For me, retirement is imminent (I'm 67), but I can't imagine how ugly those prospects would look now if I'd not prepared for decades. Leaving a career with no income stream other than $35k/year in Social Security means you must continue working in whatever diminished role is available to you at age 70+. If that sounds bad to you, well, you got it right.
In the US, that would probably be working on your feet in a minimum wage role ($25k/year), with inadequate health insurance (Medicare A with Medicaid, if your state offers the latter), living in a low end apartment or mobile home, with declining health. In short, without substantial preparation, life after retirement will _suck_. I wouldn't wish it on an enemy. But this is exactly where 30-40% of Americans will be after 65 since they were unable (or unwise) to prepare for the final 20 years of unemployment that inescapably come at the end of life (AKA retirement).
Until some sort of organized coordinated alternative to old-age-demotion comes along, old folks are on their own in America. I recommend that everyone take life post-career deadly seriously long before it happens and prepare for it, or your 'golden years' will eat you alive.
These are the things that used to cause people to die relatively quickly but that's no longer the case. My father had a stroke and he might live another 20 years. He's definitely still active but there's no way he'd be doing his former job at this point or at least not at nowhere near the same level.
That's not to say retired people are useless but it does mean you have to be realistic about their ability to earn incomes for very long after they retire. Or more prudently, your own ability. Hope for the best but plan for the worst. Pensions are a form of insurance that is worth having.
With chronic over employment, there is a solid argument for making retirement age more flexible though. Continue working and have more disposable income when you reduce how much you work or eventually retire. The current system is not very flexible and actively disincentivizes people to work beyond a certain age.
My father actually retired early because his employer was downsizing and it was cheaper for them to settle for early retirement than it was to outright fire him. That same arrangement made it completely unattractive for him to find other work. He was being paid to retire, not to take another job. Another job would have eroded his pension. That's a weird incentive. Good for my parents but not necessarily for anything else. But 60 is definitely young to retire like he did. He's 77 now.
Then I got long Covid, and was ripped out of the work force in 2020, at 56 years old.
It's no fun having nothing to do, and no purpose. The resonant idea for me from the article is to find your joy outside of work now, while you still have the time to explore the possibilities.
All those things that are totally fun for a weekend off are not sustainable for long term happiness. It's like ice cream... great stuff when you're a kid, and it's a treat... and just ok when you're an adult and could eat it exclusively.
I wish I had engrossing hobbies that could fill my days. I've watched everything interesting on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube. I played Universal Paperclips through 100 times in a row. I've spent thousands of hours in Factorio. I swore off Reddit when they sold out... so now it's here, twitter, facebook and youtube to occupy my days.
Get out now, find your passions that have nothing to do with work! Don't expect to find them magically when you retire.
I retired early (40) from a career that most wouldn’t expect that from. I have two pensions and some modest investments that allow me to live quite well a couple hours from SF, but would be scraping by there.
I can no longer do the career I was successful in due to health degradation from exactly that career, but software was always a part of it so I’m pivoting to that to keep myself engaged and enjoying life.
So the comments here on health precluding this idea are very real. I also took about a year to get through the mental ramifications of my entire career being gone, as well as the entire community I was part of (due to moving). I don’t think this is talked about enough, especially in FIRE circles online. Having talked to a few other early retirees you can quite easily find that you no longer fit with the friends you’ve had for years, either due to interests diverging, spending abilities diverging, or plain old jealousy from some of them.
At the end I elected to pursue more education and (somehow) managed to get into a solid graduate program.
So I do think staying active in retirement is something you should plan, and this is even more true for early retirement. The type of partial work that I see talked about here is possible, but not generally at the earnings potential of your primary career. Things like being a substitute teacher, poll worker, etc. all pay and in California you can make around $15k/year fairly trivially doing that. If you want to donate plasma that’s another $5k/year or so; I haven’t done it but know a few early retirees that do for health reasons (reduction of forever chemicals).
The key to those jobs is that they won’t elevate your stress level like trying to find a salaried job or gig work will.
That’s a quick set of thoughts from someone who actually did execute on this type of life path and is living it in close proximity to SF, and without any type of software career.
