It's Too Big A World To Spend Most Of Life In A Cubicle
A quick word about mini-retirements
Why not take the usual 20–30-year retirement and redistribute it throughout life instead of saving it all for the end?
It's been a while since I read The 4-Hour Work Week, but only recently I went back to it. I went over the notes I left for myself, to see which aspects stood out the most for me.
The main idea of the book is defined by its title: start a business and run it in such a way that you only have to spend about four hours of the week on it to keep it profitable. According to author Tim Ferriss, it's possible to do this by automating and delegating a lot of things. By removing the single point of failure that is you.
An interesting idea, and maybe even doable… But only after you've spent years and years setting up the business first and working eighty hours a week on it before you can count yourself out of it and have that four-hour work week. That's at least how I see it. But, there are more aspects of this book that triggered me. The biggest one of them was the concept of mini-retirements.
What if you could use a mini-retirement to sample your deferred-life plan reward before working 40 years for it?
The quote above describes the main point of mini-retirements. In our working system (in The Netherlands), you reach the retirement age when you're 67. Pretty late, right? And given the fact that this number has been raised from 65 quite recently, I wouldn't be surprised if it's going to become even higher in the coming years. Hell, once I'm 67 the retirement age is probably somewhere at 75. That sounds horrible, doesn't it?
As described in The 4-Hour Work Week, it's actually absurd that everyone waits until they've reached the retirement age before they start doing all the things that they've been holding back on because they had to work first. This means that you're not doing those things in the prime of your life when you're healthy and have the energy to do it. Because let's face it: how many retired people do you know who have the same level of energy, health, and body they had when they were 25? Like exactly the same? I don't know any.
All this is summarized perfectly in the following picture:
A mini-retirement turns the red cross of the working man into a green check mark, creating the perfect situation.
So the big question is: why wait? Will you be bankrupt if you take a mini-retirement of — let's say — three months every two years? Or maybe even every year? For most of us, I don't think so. And if so, does the same hold if you change the three months into two? Or maybe even just one? It's completely up to you how you want to define what a mini-retirement is. Keep the following in mind:
Is it really necessary to work like a slave to live like a millionaire?
Of course not. And what is rich anyway? Is it having enough money, or is it having a why in your life, a sense of fulfillment? I'd say it's the last. Of course, money is important to have, to some extent. But the rest of richness comes from the latter.
To be honest, I'm currently not doing mini-retirements myself. Not yet, anyway. But I like the reasoning behind it. I don't want to wait until I'm grey and old and out of energy before I start living. I want to do it now, while I still have the energy and health that are necessary to do it.
Are you joining me? It's too big a world to spend most of life in a cubicle, anyway.
Thanks for reading this post. I'm happy to get into a conversation with you on this topic, so feel free to leave a comment in the discussion-section below.
