What’s your retirement purpose? if you are like a lot of other workers, you have come to have doubts about the old idea of retirement as a time to leave the world of work entirely behind and instead see your retirement purpose as becoming free at last to do the work you truly love. 
Here is a link to a Washington Post Outlook piece examining how and why the conventional view of “retirement” as a time of rest was marketed to middle-class America and how and why a new vision of retirement as a second active stage of life (with more freedom) is gaining ground today. I found it fascinating to learn that the English word “retirement” is derived from a French word meaning “to go off into seclusion.” I believe that a big problem with the conventional retirement purpose is that the goal being sought is something that not too many of us look forward to all that much. How hard can anyone be expected to work to attain the ability to “go off into seclusion?”
Who Wants to Head “Off Into Seclusion?”
Most of us want to engage in some form of useful activity for as many years as we possibly can. We have good reasons for not wanting to be dependent on a paycheck. For a good number of us, the work that most excites us is work that is likely to pay little or perhaps nothing. But we do want to do things with our lives before time passes us by. So a retirement purpose that provides for a time when we will be heading “off into seclusion” rarely provides the motivation needed for a successful saving effort. Financial freedom is something everyone wants. So the focus of our saving efforts should be the exciting things we can do with our lives by attaining financial freedom. Not just in our 60s, 70s, and 80s. We should be saving for the exciting things that financial freedom lets us do with our lives in our 30s, 40s, and 50s too. Why should those age 65 and over be having all the fun? As the new idea of retirement purpose described in the article linked above gains ground, retirement will no longer be resserved for those age 65 and over. The new retirement purpose is a retirement purpose desired by just about everyone. I stand second to no one in my love for financial freedom. But this “to go off into seclusion” business is strictly for the birds, so far as I’m concerned. I want to live! Define “retirement purpose” in such a way that it permits a whole bunch more living after you get there, and I will seek to retire as early in life as possible. Use that old fogey definition in which retirement is about getting ready to die, and I can probably find better things to do with my time and efforts and money than to seek retirement either early or late.
A New Way to Work
Here’s a quote from the article that I especially liked: “This new generation of aging boomers seems poised to swap that old dream of the freedom from work for a new one built around the freedom to work — in new ways, on new terms, to new ends.” That makes sense. That’s a retirement purpose for those too young at heart to accept the idea of going “off into seclusion” any time real soon.