Now what brings me joy is spending time with my nieces and nephews. This is not a thing that can or should be monetized. I need to build up a retirement so I can truly enjoy the things I care about most in life.
My hope is to find a problem space to research in, there's a lot of capacity in unsolved problems to improve a lot of lives around the world. People die every day from diseases that we've solved in the west 50+ years ago, and there's a lot of work that can be done to make sure humanity has access to existing solutions for example.
My retirement day is practically at least thirty years ahead.
When you are young, old age seems a long way away.
I want to retire from my day job. I have work I'd like to do of my own that isn't lucrative enough (by a very long ways) that I can't spend sufficient time on now. That will be my "retirement job."
I don't want to work at my current job until I keel over.
I definitely went through this transition, no earlier than 30, but certainly before 40. I think most self-aware people do.
But the recognition usually comes at a stage of life when you literally have every responsibility: mortgage, spouse, kids, beholden to some Dilbert-boss, and carrying the world on your shoulders (not sarc - Atlas, please don't shrug).
You have no honorable options to escape. Every dimension of escape is betrayal. Don't believe me? Try it and see. Face it, own it, own everything. Wait, push harder, postpone deliverance.
The decline of the hope and expectation that work could provide fulfilment happens gradually, then suddenly (as Hemingway once said about bankruptcy). But as I retire, I still code, I always will. It gives me joy.
The temptation is then to tell all your younger successors about the valuable insight you've acquired. What you have learned is very very important. But it cannot be told, or taught, it has to be experienced - or not.
My advice to parents is to treat your children as ~20% older than they are. By the time they hit aggravated puberty, you are already talking to them as adults. They don't deserve it, but they will thank you later. And even if they don't, you have no regrets, you showed them the shining path, the parental star of piercing brightness.
Show, don't tell.
Just be the best you can be at every interaction point with the world. Whatever person or problem is in front of you right now - just be the best you can possibly be. Don't think about the future. If you inevitably fail, from time to time, as you will, learn from failure, train what you wish you could do, and be better next time.
Be the absolute best in the grave. What better accolade?
Show, don't tell. Forever.
Of course, I contradict my own advice. We are all unfathomably contradictory.
"I contain multitudes"
Walt Whitman presaging Hesse, Gödel, or perhaps Wittgenstein - how can I tell what cannot be told?
I tried my best.
I agree, but we should recognize that we are moving more and more towards a world where automation enters every facet of our life, every step of the supply chain. Hitting a pause once in a while and just reflecting on how life has changed will do a lot towards changing opinions on work and retirement. While FIRE is achievable (at least until now in software), what I think I want is a long career to work on hard problems with other people of the same wavelength.
Easier said than done, but tbh we have a lot of free time today that we waste in social media as the OP says. Consciously slowing down a bit so that one can run a longer, more focused, perhaps less financially lucrative race but also one that has a higher probability of being fulfilling and putting us in touch with good people is something all of us, the well-paid software guys, must aspire to and put into practice.
Sounds to me a bit like the grown-up version of "The real treasure is the friends we made along the way".
How do you do all the things the author wants you to do while also having a day job and trying to keep your boss happy?
This is the worst take I have seen in a while. First of all, in both Germany and Türkiye, we put aside a part of our monthly remuneration towards our pension. So when we retire, there is already a sizable sum that we have accumulated via our own work, nobody else is 'paying for our retirement'. It's our own money.
There is no some mythical younger generation working to pay our pensions, we have earned this money, it belongs to us, and we have all the reason to expect to not have to work in our old age.
The problem is only that in the current pension model, your money are not kept tight by the government or the pension fund, but instead spent or speculated with on the stock market. In this model, when you retire, it's not your money you are actually getting, but the pension contributions of the younger generation, because your money has been long spent. But that's a problem of the model, not some unsurmountable obstacle that the author of the article tries to make you believe.
Heck, if the pension fund or the government can't get it right, they can f-off and we can start saving for retirement on our own. But they say they can, so they either have to stand behind their promises, or reorganize to the new reality of people living longer and less young people entering the workforce. If that means that the government needs to guarantee a certain % of our pensions as a collateral, so be it. The world can benefit from less stock market speculation and more monetary resilience.
