Why I'm not planning for my retirement

I want to live right now

My husband and I celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, and, to mark the occasion, we left our children with their Nonna and spent the day in a spa. It was blissful. We swam, we sauna-ed, we lay around next to the pool reading… and no one asked me for a snack all day. As we were sitting in the jacuzzi, my husband said to me, “I need to budget for this in my retirement plan. When I retire, I’d like to do this once a week.”

I think that might be one of the most depressing things I’ve ever heard.

Why do we so often talk about all the amazing things we’ll do when we retire? Or in some imagined easier future? When the kids have left home. When I’ve got that promotion. When you’ve got a new qualification. When interest rates improve. When we have a bigger house.

What about right now?

What if we never get there?

I’m 40 years old and self-employed. I don’t have much in the way of a pension. And the world is just getting more and more screwed by capitalism. Interest rates are bananas, and the cost of actual bananas (and everything else) is becoming unmanageable. Unless something fairly magical happens, I can’t see me being in a position to retire comfortably anytime soon. When my husband talks about the life we’ll have when we retire, it sounds to me like a fairytale.

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash

Ok, he works for a university and has quite a decent pension, so maybe I’ll be able to stop working in my 70s and live off him (#FeminismFail). But who knows what condition I’ll be in by then. I already feel like I’m held together with sticky tape, and both my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandfather died unreasonably young. Planning for a joyful retirement is all well and good, but what if I don’t get there?

It feels so often that we’re telling ourselves we can have the good stuff in life when we reach a point that may or may not ever come. What if your boss screws you over and gives the promotion to someone else? What if your kids leave home just as you find yourself needing to care for an ageing parent? What if finishing the qualification leads to you being offered an amazing job that takes over all your free time?

Even if that time does come, it’s a really, really long way away. Do I want to wait another 30 years to have the life I want?

Sometimes I wonder if this “I’ll do that when…” attitude is actually a way of stalling. Maybe the dreams we hold feel too fragile to release into the world, so we hold them close, keep them cupped in our hands, and gaze at them from time to time only to hide them away from view again. We tell ourselves we’re waiting for the perfect moment, when really we don’t want to have to reach that moment - we want an excuse to keep our dreams in an imagined future.

Why would we want to keep the life we most desire at such a distance?

Fear of failure is powerful. What if we find time to write the novel and then no one wants to read it? What if we discover that, even with all the time in the world to train, we still can’t run a marathon? That we have no talent for the piano? Maybe our business idea isn’t as good as we think it is, or we don’t have the capabilities to make it successful.

But fear of success can be just as paralysing. What if we get the time and space we said we needed, only to find it wasn’t the job or the house or the simple lack of time and space that was keeping us from being truly happy? What if there’s something much more fundamental that needs addressing, something that would be far more difficult and life-altering to try to address?

Then there’s another issue that I think holds many of us back - we believe we simply don’t deserve to have the life we want. Either because we just aren’t worthy of happiness, or because we haven’t earned it yet.

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The worthiness of suffering

Deeply ingrained into most of us is a belief that life is supposed to be hard. We’re meant to struggle and suffer in order to be rewarded with good things. It starts when we’re young - you can have a cookie when you’ve finished your homework, you can have dessert when you’ve eaten your broccoli. At school, we’re told we must push ourselves harder and harder, then, if we’re “good”, we might be rewarded with a sticker or a certificate, maybe even a prize. Then we carry that attitude into the world of work - we have to give everything we’ve got to our careers, working absurd hours and putting all our energy into fuelling someone else’s success, in order to be rewarded with crumbs from the table. Then, maybe, just maybe, if we can keep that up for long enough without breaking, we might be rewarded with some time to give to our own lives for the years we have left.

I’m sorry, but fuck that.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again many more times, it’s not supposed to be this hard. I don’t believe we were put on this Earth to drain ourselves of our powerful life-force in service of a cold and heartless machine. I don’t believe that we are here to suffer. I believe we are born worthy and valuable. I believe we are here to squeeze as much joy and wonder and feeling out of this life as we can in the short time we have to experience it.

That doesn’t mean that life doesn’t come with challenges. Of course there will be ups and downs to navigate, there will be times that life absolutely cracks you open and you feel your heart tearing at the seams. But nature is all about balance, and we owe it to ourselves to counterweight that pain with as much pleasure as we can.

We live in a capitalist society (for now), so bills still have to be paid, mortgage or rent payments have to be met, and we have to find ways to balance our needs with society’s. But it has to be a balance. It can’t be all give from our side with only a vague promise of getting something back dangled in front of us in the distance.

Plus, the sooner you give your dreams a go, the less crushing it will be if they don’t work out. If no one reads this novel? Write another one. Or take up poetry or painting or photography instead. If you move house and you’re still not satisfied with your life? Believe that it is possible to do the hard work of healing your bigger issues, of making the big changes that will give you the freedom you crave. There is time to start again - there is always time. You do deserve to be happy. You deserve it so very much.

So, yes, I should be better prepared for my retirement. I should save more, I need to put more into my pension. At least my business now has a pension scheme - we’ve made a start! But I’m not waiting until I (maybe) get to retire to go to the spa, to write the novel, to do the things that I want to do. I’m not putting all my eggs in the basket of a mythical future. I want to live right now.

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Living for today

Realistically, we can’t go for a spa day every week. We can’t go on three international holidays a year like my in-laws (who were much better prepared for their retirement!) do. It’s not necessarily possible right now to completely live the life you want, but it is possible to make a start.

After that moment in the jacuzzi, I challenged my husband (and myself) to think about what kind of life we really want. What do we want to do when we retire (or when the kids are older, or when my business needs less from me)? When we get all of our dreams out on the table, we can look at small ways to start bringing them to life right now.

My husband wants to travel. His ambition is to see all of the Seven Wonders of the World, and he has three left to go. Brazil and Peru are trips we’d like to take when the children are a bit older, so that they can either fully enjoy them with us or we can leave them with grandparents for a week or two while we go. So the focus now is on saving up for a trip to Petra, and training to be able to trek for long hours through the desert.

And a spa day once a week might be too much time to take away from work right now, but once a month or even every two or three months is definitely manageable. We discovered a health club down the road from our home that does day passes for £19 per person. That’s definitely something we could budget for.

As for me, writing has always been the dream. The thing I’ll get to when there’s enough time. When I was building my career, I said that I’d do it once the pressure of work was less. Then I had children and started my own business and, holy crap, if I thought I didn’t have any time then, suddenly those days of working 12 hours a day six days a week seem absurdly laidback. But, actually, I’ve found more time to write since having children because it has felt so very necessary. I’ve needed that outlet, that self-expression, that something for myself. So I’ve found whatever pockets of time to write that I can. I got up at 5am for a while, when my son was in a phase of sleeping through the night, but now he’s in a phase of crawling into my bed at 2am and waking up at 6am, so now I’m writing at 9pm at night, or at the weekends when my husband can take the kids out for a few hours.

I realised, when I threw that challenge out to my husband, that there was little else that I’d dreamed for myself. I’d spent so long giving myself to others - studying, career, children - that I’d lost sight of what was important just to me. So that’s my task now, to figure out what I want, and how to bring that to life in the here and now.

And now I’d like to challenge you to do the same. What do you want in life? What dreams are you putting off into the future? How can you start to bring them into reality right here and now?