Stop Waiting Till You Are 65 to Live
*Excerpt: You have been saving your best years for old age. But the life you are postponing does not become easier to live — it becomes harder. The only thing that makes me sad is that I’ve not been able to spend as much time as I’d liked to have spent with my wife and children.
Somewhere along the way, we took a trade that no-one explicitly offered us.
Work forty years. Defer the living.
Get enough money, enough security, enough permission, and at sixty-five, finally start the life you really wanted.
Sounds good. Indeed it is a gamble.
A gamble that your health will hold up. That there’s still energy in you. That the things you want to do at thirty-five will be there for you and still make sense at sixty-five. That you'll still want to do them after four decades of not doing them.
Tim Ferriss dissected this gamble and called it like it is: a bad bet.
Then he proposed an alternative that changes everything about how you think about freedom and time and the shape of a life.
The Deferred Life Plan And Why It Doesn’t Work
Most people are running what Ferriss calls the Deferred Life Plan.
The argument runs as follows: Work now. Surrender now. Save now! Practice delaying gratification, often enough, and eventually the freedom you have been working for will arrive. *
There are some catastrophic flaws in this plan. First, the retirement you are planning for is not guaranteed.
Changes in health. Energy is dissipated. The adventures that called you at thirty-five are physically more difficult or simply less attractive at sixty-five. The business you wanted to start, the country you wanted to live in for a year, the sabbatical you imagined taking — they have a window. And the window doesn't stay open forever. Second, you are trading off the present self for the future one.
The person who works sixty hours a week for thirty years to retire comfortably is making a very specific trade off, years of life experience now for financial security later. That might be a worthwhile trade. But most people get there without ever consciously deciding to. Third, deferred living is a habit of mind.
People who spend decades telling themselves "I'll do that when..." often discover when the "when" finally comes that they still haven't done it. Because that's their habit of deferral, and habits don't just disappear when the circumstances have changed.
Mini-Retirements: A Completely New Model
Ferriss’s alternative is not early retirement in the traditional sense. It is something more radical and more practical at once: Spread your freedom throughout your life, instead of saving it all for the end.
Rather than one long retirement at sixty-five, have several mini-retirements — long periods of rest, travel, exploration, creative work, or simple presence — spread out over your working life.
One month in a country you’ve always dreamed of living in. Six weeks of intense focus on something that’s not your job. A season of not much. Reading, walking, thinking, recovering.
These are not vacations. Holidays are crowded in, hurried; often they are more tiring than the work they were to relieve. A mini-retirement is long enough to really get somewhere, and to let the pace of life slow, and to let your mind settle, and to find out what you really want rather than what the urgency of work has been telling you that you want.
But How? The question that everybody asks?
The initial reaction to the mini-retirement idea is invariably a practical one: “That sounds wonderful. But I can't afford it. I have commitments. These are real fears. “My career can’t just stop.”* And for most people are more negotiable than they seem at first.
On affordability: Mini-retirements don’t need the life savings. They need a different relationship with spending – experience over accumulation, honesty about what your actual cost of living is versus what it’s expanded to accommodate things that are, on reflection, not what you value most.
A month in northern Thailand or Portugal can be a lot cheaper than a month living in the city with your current standard. The geography of freedom is more accessible than most people allow themselves to think.
On career: The question is not if your career can handle a break. Is the career you are building one that would be enriched, not detracted from, by a person who has truly lived – who has taken time, thought deeply, come back with perspective and energy the relentless grind cannot provide?
The answer for most knowledge-based careers is augmentation. People who have taken time, who have really rested, who have seen and done things outside of their professional context, tend to bring back something that raw industrial experience can't replicate. About timing: There’s never a perfect time. There never will.” The mortgage, the project, the promotion, the opportunity, there's always something that makes this the wrong year. If you wait for the right year, it won't come.
And the one question that must be asked is: what would have to be true for a mini-retirement to be possible in the next twelve months? Not in the next ten years. The following 12 months.
What Mini-Retirements Really Yield
Besides the obvious benefits of rest and experience, though, mini-retirements provide something less visible but more important: They drive clarity.
You step out of the beat of the daily grind — the meetings, the deliverables, the low-level urgency — and discover what you really care about. It’s not what you’ve been telling yourself . What happens in reality.
Many people who take their first long break find out that the life they were creating wasn’t quite the life they wanted. That they were optimizing for a career that was someone else’s definition of success. That the things they had been putting off were not really luxuries but necessities.
This is an uncomfortable knowing. But it is valuable knowledge and it is the kind of knowledge that only extended time and real stillness can produce.
The mini-retirement is not a way to escape from your life. It is a return to it – a chance to see it clearly from a distance the relentless forward motion of working life rarely allows.
The Time is Now
The key argument:
You don't know how much time you have got.
Not morbidly, but truthfully. The health you have now, the energy you have now, the curiosity and appetite for experience you carry right now – these are not guaranteed to be waiting for you at sixty-five in the same form.
There is a version of the things you want to do in your life that is best done now, or soon, or at least not put off forever. Traveling in your thirties is not the same as traveling in your seventies. Starting a creative project is different before the weight of decades of not doing it has settled. The brain is still hungry for it, and the habits of learning are still warm. It’s easier to learn something new.
This is not an argument for carelessness. It is an argument to take your own life seriously enough to live it, not just plan it, not just fund it, but actually, concretely, experientially live it.
*You're spending the years you're saving for later now. The only question is are you the one in control. *
The One Question That Starts It All
If you’ve read this and felt something – a recognition, a restlessness, a quiet agreement with something you’ve been thinking for a while but not quite articulating – then here is the only question worth sitting with:
What would you do if you had three months of free time?
Not what you’d do if money were no object and everything else fell into place. Only, if you had three months, starting next year, what would really matter to you?
Here it is. Be precise. Make the answer as true As you can make it.
Because the life that answer refers to, is not a fantasy. It's a plan, a plan that requires you to take it seriously enough to begin building toward it.
Your life of postponement ends when you choose it to. > You have been proficient at the work. Now be as good at living. Begin before you are ready. Start before it is convenient Just begin.
References
- Tim Ferriss — [The 4 Hour Work Week]https://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/dp/0307465357- Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman(https://www.amazon.com/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Management-Mortals/dp/0374159122) - Bronnie Ware — *The Top Five Regrets of the Dying*
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