Hal - Deliberately Basic

Unless You’re Retired, Don’t Talk To Me About Time

The last thing you want to hear after you finally get to retire is, “You’re retired. You have nothing to do, so do this – insert chore here – for me.” There is a stigma concerning retirement, that by virtue of leaving your job, time no longer has meaning for you. This very well may be true for some, especially previous generations, but not for baby boomers.

Articles abound in magazines and on the Internet about having enough money saved to retire. Depending on what you want to do, money may not be an issue, even if you don’t have much. More important than money is, how you will spend your time. The one thing that makes all men equal is time. All of us have exactly the same.

We constantly hear sage advice about saving for retirement, and that is construed as saving money for retirement. What we really need to do is save enough time for retirement. How do we go about saving time?

How many people do you know whose life is defined by what they do for a living? When I was young, and observing older men retire, I used to hear how awful their lives had become after retirement. Many men equated retirement with death. I remember one man saying, “The day I retired was the worst day of my life”. He, like so many from the WWII generation, had developed no interest in anything except what they did at work.

The key to retiring is no different than the way you live your life now. You need something to do, and you need a schedule to do it. The difference is, you make and control your schedule, as opposed to a corporation making it for you. Consider this as working for yourself.

Think of the perks you can give yourself. Do you want three months vacation to travel. Consult with the boss and do it. Perhaps you have a passion for something that took far too much time when you worked for someone else. If you didn’t develop interests outside your job while you worked for someone else, shame on you.

Years ago I read the three fundamental requirements for happiness:
Something to do, Someone to love, and something to look forward to.
You could add to this list, health, money, and everything else in the world. But assuming you are relatively healthy, those are the big three. Even if your health is not so good, and you have the first two things, and you have something to look forward to.

Something to do is vital to retirement. Development of something to do should start early in life, and continue till you die. Some people have only one thing they want to be the center of their focus; others have an interest in nearly anything that happens. I consider myself fortunate in that I’ve developed many interests, far too many too ever be expert at one. I don’t care to be an expert at anything. As you read this, you are experiencing an interest I recently developed; blogging. What you do is not at all important. Sitting on your ass and doing nothing will earn you nothing except a fat ass.

Finally, unless you are an idiot, you will find something to do. You will find yourself saying, “How did I ever find time to work?” Nature abhors a void, and if you have time with nothing to do, you had better fill it with something, or else someone will do it for you.

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