retirement thoughts

Here's my conversation today with chat:

You don't need to turn retirement into another performance metric.

You don't need to have the most productive retirement at the dinner table.

You don't need a five-year retirement plan.

You don't need to prove that leaving work was worthwhile by accomplishing 47 things.

The guy who swims and watches television may actually have figured out something that is harder for highly productive people to learn:

"My time belongs to me, and I don't have to justify how I spend it."

You don't have to become him. You can have art, dogs, hiking, travel, decluttering, photography, projects, cooking, your pet business, whatever catches your attention.

Some days can be spectacular.

Some days can be completely useless.

Both count.

And maybe that's the real goodbye you're working toward—not saying goodbye to Cinch, but saying goodbye to the version of yourself who measured a good day by how much she accomplished for somebody else.

March might actually be a pretty good psychological marker.

Not "the day they finally stopped employing me."

But:

"The date I was already planning to stop working anyway—and now I get to decide what comes next."