> Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren't that organized, disciplined, or motivated.
Maybe, but I don’t know anyone who’s less happy being retired. They might not be living their retirement fantasy, but the pressure and stress of having to work is gone.
Retirement is such a loaded word because to many it means "wealthy enough to do whatever they want", whereas traditionally it meant "no longer useful to employers". In the former case we have stories of 20-somethings "retiring", the word repurposed into just a meaningless boast.
In the no longer useful to employers vein, in the working class town I grew up in there was a common observation that retirement was a harbinger of death. That when someone retired their lifestyle would quickly decline to sedentary decay, boredom medicated with alcohol (or other things). Death would quickly follow.
As an aside, tangentially there's a wonderful passage from Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer -
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
> Americans cannot imagine stopping work before they've either (1) purchased everything that they could conceivably want, or (2) collapsed from physical exhaustion.
If your material needs and desires are sufficiently low, and your resources sufficiently high, you could retire. Age or usefulness to an employer could be an upper bound, I suppose.
I look at it like this: finances are like a bathtub. What you spend is the drain, your income (whether salary, interest, cap gains, etc) is the faucet, and your resources are the water in the tub. Retirement is the point where you can turn off (or turn down) the faucet and not run dry. Some people have big drainpipes and need a big tub and lots of water; others can live with a trickle.
I retired at age 62.5, tired of working long hours and high stress as a lead programmer in a huge company. Now I write code all day I want to write. Much more fun. I miss being involved in the (non FAANG) companies business, but I don't miss the hours, stress, frustration or exec indecision at all.
Both my grandfathers have repeatedly tried to retire and within 3 weeks went back to work until in the case of one his boss changed and in the case of the other, at 77 he is still working.
For many their work is very core to their identity and without it, they have little to do.
I think easing out of work is important. My dad 'retired' at 67 and instantly got hired back as a consultant on an hourly basis. He then spent the next 3 or so years slowly cutting down his hours until he was only working ~20-30% at which point he felt ready quit.
Similar. My old man went back to his old job as a consultant. It was supposed to be 20 hours a week and quickly turned into 40. Then he gradually reduced over time.
Probably my ideal thing would be some project-based (non-dev) consulting that wasn't too many hours and that let me disappear for a month here and there. I'm not sure I could really count on that though--especially without a lot of beating of bushes--which leads me to put in a bit more time while I easily can.
A consultant is basically anyone who is paid by the hour/day to works on projects and isn't employed by the company whose project they're working on.
Generally the difference between a consultant and a contractor is kind of diffuse, but basically a consultant has more autonomy and is expected to offer advice and guidance based on their experience, while a contractor is expected more to just implement a plan given to them. But as I said it's very diffuse and many people use the term contractor and consultant interchangeably.
As to what it requires, literally just that you can convince someone to pay you money for you to give them advice. Often a consultant will have a lot of experience in a specific area and will be brought on by companies that need help and expertise in that area for a specific project, but don't want to hire an expert full time.
There are also consulting companies that employ people and hire them out to other companies as consultants. At which point you just get a regular salary from your employer and the company you are hired out to pays your employer for the hours you work.
There is plenty of research to suggest that people go into cognitive decline after entering retirement. Whether that translated to a change in "happiness" is perhaps a different metric, but it certainly is suggestive.
I tend to believe the statement -- I don't know about the "happiness" aspect per se but regarding doing all those things you told yourself you'd do, yeah for sure. During COVID lockdown I saw hundreds of instances of a meme something along the lines of:
"I used to think I just didn't have the time for all the things I wanted to accomplish; lockdown proved that isn't true!"
And I cannot relate. This is not to say that I don't believe you, just to say that the opposite experience does exist. Some of my hobbies are pretty involved and basically require studying (signal processing etc.), and during the COVID lockdown I was able to spend much, much more time on not just those, but everything else as well.
I read some interesting advice somewhere that said: "Sit still until you're compelled to move."
I think the idea is that a lot of our wants / desires are urges that come and go, but our dreams and needs are deeper than that and we have to let those urges pass before we can find out what our true desires are.
Maybe, but I don’t know anyone who’s less happy being retired. They might not be living their retirement fantasy, but the pressure and stress of having to work is gone.