The myth that the younger generation is somehow paying the pensions of the old and that it's somehow a problem applies only if you don't ask: where did all the money we contributed towards our pension go. It's just a fault in the system that our own pension money is spent recklessly by the governments' bad calculations. The solution to that is emphatically not, as the author mentioned, 'expecting to never retire', but by demanding that our pension money is responsibly handled and not spent in the expectation that future schmucks will also join in this pyramid scheme.
Any takers?
1. human lifespan has doubled in last 100 years. Lifespan is still increasing but healthspan isn’t at the same rate. This means in the later years, we are spending a fortune on healthcare costs to extend lifespan a few more months.
2. Retirement age is fixed-ish in most countries. With rising lifespans, this means more years are spent draining on retirement income.
3. Lower birth rates means fewer people working to pay for retirees.
Something has to give. If we have fewer longer living people, then we need them to work more years.
Ideally retirement age is (average lifespan - 20 years) and is adjusted every few years.
It is a tough pill to swallow. Keeping the status quo means current generation will pay for boomers but by the time they retire, the pot runs out.
In US they say, social security will be drained by 2035 if nothing changes.
I wrote a brief comment on this a day ago which sparked the idea of writing something longer [0]. Bottom line being: make sure you are happy today, you might not get tomorrow.
I mean I pay ~40%-55% of my income toward various taxes witch fund pensions among other thing. I would expect to get something 'back' after the age of 65. But chances are very slim what that will be any meaningful sum.
I’m still working full time as a Software Developer and systems analyst, and largely by my own choice. Though I admit my lifestyle would be curtailed a bit (or maybe a LOT, if I live long enough!) if I had to live off my current savings plus whatever level of social security I’d be entitled to.
I’m still healthy enough to do the work, but I definitely feel like I don’t have the energy level and stamina that I used to. Nor as much motivation to focus on the job and my career.
Those last two challenges were most apparent during my previous two jobs, which were at software or hardware start-ups. I simply don’t want to deal with that level of stress and time pressure anymore, regardless of whether or not I can work at that pace. (Which is increasingly doubtful, admittedly.)
Currently I’m working at a sort of ‘biotech startup’ except we’re embedded inside a giant pharma company. And the work pace is wonderfully relaxed (and low-stress), compared to my previous employment (in high-tech startups). From my current viewpoint, and career needs, it’s a good match. I get a solid salary (+ bonus and stock), but (unlike software/internet/AI startups): a PHENOMENAL benefits plan. Though not FAANG money; but, then again, I never made that kind of money when I worked for Internet startup companies, so…
The good news, for my current career, is that I’m still mentally sharp enough to have, say, an in depth discussion of the differences between React, Vue, and other UI frameworks. And I’m teaching myself the finer points of TypeScript, as well as applying it on the job. The bad news, is that I’m having a serious of health issues. Nothing catastrophic so far; but gradually increasing in significance or frequency. At this point I feel like it’s a race between when my body gives out, or when I simply lose interest in writing code, and can convince myself that I’ve got enough savings to retire on.
Assuming that I can retire in reasonably OK health (if possible, in 3-4 years, around age 70, when I’d max-out social security benefits), I’m thinking that I have a low boredom threshold, and will want something to keep me engaged (and to help me maintain a healthy regular schedule). I’m not sure what that is yet. Maybe something just for fun (for example, I like to do woodworking)? Maybe something part-time, or freelance; but enough income to make my retirement less financially worrisome)? I’ve thought of: substitute teaching; being a teacher’s assistant (both at secondary education level; college adjunct faculty; sound or TV production; or maybe trying to sell some of my woodworking (which would make it a much less fun hobby, sadly)? Possibly an (off-season) estate caretaker gig?
I’d love to hear from others here, on HN, who are retired (or about to) and have: experience reports, cavests, or tips to convey. Or constructive feedback on my own retirement ideas…
It's no surprise that the author is a software developer, as we are the rare cases that are often well paid, often enjoy what we do tremendously, and the job has few physical requirements that would exclude an elderly person (though age discrimination is very real). The author's points come from a very privileged position, and I'm not sure they realise it.
I'm all for not giving up on life at retirement age, but even though I like my job I sure as hell don't want to be doing a 9-5 when I'm 80. I don't even really want to be doing it now.