We don't think about money very much anymore, though I try to do a manual accounting summary a few times a year just to keep on eye on things. Yesterday's year-end summary suggests that our invested assets have roughly doubled in size since I retired in 2018.
In retrospect, looking at my working career feels like looking back at high school. It's like this part of my life's ancient history that felt super important and stressful at the time, but from the vantage point of adulthood you just have to laugh at how silly it all was. Yes, you had to go to class and get good grades but all of the stressors and the social pressures and the identity crises, which seemed like existential threats at the time, are now obviously the byproducts of a weirdly unnatural social experiment for kids with half-finished brain development. Why did we care who was voted prom queen, or which of your friends got the same fifth period math class, or who got cut from the tennis team? None of that stupid shit really mattered, right?
My old job feels just like that now. A ridiculously contrived social experiment in which we all did our honest best to succeed at things that totally didn't matter. Even in cases where I felt my work was meaningful and important, in retrospect I was making those measurements in units of dollars and it turns out dollars aren't real. I still attend a monthly retiree-breakfast with some of my former coworkers, and hearing them reminisce about it is EXACTLY like going back to your childhood hometown as an adult and listening to the townies reminisce about their high school glory days. Sometimes funny, but ultimately kind of pathetic and depressing. Why haven't you moved on to bigger and better things?
Retired life is good. Without a professional identity you get to decide who and what you are as a person. It's freeing, in a way, because with almost no monetary constraints you have very few limitations and also (even more importantly) zero expectations. Even the best job in the world requires you to do certain things at certain times, and those expectations become restrictions become burdens become prisons of your own making. Once you buy your financial freedom all of that falls away, and it's suddenly pretty obvious that virtually every job makes the worker a slave of sorts. You must produce wealth for someone else, or else you will be homeless and hungry. You must obey these rules for dress, speech, timeliness, haircut, deference, quotas. We accept this as the normal state of things. Give a man a few million dollars and a paid-off house, and he can reject all of that and self-actualize for the first time in his life. Who knows what you'll become?
My partner and I are still busy. I won't bore you with too many specifics, but we're still maintaining a full schedule every day. We work when we want to (even for money, sometimes!), we travel when we want to, we support our kids and our aging parents in ways that wouldn't be possible with full time jobs. We contribute to causes we believe in, we spend time with friends, we host family gatherings, we go on adventures. Every day I'm grateful for the years I spent being too frugal in my 20s and 30s because they bought me freedom from my 40s onwards.
For all of you still plugging away, inching towards your retirement goal, just know that it's absolutely worth it.
