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Retirement is such a loaded word because to many it means "wealthy enough to do whatever they want", whereas traditionally it meant "no longer useful to employe
by defaultname 5y ago
Retirement is such a loaded word because to many it means "wealthy enough to do whatever they want", whereas traditionally it meant "no longer useful to employers". In the former case we have stories of 20-somethings "retiring", the word repurposed into just a meaningless boast.
In the no longer useful to employers vein, in the working class town I grew up in there was a common observation that retirement was a harbinger of death. That when someone retired their lifestyle would quickly decline to sedentary decay, boredom medicated with alcohol (or other things). Death would quickly follow.
As an aside, tangentially there's a wonderful passage from Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer -
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
- Domenic_S 5y agoThe article discusses this. In part: > Americans cannot imagine stopping work before they've either (1) purchased everything that they could conceivably want, or (2) collapsed from physical exhaustion. If your material needs and desires are sufficiently low, and your resources sufficiently high, you could retire. Age or usefulness to an employer could be an upper bound, I suppose. I look at it like this: finances are like a bathtub. What you spend is the drain, your income (whether salary, interest, cap gains, etc) is the faucet, and your resources are the water in the tub. Retirement is the point where you can turn off (or turn down) the faucet and not run dry. Some people have big drainpipes and need a big tub and lots of water; others can live with a trickle.
- nly 5y agoI prefer the term "financially independent". Just knowing you can walk away at any time without ending up homeless or in poverty.