This morning, I came across an article about a 62-year-old woman and her 87-year-old father who have no plans to retire. He’s a lexicographer; she’s a writer. Their thesis? Work gives them purpose, so why stop?
Now, purpose is beautiful. It is the animating force that keeps us from collapsing inward. But we have allowed the word “work” to do a tremendous amount of laundering.
There is a vast distance between writing a novel in a quiet room and scanning groceries until your back screams while a customer yells about a 2017 coupon. They are both called “work,” but that’s like saying “water” and refusing to distinguish between a warm bath and someone being held under.
If your work nourishes you, by all means, continue. But that is not an argument against retirement; it is an argument for freedom. We live in an age of staggering abundance, yet we’ve convinced millions that grinding themselves into dust for the privilege of survival is spiritually enriching. That isn’t wisdom—it’s branding.
The confusion lies in the fact that we have collapsed three different things into one: labor as effort, employment as economics, and purpose as meaning.
Sometimes they overlap. That is the “sweet spot” where the artist paints freely, the teacher feels alive in the classroom, or the nurse is given enough support to actually care. But often, they don’t. A person may labor for decades and never feel meaning. Conversely, a person may retire and finally discover the first real purpose of their life in walking slowly with a friend, making soup, or sitting by a lake without monetizing the experience.
Retirement is often framed as a decline into irrelevance. But for many, it is the return of ownership. Ownership of the body, the day, the attention, and the energy—the self, finally returned after decades of being rented out in eight-hour increments.
There is a class element here that cannot be ignored. The people most likely to say they’ll never retire are usually those whose work contains autonomy and creativity. Their missing footnote is: “My work is not destroying me.”
We should want people to have purpose at every stage, but we should not confuse purpose with being economically extractable. Purpose is older than capitalism and larger than a supervisor. Real fulfillment is a life where continuing and stopping are both dignified choices.
May everyone have the freedom to discover what actually gives them life. And may no one be forced to call exhaustion “meaning” just to make the system feel better about itself.