire before dipping into those retirement accounts for X period of time. In this scenario, retirement is not a one-time thing but perhaps more financially driven.
But the discrepancy here is in the word “enough.” $10 million may be enough for one person to retire at 35 but not enough for someone else at 35. Theoretically, $10 might be enough for someone to retire. If they have such a lifestyle.
So if there is that much financial variability, then financial reasons can’t be the main factor here.
I think it’s time-energy-mindset related. Is it when we want to do something new? More control of our time and energy? Someone’s retirement may be full of travel; others’ full of relaxation at home; others’ full of passive income streams; others’ full of hobbies they always wanted to do.
In many of these cases, someone’s version of retirement is things they’ve wanted to do or have done but want to do more of. So essentially more control or autonomy of their time. Money is just a way to do that.
So time = energy. Or it’s a subset of it. And those activities give us joy, happiness, fulfillment, etc. I like enhancement better than management, as I’ve discussed previously.
Putting all that together, retirement, for me, is:
A self-reliant energy enhancement belief.
So if that’s the case, I’m self-reliant right now. I’m enhancing my energy on a daily, weekly basis by doing things I want to be doing. So by that definition, aren’t I already retired right now?
I already have a mindset of being the person I want to be. Why do I need to wait until a certain age or financial threshold to determine when I retire?
Tying that back to the original question, I’ll never really retire because I’m already retired. Conversely though, I am already that which I am. At least according to my definition.
In the societal sense, I’ll never really retire because I’ll always continue to have this ‘retired’ mindset.
It seems like I’m on opposite sides of the spectrum with these answers but again that’s if we use a 2D framework. If it’s 3D, then we just curve it to be the same place.
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