Becoming Unretirable

A lot of people talk about quitting their jobs. A lot. And a very few of them actually quit. Last week I made it very clear to my boss that I am going to: 1) quit after the last week of job or 2) she continue to work with me but under my own freelance terms. I got the #2. Now, what?

Freelancing isn’t easy. For most people, it’s always about looking for the next client — know what? I’m going to stop talking about freelancing. I’ll talk about that later. Do you know what most people mention when I tell them I’m quitting?

“But what are you supposed to do for retirement?”

Yes. That’s the most mentioned question. That says a lot about our society and how we establish retirement as the ultimate goal, rather than the journey that behests.

Do you know that the employment numbers doesn’t reflect those freelancing? Yes, freelancers are considered as unemployed. Freelancers are not considered as members of the working force in our government’s eyes. Why? A quick guess: our society is heavily dependent on the very idea of retirement.

Is it really good to hope that you will be able to suddenly stop working and live like a millionaire — no work and all fun? Hoping might be fine; however the reality is that while most of the retirees are ‘millionaires’ (the ideal retiree has about 1m worth of money saved up in their portfolio), very few live very well. Most of those people who ‘live well’ are the ones who have worked for over 25 years for the same company, institution, etc. One place. Yes, at one. singular. place.

That singular-working-place-for-x-years retirement model is unsustainable for the modern conditions. Everybody’s moving around and changing jobs nowadays. Nobody wants to and will not ‘put up’ with bullshit. That’s our modern attitude. And that’s because we are listening to ourselves more. And that’s basically coming to terms with ourselves. That’s why I quit my job. Because I had to come to terms with myself. That’s our generational attitude.

Retire a bit everyday.

If there’s one thing that quitting my job had taught me, it’s coming to terms with yourself & accepting that. That’s it.

And I think that’s the main problem with our current economy and the retiring problem. A lot of our older citizens are hanging on their jobs by their clenched fingers, I think, because they haven’t come to terms with themselves for a long time—or never have. A lot of them will say that they can’t just do that. They’ve tried to pursue through fantasies that was created through a very curated collection of marketing whims. We don’t need 2,500 sq. ft. houses. We don’t need BMWs. We don’t need new phones every six months. We don’t need RVs. We don’t need stuff that are bubbles that eventually will burst. What we need to do is to come to terms with ourselves. Face the reality that consolidated retirement models blatantly ignore the fact you might just flop out and die anytime now.

We don’t need to save up all of our retiring days into one consolidated period of time and binge eat all of that in one long sitting. Our retirement model is designed to be binged upon. Binged. And no good, we all know, has ever came out of binging. Our retirement is just financial glutton & slavery masked in a fancy terminology.

Society doesn't get better through retirement.

Come to terms with your unsustainable fantasy, your dreamy midnight walk now. No society has become better through the past or even the future. Society gets better through only one tense. The present tense. As in, now!

That’s something I hope that our generation will be better at: coming to terms with ourselves.

Your terms is the only safety net you’ll ever have.

Coming to terms often means being uncomfortable. And that’s the most important thing there is: being uncomfortable. It’s time for us as a people and as a nation to feel uncomfortable and come to terms with ourselves.

Retire a bit everyday, like how the rest of the world does.