A 24 Year Old's Thoughts on Retirement
On why we shouldn't race to "retirement" and why we look at it wrong
In the final scene of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, everyone has left the house and Will Smith stands in an empty living room contemplating all his accomplishments while at Bel-Air and future plans. He looks around and nods his head before moving to turn off the light. He realizes his accomplishments and plans since moving to Bel-Air are underwhelming.
It is frightening to think this is the conclusion we could reach after a few years of life.
I think one of my biggest fears in life is getting to retirement and standing there like Will wondering, “Is this it? This is what I have worked my whole life for? This is what I accomplished? What do I do now?”
Retirement is often glamourized. Days filled with little commitments, time by the pool, going to the gym as you please, and maybe even a nice house right on the sunny beaches of Florida. To me, retirement is an interesting phenomenon. It is the end goal for everyone. It is the end boss. The final level of work we reach and when we reach it, we have achieved nirvana or so we think.
My friends and I often talk about retirement because after college it is the next predetermined step in our career until we outline things ourselves. It is something that everyone is always working towards.
It is natural to discuss something that may be 40 years away because all our lives, we always have something we are actively working towards. As a kid, we move through elementary and middle school trying to make good grades and advance to the next year. We are young and naïve in an innocent way. Our goals are usually far-fetched such as being in the NBA, one that I certainly thought was way too realistic.
Fast forward to high school and now, it is time to get more serious. This time determines a large majority of our future, whether it be college, a trade, or our career, whatever it is. We may not know exactly where life might take us, but we work to allow ourselves the optionality to have as much say as possible in where our life might go.
Next, we arrive at college. College is labeled as the best four years of your life. A time when mistakes are encouraged, risks are taken, and hard work is very objectively measured. The grade on a test. The internship you land. The job you receive after graduation. College is always full of purpose because, in the end, you are always actively working towards a degree. The beauty of college is it may provide an idea of where we may be headed but most importantly, it provides an explicit way to measure success and ultimately, your life.
However, once you leave college that largely evaporates. It is hard to know where you are going in life. The ways to measure success in our lives are no longer abundant. Many struggle with where they ultimately want to land and who they eventually wish to be. A promotion, a raise, or a level change provides some sort of semblance that you may be heading in the right direction, but what exactly is that direction? It is largely a world of unknowns.
All the way down the line, we have something that every working-class American is working towards, retirement. Retirement is a weird phenomenon because it is something we work toward and we are led to believe is so enchanting, yet we don’t know how much we will like it until we finally try it.
We are told to never judge a book by its cover, but retirement is a book that is forever judged by its cover.
It is a promise of a luxurious lifestyle free of commitments so much so people make sacrifices for it, never actually having known or experienced what it is truly like. People miss vacations, people work 100-hour weeks, and people delay marriages all to save for it. They look back and gone are the days of gallivanting around Europe for two weeks, climbing a mountain, staying up for no good reason until 3 am, sharing a room in a hostel with random strangers, and so much more. As you chip away at the mountain of life, you climb higher but on that ascent, you shed privileges you were previously afforded. In life, there are few guarantees but the one guarantee is you only get older.
Eventually, with each passing year, each passing day, each passing second you can’t do things you once did. Your body doesn’t move like it used to, your schedule isn’t as free as it once was, and your responsibilities are much more than before. So why do we race through our careers just to get to retirement? Or perhaps our idea of retirement is wrong? It is something I think about a good bit because my friends and I have always talked about it.
One of my friends asked me just this weekend when I wanted to retire. I mean, I am 24. Retirement is merely a blip in the future. I don’t know. But I would be lying if I didn’t have an idea of when it may be.
Delaying my answer to his question, I asked him what he defines as retirement and what retirement might look like to him. He mentioned he wished to retire at the age of 40. He started to lay out all the things he wanted to do and a lot of them still involved working despite his wish to “retire” at 40.
He is not alone either, a not so insignificant amount of people retire but don’t cease to work. They may retire from their 9-5 but still have a part-time job, manage rental properties, or build things. The work never stops. I am sure that will be me too. I think it is incredibly hard to retire and put a full stop to work.
It is like a professional athlete that can’t hang it up. Michael Jordan retired two times only later to unretire and come back. The third time was in fact the charm but removing a piece of your life that has always been there is not easy. It is impossible for most.
Retirement is better viewed through the lens of retiring from the work you no longer want to do. My friend wants to retire at 40 but he doesn’t want to retire and ride off into the sunset down to the Florida beaches and never work again. At the age of 40, he wants to never have to do work he doesn’t care for again.
Real retirement is working on things you have a passion for. Work towards retiring from the boring work and the mundane cycles of life you do not enjoy. That is real retirement. Retirement isn’t X amount of dollars in your 401k. Work doesn’t have to be your passion but work is a whole lot better when it is something you may be passionate about or it provides an opportunity to chase your passions. I think it is better to move towards that in life. Move towards finding something you don’t ever want to stop, all while enjoying the ride that life provides. The work is so much easier to bear.
People suffocate themselves in their work in hopes of one day retiring early. The Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) method has tried to normalize this but so many people reach their goal of retiring early but can’t stop working. Working has become part of their identity. They race to retirement but when they “retire” early, they don’t know what to do because their whole life all they have known is work. They are no different than some professional athletes.
Basketball consumed a hefty amount of Jordan’s time and that is why he unretired twice. The work became who he was. It is important to work hard towards retirement and max out your 401k, but it is also important to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Life is a delicate balance. A delicate balance of work and fun. A delicate balance of challenging yourself but also rewarding yourself.
Don’t suck the fun out of life just to maybe one day retire a few months early. Life is truly not a race. Everyone is running their own race. Race towards eliminating having to work on things you don’t like. To race towards something you may not even like seems like a goofy race to try and win.
Never do they write about someone’s passing on how they may have retired a few years early, they write about the experiences, stories, and impressions a person left behind. The mark they left on this world. You take the experiences, stories, and reflections with you to the grave but you can’t take your money.
Don’t be so caught in racing towards retirement and not enjoying the fun life provides. That is a losing race. The real race we all want to run is the race towards eliminating the boring, mundane work that you can’t bear. That is how you max out the 401k of life. It won’t matter how much money sits in your Roth 401k because you will have already won the race. The money in your retirement account is merely a bonus.
Retire from the work you don’t like because they never talk about the money you take to the grave, they talk about the impression you left on the world. I believe your impression on this world will be much greater if you spend it on work you love and enjoy. The last thing we want to happen at retirement is to look back and wonder, is this what I have worked for my whole life?
Appreciate you reading.
-Scantron
Scantron’s Selections - A few things I loved this week.
Jason Zweig wrote a really good article on Charlie Munger and how Munger attributed a lot of his success to luck.
People are calling this the best My First Million episode ever. From nothing to a multi-million egg carton business.
I finished this book recently and people talk on how it is one of their favorite reads ever. I concur and I feel like I need to read it a few more times just because it was that good.
Great piece. I’m on Team Never Retire. Do what you love until you die.
Thanks. If I were to do the things that I truly loved and had a good significant impact on the world while having trust worthy friends and family, I doubt I would even dream of retirement even if nobody was aware of it. I often think life can be turned into an infinite game with a great team to explore it but an atomized society might need more than just the economy to be inspired.
On a macro level, the ripple effects caused as a result of making decisions between consistency and change arising from each of our expectations and disappointments is sometimes leveraged for divisive narratives when in the end we're all humans relying on a natural world and its resources with limited perspectives
In a metaphoric sense, we are lacking the secret gel that molds all of our individual versions of life that would build a collective harmonious future without too many consequences in the process