Stop saying your goal is to retire when you (yes you) could’ve done so yesterday

Everybody aims for retirement, yet nobody knows why, nor even what they mean by it

‘So what do you do?’ says the Trainee Solicitor at that Big Firm You’ve Heard Of Without Really Knowing How or Why.

Those cursed words shoot through the air like a poisoned dart. They puncture the atmosphere the champagne was trying so hard to inflate, and incapacitate what passes for vibe in a room largely populated by people who’ve dedicated (or perhaps sacrificed) their lives to the law (or perhaps the monetary rewards that accompany it).

It could be worse, I think. At least the Trainee Solicitor delivered his line unapologetically. A step up from those who’ve come to fear the reflection of its mundanity, but who are unable to shake their interest in its status-crutch answer. That dance around those four words with the grace of a swirl of garbage on a windy day, while making a mental note to search for ‘alternatives to asking “what do you do?” ’ on Reddit when they get home.

‘I’m a Judge,’ says the man whose bowtie looks like it decided to skip dinner and go straight to the hungover morning after, and whose dress shirt looks like it’s about to set off in search of the long-lost hair that presumably used to dwell upon the Judge’s head.

‘Oh, cool,’ says the Trainee Solicitor, trying to sound like he talks to judges all the time, and, by virtue of the trying, failing.

‘Well, I’m mostly retired now,’ says the Judge.

‘How do you mean “mostly”?’ I ask.

‘Well, I don’t need to work,’ says the Judge, with a carefully curated casualness that lifts his chest so much it threatens to pop out an already fraught button. This is possibly why shirt studs exist, I think, as he continues, with a guffaw that aims for self-deprecatory levity but ends up at existential nervousness: ‘I’m just not sure what else I can do!’

Sure mate, I think, with all your expertise, and experience, and money, and connections, and probably another 20 years or so of free time to do something with them… what else could you do?

‘Oh, I know that feeling. Too well, sadly,’ I say instead. ‘A large part of my old job used to involve helping people who’d come in wanting – and willing to pay an arguably indecent amount for – a plan for how to retire, but who hadn’t given anything one could reasonably call “thought” to either what retirement really meant, nor even what they’d do with it – why they might want to do it beyond the fact that it was just the next milestone on the conveyor belt.’

‘Oh, were you a financial adviser?’ says the Judge, with the disdain camouflaged with politeness so well-honed among the upper-middle-classes.

‘Something like that,’ I say. ‘I preferred “financial psychologist” when I was swimming in those waters, for much the same reasons I assume you just said “adviser” in the way you did, but I’m not sure it really matters anymore.’

The slight distancing from the commission-cowboy association seems to reassure him.

‘Any tips?’ he asks.

‘Plenty,’ I say. ‘I could talk all night about the tragedy of how people spend their lives waiting to retire and their retirements waiting to die. And how maybe there might be an obviously better way to turn the stopping of work into the starting of something more meaningful. And how there are possibly better targets for relationships to cultivate than one’s wine merchant.’

Ok, I don’t say any of that.

‘But now doesn’t feel like the time,’ I actually say. ‘Retirement is a far better prompt than it is a goal. If people thought about it that way, I’m confident most would pretty easily make smarter choices about both pursuing it, and making the most of it when they got there, if indeed getting there were smart in itself, which I daresay it probably isn’t. Leisure is old, but retirement is new, and the emergence of the latter seems to have bollocksed up our millennia-old ability to be good with the former.’¹

‘Hey ho,’ I continue, spinning the subject back to the more lawyer-friendly question of numbers, ‘When you said mostly retired, how many hours a week do you still work?’

‘10 or so,’ says the Judge.

‘Interesting,’ I say. ‘Because that’s more than me. Does that make me mostly retired?’

‘Well, you’re clearly well ahead of me,’ says the Judge, believing, as he apparently does, in a world where the aim is to ‘get ahead’ even when you’ve no idea what you’re getting head of, let alone why you’d want to. ‘Are you extremely wealthy?’ he continues. ‘Are you one of these Bitcoin people?’

‘Gosh no’ I say.

‘You must be,’ says the Judge. I probably shouldn’t complain that he’s judging me, though I do hope such conclusion-jumping doesn’t happen in his courtroom.

