Somewhere in your phone or on a whiteboard in your office, there's a number and a date.
The number is what you think you need when you “retire”. The date is when you finally get to “retire”. I've watched people arrange 20 years of their life around those two things, and I've done a version of it myself, so I'm not throwing shade.
But I want to ask you something I couldn't answer for myself for a long time.
What are you actually aiming at?
Not the number. The thing on the other side of it. Say the word "retire" out loud and then try to describe what it actually means for a Tuesday in your life. Most people can describe the picture from the commercial, but few can describe the actual Tuesday.
It Started as a Government Program
This idea didn't come from anywhere near where you'd think.
Germany created the world's first national old-age pension in 1889 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. His motives were purely political. Socialist parties were gaining ground across industrial Europe, and Bismarck wanted to take the wind out of them by having the imperial state hand workers something first. When critics called him a socialist for it, he said call it socialism or whatever you like, it's the same to him.
I checked the popular version of this story carefully, and most of it is wrong. Germany set the age at 70, not 65. Bismarck was 74 at the time. The age wasn't lowered to 65 until 1916, which was 18 years after he was dead. And America didn't copy him.
The United States launched Social Security in 1935 and picked 65 after the Committee on Economic Security surveyed what already existed here. Private pension plans, about 30 state-run old-age systems, and the federal Railroad Retirement System. Roughly half used 65 and half used 70, and 65 was the more common norm. Then the actuaries confirmed that 65 could pay for itself on a modest payroll tax.
So the age you've organized your life around came out of a survey of existing plans and a calculation about what was affordable.
Nobody Designed It as a Way to Live
Read that history again and notice what's missing from it.
Nobody sat down and asked what a good final chapter looks like for a human being. Nobody asked what a person should do with their 60s and 70s. It was a benefit built for industrial workers whose bodies had been used up by factories, and the numbers were set by actuaries figuring out what a government could afford to pay.
That's a fine thing for a government to do. It's a terrible thing to build your life around.
And there's a detail in the German records that tells you exactly what it was for. Because the German system combined disability and old-age benefits, roughly 90% of covered workers left on disability before they ever reached 70.
They didn't retire. Their bodies quit on them, and the state caught them. That's what the program was designed to do.
It Isn't in the Bible Either
I spent over a decade as a pastor, so let me add one more thing I noticed a long time ago and never had a good answer for.
Scripture talks constantly about work, rest, seasons, and Sabbath. God rested on the seventh day. The land got a Sabbath year. There are commands about resting your servants and even your animals. Rest is all over the Bible.
What isn't there is a phase of life where you stop contributing. There's one narrow passage in Numbers 8 where Levites serve in the tent of meeting from 25 to 50 and are then released from the regular service. But even there, the text says they can still assist their brothers. They didn't go off to an over-50 community in the hills of Canaan. They changed roles.
Now that absence doesn't prove anything by itself, because plenty of good things aren't in scripture. But between a book that's been around for thousands of years and a pension program from 1889, only one of them ever proposed a stage of life where you stop producing. And it wasn't the book.
Then Somebody Sold It to You
On its own, 65 was just an eligibility rule. About as inspiring as a tax bracket.
What turned it into something people dream about was the financial services industry, because they had products to sell and they needed you to want that day badly enough to fund it for 30 years.
Think about the imagery you've absorbed your entire adult life. The couple walking on the beach. The golf course at sunset. The sailboat, the RV, the grandkids running across a lawn. Then look at the bottom of the page and see who paid for the ad.
I'm not claiming a conspiracy, because this is just how advertising works. Somebody selling a 30-year accumulation product needs you emotionally attached to the day the accumulating stops. They sold you a picture, the picture worked, and now most people can describe their retirement in more detail than they can describe next Tuesday.
What You're Actually Signing Up For
So let's be specific about the arrangement.
You work for 40 years. You hand a percentage of every check to the government and a percentage to a fund manager. Then at a certain age you stop producing anything, and for the next 20 or 30 years you live on a government program, a fund you don't control, and a pile of money in a race against how long you happen to live.
That's the plan. That's what "I'm going to retire at 65" actually describes.
Now, before you start getting mad at me, I'm not saying don't save. Save and invest aggressively. I'm saying look straight at what you've been told to aim for, because the aim is to become entirely dependent on other people's promises at the exact point in your life when you have the least ability to do anything about it if those promises don't hold.
The Part I've Watched Happen
I've seen this enough times that I've stopped thinking it's a coincidence.
A lot of the people I know who spent decades looking forward to retirement, and then got there, stopped being givers. They became takers. They stopped producing anything for anybody, and something in them got smaller. Not because they got old. Because they quit contributing and nobody had ever told them that the contributing was the point.
The research backs up part of this, and I want to be careful about which part. Studies on retirement are all over the map, and honestly most of them find that mental health improves. Less stress, better sleep, more control over the day. I went looking for evidence that retirement wrecks people and I mostly didn't find it, so I'm not going to pretend it did.
But one finding holds up across the reviews, and you should pay attention to this one. What predicts a hard landing isn't the age or the money. It's how much of yourself was in the work. Retirement takes away the routine, the people, the sense of being needed, and an identity built over decades. The more of you that was in it, the more of you leaves when it goes.
Now think about who that describes. It describes you.
And let me be fair here, because it's true. If you saved well and you decide it's your turn to sit back for a while, that's a legitimate choice and you've earned the right to make it. I'm not calling that failure. What I'm against is being shackled to an age and an amount that somebody else picked, without ever asking what you were aiming at.
There's Another Way to Do This
The alternative isn't “work until you drop” either. I want to be clear about that.
The alternative is to build something that produces without you standing in it.
That's the whole argument for owning an asset instead of owning a job. If the business runs when you're not there, you don't need a date on a calendar to give you permission to go somewhere. You don't need a fund manager's returns to hold up. You're not waiting on a government program that was designed in 1889 for factory workers.
That's the difference between an Owner-Operator, an Owner-Manager, and an Owner-Investor. The Owner-Investor didn't retire. He built something that keeps producing, and then he went and did what he wanted with his Tuesdays. I wrote about the closest version of this in You're Not the Expert. You're the Bottleneck and about what happens when you wait in Later Never Comes.
Save and produce. Both. For as long as you're able.
Now What
One thing this week, and it won't take long.
Name one thing you own, or one thing you could build, that produces income without you working in it. Not a theory. An actual thing. A part of the business that runs without you, a piece of property, a product, a stake in something somebody else operates.
If you can name one, write down the next step on it and put a date on that step this month.
If you can't name one, that's the more useful answer, and it tells you what the last 40 years of your working life are currently set up to depend on. It also tells you what to work on before you think about a retirement date again. Related to that, More Money Doesn't Buy Freedom covers what happens when the income grows but nothing else changes.
Words of Wisdom
"Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest."
– Proverbs 6:6-8
Look at what Solomon points out about that ant. No commander. No overseer. No ruler.
Nobody set its retirement age. Nobody ran an actuarial table on it. It doesn't have a program, and it isn't waiting on anybody's promise. It just produces and it stores, on its own initiative, in the season when producing is possible.
That's a really important nugget of truth right there, written down 3,000 years before Bismarck.
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