I always assumed I’d retire at 65. That was the number, the magic number, the one they tell you when you’re young, when you’re too busy destroying your body and your mind with whatever you can get your hands on to care about things like pensions or investment portfolios. I figured I’d be done by then, some weathered version of myself walking through an airport in an expensive, shapeless sweater, off to some mind-numbing coastal town where people wear white linen and drink two fingers of bourbon on porches that smell like money and salt. But then I hit 65, and the only thing I could afford was more work.
Retirement is a story people tell you, like true love or justice. I don’t know a single person my age who’s stopped. They still show up, still clock in, still sit in meetings under the same fluorescent lights, still let the weight of it all settle in their backs and shoulders until they ache at the end of the day and mistake it for some kind of earned fatigue. No one my age retires. No one stops. Stopping is a fantasy, a marketing tool, a dangling carrot used to keep people tolerating the unbearable grind of it all.
I had savings. I did. A little. And then the economy happened. And then the markets happened. And then life happened—medical bills, rent hikes, a kid who needed help, a divorce that emptied out the rest. I used to check the numbers every day, then once a week, then once a month, and now I don’t check at all because what’s the point? The number is never going to be big enough. That’s the trick, the sleight of hand: the number is never big enough, and the price of everything is always going up.
I ran the math once, late at night, alone in my dim, expensive apartment that I never really bothered decorating. If I stopped working today, I’d last maybe seven years before I ran out. Seven years. I’d be dead broke by 72. The part no one tells you is that 72 isn’t old anymore. 72 is another twenty years of needing to eat, needing a place to sleep, needing medication, needing—needing—needing. The needing never stops, and the money never lasts. So I don’t stop.
Instead, I wake up, I shower, I sit at the desk I’ve sat at for years, in the same chair that’s slightly too stiff, answering emails that I don’t care about, for a company that would replace me in a week, for a paycheck that barely covers the things I should’ve already paid off by now. There’s something grotesque about it, something obscene, watching yourself move through the same motions decade after decade, a parody of your younger self but without the ambition, without the promise, just this endless cycle of productivity and exhaustion with no end in sight.
I used to imagine a different life. Something quieter, slower. Mornings with nowhere to be, afternoons spent reading books I never got around to, nights with a view of the ocean or a cityscape that doesn’t look like the same one I’ve been staring at for 30 years. Now I imagine something else. I imagine working until I can’t. Until my body says no. Until they fire me, or I collapse at my desk, or they find me one morning, still in bed, phone alarm buzzing uselessly next to me because it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s retirement. That’s the real endgame. Not a pension, not a sunset, not a congratulatory handshake on your way out the door. Just the point where you can’t do it anymore, and then it’s over.
I never thought I’d be here, at 65, staring down an endless tunnel of more work, more hours, more years. But here I am. And I don’t know if I’ll ever get out.