Thoughts on early retirement
Some call it work, I call it hobby. Every morning, I throw a Taylor Swift song to remind me that 1) I'm alive 2) I'm healthy 3) Take life not too seriously.
“[The world] never was any better, it never will be any better. It will only be richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.”
I was reading a reddit thread this morning about how the belief of a future economic/environnemental collapse affect our current life. A guy wrote this: "They see my "lack of a job" or extreme early retirement as either a mistake or a problem. They then try to help me solve it. What it sounds like to me is them talking about whether I would prefer smoking or non-smoking section in some kind of prison. The big issue, the prison, that never gets spoken of, and if you point it out and they acknowledge it, the conversation will quickly slip away to details that don't matter again. I generally have no patience for this now, and I have started asking people what they are going to do with the rest of their own precious lives."
This is the thing my friend. This guy gets it. I'll get back to this paragraph in a few lines. I'm going to go into an early retire in the next few months. And by that I mean that I'll start doing what I really want to do, when I want to do, for as long as I want to do.
Maybe I'll just drive around the States for a year. Then take a plane and go for a year in Africa. Then a year in Georgia. Be a wedding photographer in Vanuatu goes why not.
The idea of an infinite growth on a finite planet is absurd. But the whole economy is build on this very crazy premise. Without growth, there isn't a global economy, plain and simple. And one day we will reach the limit of growth to this finite world. We live on borrowed time in a way.
The planet is going into a catastrophic climate change period, as it never as seen before.
It is hard to find people that "gets it". Like, what would you do if you'd think that the world has you know is coming to end in ten years ? Twenty years ? Thirty years ? Will you live the life you live as of today? Or would you go hard and enjoy life at its fullest ? What about if life as you know it would end in a year ? What if you knew that you'd die of cancer in 400 days ?
The core of my soul has been built around the principle that I live on borrowed time. A borrowed body from stardust that swirled and thurled to form this human thing. Every time I call my parents, one of the first question they ask me is "What are you going to do tomorrow ?"
I don't know. I don't make plans, yet I make plans. I go where the wind drags me in and where my soul aspires to go. I don't bother telling my friends that I am taking extreme early retirement at 24. I tell them that I'll go travel. Or find a new job. Thing is, I'm not working for money, but that is not okay to say out loud to your co-worker.
I cannot recommend enough to take the time to read some of Gail Tveberg's best articles on www.ourfiniteworld.com. She gets it. I'll end this post by a quote of Walter Miller.
“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.”