Maybe, but I don’t know anyone who’s less happy being retired.
I've known lots of people who spiraled into various levels of depression after retirement. It's even more likely if the retirement wasn't voluntary.
I've known lots of people who spiraled into various levels of depression after retirement. It's even more likely if the retirement wasn't voluntary.
In the no longer useful to employers vein, in the working class town I grew up in there was a common observation that retirement was a harbinger of death. That when someone retired their lifestyle would quickly decline to sedentary decay, boredom medicated with alcohol (or other things). Death would quickly follow.
As an aside, tangentially there's a wonderful passage from Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer -
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
> Americans cannot imagine stopping work before they've either (1) purchased everything that they could conceivably want, or (2) collapsed from physical exhaustion.
If your material needs and desires are sufficiently low, and your resources sufficiently high, you could retire. Age or usefulness to an employer could be an upper bound, I suppose.
I look at it like this: finances are like a bathtub. What you spend is the drain, your income (whether salary, interest, cap gains, etc) is the faucet, and your resources are the water in the tub. Retirement is the point where you can turn off (or turn down) the faucet and not run dry. Some people have big drainpipes and need a big tub and lots of water; others can live with a trickle.