‘It depends how you look at it, I suppose,’ I say. ‘Compared to everyone in this room? No. Compared to former clients of mine that were convinced they couldn’t retire for another decade or more? Hell no. Compared to everyone in the world? I live in London, so obviously yes, I’m one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Compared to every human that’s ever lived…? But far, far, more importantly for the context of using retirement as a prompt more than a goal, I just think about money differently.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Hah. I’ve been messing about writing a book about pretty much that. In the meantime, long-shot, but have you read much Erich Fromm, or Iain McGilchrist? That would make this a lot easier…’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Oh well, not to worry. I don’t have different values to anyone else. Everyone, I like to think, cares most deeply about deepening relationships with themselves, others, and the world, becoming wiser, more loving, more compassionate, more courageous, and so on. I just don’t (or at least try not to) use money as a proxy for living those values. Which is admittedly a heck of a lot easier when you’ve been inside the heads of those that have what everybody else believes they want and truly seen how it just doesn’t work.’

‘It’s pretty crazy, right,’ I continue, ‘how we can even talk of people that “have everything” and who still feel like something important is missing. Or how we can seemingly sincerely believe that achieving the same result with fewer resources is better, except when it comes to the only result that ultimately matters: living a good life… think of those that brag about spending 10,000 a month to live as happily as someone spending a tenth of that. It’s become almost cliched to point and laugh at the fact that so many sacrifice their best time and energy in jobs they don’t enjoy, to earn money to then waste in ways driven by their perceptions of other people’s perceptions of them – people they don’t care about, and probably don’t even know. No one really believes quality of life is measured with quantity of consumption. But they’re so damn stuck living in a way that tells them if something can’t be measured it doesn’t exist that they do it anyway.’

Oh bugger, I’m doing it again, I think.

However, with a mental squint I can pretend the look on the Judge’s face is one of genuine interest rather than the sort of fascination you get when talking to a child who’s skirting the outer limits of their imaginative solar system to tell you how they spent the weekend on the moon with some mermaids.

So I charge on.

‘Everyone in this room could have retired yesterday. They couldn’t have retired while continuing to live in London, perhaps. Or while continuing to send their children to Eton. Or while holidaying in suites rather than tents, and so on. The point isn’t to judge a string of “whats” – what sort of house to live in, or school to send your children to. It’s merely to point out the weird distortion that happens when we talk about retirement as if it were a “thing” rather than merely a slight shift in the rhythms of the way in which we live. So the same rules as before should apply. Turning retirement into a thing seems to worsen lives both in the run up to it, and in itself. Other than putting a few ex-insurance salesmen out of work, I can’t see too many downsides to dropping it as an unchallenged, universal, life goal.’

‘So if we don’t have retirement as a goal, what should we have instead?’ says the Trainee Solicitor, who I’m surprised to see is still with us, even if he appears to have not been listening.

‘You already know,’ I say, as we’re interrupted with the call to stride, sidle, shuffle, or be wheeled through to dinner. ‘But the first step to seeing that you know, is to try on really believing that maybe the typical path to retirement is, rather than an obvious default, actually a bit silly, and that maybe using a “number” as a goal, while obviously of tip-tip importance for genuinely poor people, is maybe a deathly distraction for everyone else?’

1. Iain McGilchrist: ‘The ancient Greeks had no great love of work, either. They saw it as a necessity whose purpose was to clothe, shelter and feed the population, but that once that was out of the way, they could get back to the real business of life: namely, leisure. By this they did not mean just lazily lying about, nor, as leisure often seems to be nowadays, the frenetic pursuit of stimulation in a desperate attempt to fill the void so that we do not have to contemplate the emptiness of existence. No, it was in a way the opposite. A cultivation of stillness, the devotion of time and attention to what matters, and that has no ulterior purpose or instrumental ‘point’– and is therefore in grave danger, nowadays, of being considered ‘pointless’: scholarship (which comes from the Greek scholē, leisure), and the pursuit of insight, simplicity, beauty. The Latin word for business (literally, busy-ness) is negotium, from nec + otium – literally, “no leisure”.’