I’ve been thinking about retirement lately. Not because I have to — but because I’m turning 55 in June, and the question keeps finding me.
The first time I understood what retirement really meant, I wasn’t thinking about it at all. I was early in my career, working at the Louisiana Department of Social Services. Still figuring out how everything worked — the job, the politics, the unwritten rules. And I noticed something. The happiest people in that building weren’t the ones who loved their work the most. They were the ones who could leave.
They were state employees. Most of them had pensions — guaranteed income for the rest of their lives, locked in and waiting. And somehow, that changed everything about how they showed up. They weren’t anxious. They weren’t performing. They had already won the financial part of the game, and it showed.
I never forgot that.
Fast forward a few decades. By the FIRE framework — 25 times your annual expenses — I qualify. I’m not saying that to brag. I’m saying it because hitting a number you once thought was abstract has a way of forcing the real question into focus.
And the real question isn’t can I retire?
It’s what would I be retiring to?
That distinction matters more than any spreadsheet. Retiring from something is just running away with a better exit strategy. If you retire because you’re burned out, or because you resent Mondays, or because you’ve been counting down for years — that’s not retirement. That’s escape. And escape rarely delivers what we think it will.
Retiring toward something is different. It requires knowing what you actually want your days to look like. Not in vague terms — not “travel more” or “spend time with family” — but specifically. What do you do at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday when no one is telling you where to be?
My mother worked until she was around 75. She was a guidance counselor — and a good one. When people asked her about retirement, she had a question ready for them.
“Why would I retire to go be a Walmart greeter?”
She wasn’t being dismissive. She was making a point that most retirement conversations miss entirely. She had meaningful work. Work that used everything she knew, work that mattered to people. The alternative — stepping away from that to fill time with something smaller — wasn’t appealing. Not because she was afraid of slowing down, but because she hadn’t found anything worth slowing down for.
That’s the question she was really asking. Not why retire? but what are you retiring to?
I think about photography. I think about the blog. I think about real estate, cycling, time — the kind of time that doesn’t get carved up before you can use it. I think about what I’d build if the job wasn’t in the frame.
But here’s the thing: I like my job. Not love — like. It’s challenging, it’s rewarding, and at the end of the day it’s still a job. But liking it matters more than I used to think. It means I’m not running from anything. And that changes the retirement question entirely.
There’s a version of this conversation that treats retirement as the finish line — the reward waiting at the end of a long race. Work hard enough, save enough, and then you get to rest. But rest from what? And rest toward what?
The happiest people I watched all those years ago at Social Services weren’t happy because they’d stopped working. They were happy because they’d built enough — enough security, enough options, enough clarity — that whatever they did next was a choice. Not an obligation.
That’s what I want. Not early retirement. Not late retirement. The version where I decide, every day, that this is still worth doing. And on the day it isn’t — I want to be ready.
The number matters. The options matter. But the clarity matters most.
So the question I keep sitting with isn’t whether I can retire. It’s whether I know what I’m retiring to. And if I don’t have a good answer yet, that’s not a reason to wait — it’s a reason to start figuring it out now.
Because one day the option will be there. I’d rather know what I’m walking toward when it is.
Leave a Reply