What’s Wrong about Retirement Advice

Image by reid.gilman via Flickr

We’ve been programmed from birth to get with the program. We hear the message that you can’t start too early teaching your child to read or play the piano or learn to swim or play tennis. Before you even have time to think about what life is all about and what is important, you get put on a program and before you know it you are convinced that it you ever step off the path, you are doomed to be a loser.

We are trained to see the world as full of winners – those who follow the program – and losers – those who fall off and end up working at the convenience store on the corner. If you are with the program you define yourself by the path you followed – your college, your job or when you really get deeply embedded in the program, the college your kids got into and their job. Life becomes a set of merit badges or check boxes.

Nobody thinks about the kind of life they want. Nobody ever asks questions about what makes life worthwhile. Nobody asks about fulfillment or lifestyle. People are expected to make themselves fit into the spaces provided, not stand out as individuals.

I bought the program hook, line and sinker. I worked a full career satisfying somebody else s plan and sacrificing my family and my spirit to conventional wisdom group think. Along the way I began to suspect that something was wrong with the path I followed but after not thinking for so long, it wasn’t easy to hold an independent thought in my head, let alone step off the path.

It was only when I retired that I began to understand what I had done to myself. And when I looked around to see what to make of retirement, I found people ready to tell me what to do so I wouldn’t have to think for myself about life and what is important to me. I found another path.

And that’s what drives me crazy about retirement blogs. They are all about following the numbers, doing the expected things and not thinking. They are all about being safe and secure, not making waves and definitely not pushing the envelope. They advocate a lifestyle that is so pleasant and innane that you probably won’t notice when you actually die.

I’ve been dead most of my life and with the precious little time I have left, I intend to stay off the path of conventional wisdom and make a lifestyle that keeps me excited each day. I want to set goals that take me far away from ordinary and keep pushing my abilities. I want to fight the aging process every step of the way instead of going softly into the night.

I’m a poor role model for the conventional retirement blogs. My finances are strapped. My goals are bigger than my pocket book and I’m not very relatable. I’m also way past following somebody else’s plans. I’ve got big time flaws, limitations and hang-ups. If you want to manage your money and drift numbly along your declining years, we don’t have anything to talk about. Stay asleep and follow the programming elsewhere.

But I think that retirement is the last chance I have to be the person I can be, not the programmed robot of most of my life. And that’s why I don’t read retirement blogs. They don’t tell me anything about living and I’ve got only a few more years to make up for a lifetime asleep at the switch. For me, the only advice that makes sense is to search my heart for what is important and focus my thoughts and resources to live that life. Everything else is useless.