Don’t Retire!

You may be thinking, “What? Are you crazy? Are you talking about working for the rest of my life?”

That most of us think that way is exactly the problem. Tim Ferriss of The 4 Hour Work Week asks the question, “What if retirement weren’t an option? What would you do then?” It shows how a monumental con has been pulled on all of us. The idea is that you will work your ass off for years at a job you loathe, until you’re almost dead, and then you’re going to start living.

Think about it for a moment, Social (In)Security and retirement age were set at just about the point that the average man was expected to die. The whole “retirement” fantasy is just a mind game to get you to work yourself to death. Who benefits? While you’re scrubbing toilets or deep frying chicken, eating paper bag lunches and taking work home on weekends, the boss is making big bucks and attending banquets serving steak and champagne, where he is lauded for his tireless work. Of course it’s you who has your tires slashed by the disgruntled student, it’s you who falls off the roof while shingling and gets a fractured vertebra, or it’s you who gets shanked by a prisoner in the yard.

So you wind up counting the days, like the teacher I worked with who at any point in the year knew exactly how many days there were until the last day of school. You slog through a “career” enduring Mondays and living until the end of the day, until payday, until vacation, until a time several decades on the horizon when it will all be over and you can finally live.

But think for a moment.

• Does any pro athlete want to retire? Did Michael Jordan ever think, “Man, I’m tired of all this basketball playing. Oh hell, not another game”?

• Does the Jack Daniels taste tester think, “Oh @$#! Monday again”?

• Does a pimp think, “Oh God, another day of bitchslapping ho’s and cruising in a Cadillac”?

Jack Nicholson, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Emeril Lagasse, George Bush, Gene Simmons, etc., are not trudging through life until retirement. Neither was Steve Irwin or Jacques Cousteau.

The problem with the retirement mindset is that you have agreed to put your life on hold. To make matters worse, your idea of a sexual strategy is getting married. So you’ve consigned yourself to decades of dreary work both on the job and in your marriage.

The huge unforeseen problem is that if your wife divorces you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you can lose half of your retirement. I can’t see myself working for thirty years, dreaming of a payoff, only to have some wench take half of it. That’s about the time I start scanning Craig’s List for “Contract Killer 4 Hire.”

If you have a thriving livelihood that you can do forever, and will want to do every day, then you have a sustainable living. You also don’t have an entire lifetime of work invested in a single retirement egg that can be crushed.