Is Retirement The One Goal To Reach To Be Finally Free?

Freedom is more accessible than ever and the process has accelerated since the pandemic hit us last year. Our way of living have started to shift for the better.

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

For many of us and our elder generations, retirement is the achievement of an entire life of work. About 45 years of hard labour to reach that stage around the age of 65 years old. Is this still up to date nowadays?

I don’t think so. Most of the new generations, since 1990, do not consider their retirement as a goal to reach to stop working and do nothing for the rest of their lives

According to a study published in the Journal de Montreal in 2019, more than 50% of Millennials, now in the labour market, think of working beyond the age of 65 or plan to remain active outside the labour market after retiring from the workforce. That percentage was only 30% in 2003. It’s a significant change in mentality.

We no longer see work as a simple necessity and obligation but also as an accomplishment in itself.

For me, retirement simply means having the freedom to choose what we do with our days rather than having a continual work routine like “metro-work-sleep.”

The fact that we live in a system that allows us to work more and more at our own pace, mainly teleworking, has broken this routine. We now can mix our personal and professional lives to obtain a much better life balance.

We now accomplish in 20 hours what we did in 40 hours in the past for many jobs. Having more leeway in our daily lives makes us more productive.

How many stories are there of people who simply fell ill after retiring from the workforce and died out of boredom? It was common in the past.

I believe it will be rarer now. We are more open to a fulfilled life outside of work. Our professional life now seems to be an increasingly integral part of our personal life.

We no longer live just for work. We want to accomplish ourselves as a human being, as an individual, and work is only a part of our life’s big picture.

So my question to you is:

Do we still have to wait until retirement to achieve this freedom of choice