Retirement... or Financial Independence? — A Perspective

An awful lot of us were born into and raised with the idea that you work hard during your life, and at some point to get to "retire," and no longer work.

Fair enough.

The fundamental underlying premise is that you "work" and then you transition to "not working."

Sunset Years?

2020 — A Different Reality?

For lots of different reasons, those rules don't really apply in our day and age.

For one thing, a lot of people find themselves getting to "retirement age" and they can't actually afford to stop working; they need that steady paycheck in order to continue living some semblance of a life that doesn't involve poverty and dereliction.

Such notions as "Pensions" and "Social Security" — which people once upon a time viewed as the gateway to retirement — have become uncertainties, if not outright absent for many families.

The other tenet behind retirement was that the human bodies — which were often required to do considerable physical toil in the context of work — tended to simply start giving out somewhere in your sixties, making you a less valuable worker... hence retirement. Being "put out to pasture," so to speak.

In the technological age, that simply doesn't apply, anymore.

Philosophical — Rather than Functional — Retirement

If you look at the way our society works today, the entire notion of "retirement" really has become more an issue of Financial Independence than an issue of working vs. not-working.

Our values are changing.

I think back and reflect on people of my late parents' generation — they were born around 1920 — and the entire idea of "not-working" (even if you had plenty of money) was somewhat scoffed upon; even regarded as "laziness" or "idling."

I remember my dad pointing out to me — this would have been in the 1970's — how an adult man in his 30s-40s spotted in a grocery store "just shopping" during "working hours" would be looked at askance by the women, with whispers of "Why isn't he WORKING? Is something WRONG with him?"

Self-Identity, and "What Do You DO?"

Whereas this particular paradigm is perhaps most prevalent in the US of A — and more present in the industrialized west — we have long attributed a very large part of our self-identity to work.

We often are our work. At least we used to be.

Studying the actual language of my native Denmark, truly reveals just how much: Up until probably WWII, it was just as common to address someone by their profession as by the titles "Mr." or "Mrs." For example "Bricklayer Sørensen" or "Dentist Andersen," rather than Mr. Sørensen or Mrs. Andersen.

Although that has long since changed, I also remember noting that conversation at gatherings in Texas — where I started living in 1981 — often started around the question "So what do you DO?"

But are we really what we DO?

Towards the Next Paradigm

When I was in college in the 1980's, we definitely talked about the idea of "retiring early." Typically, that meant that you'd bust your butt till you were 50-something, save carefully and then move to Mexico or Costa Rica where the cost of living was low.

Since then — at least from my personal perspective — the entire idea of "retirement" has pretty much been replaced by a more relevant question: "Do you have Financial Independence?"

What "retirement" actually means is securing yourself a place where the idea of "work" has become optional, rather than mandatory in your life. Can you afford to not be on someone's payroll?

Moreover, the advent of the Internet has made it more feasible for many of us to derive some sort of income from our computers, at home.

Along Came Automation...

Of course, these days the entire nature of work — not just "retirement" is changing as automation and Artificial Intelligence increasingly make entire industries more or less obsolete... at least in terms of needing human beings to do the work.

Even the current pandemic is changing the nature of work... telecommuting is growing rapidly, but if the economy continues to be rocky, it would not surprise me if many of the people who started working from home might just end up being asked to stay home and not work, at all. Because they are not needed.

Once again we have to face the question not so much of whether we get to "retire," but whether we have the financial wherewithal and creativity to live a work in which we no longer "work" in the conventional understanding of the word.

Thanks for reading... and I hope you're having a great start to your week!

How about YOU? What are your feelings about retirement? Are you financially secure enough to stop working? How do you think "retirement" will work in the future, 10, 20, 50 years down the road? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

---

Greetings bloggers and social content creators! This article was created via PeakD, an application that's part of the Hive Social Content Experience. If you're a blogger, writer, poet, artist, vlogger, musician or other creative content wizard, come join us! Hive is a little "different" because it's not run by a "company;" it operates via the consensus of its users and your content can't be banned, censored, taken down or demonetized. And that COUNTS for something, in these uncertain times! So if you're ready for the next generation of social content where YOU retain ownership and control, come by and learn about Hive and make an account!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT cross posted anywhere else!)
Created at 20201005 22:52 PDT
0120/1347