Retirement is the pinnacle of performance, and I'm choosing to opt out.

Even retirement has been converted into a production race.

At 1 AM, the blue illumination of my laptop reveals strewn papers and empty coffee cups. Another late night spent pursuing artificial ambitions, demonstrating my value via productivity.

In these times, I fantasize not of adventure or success but of empty time—mornings without alarms, days without plans. Of retirement.

This revelation seems almost humiliating in our achievement-obsessed world. When friends talk retirement, they conjure scenes of continual motion—consulting companies, foreign excursions, and passionate activities.

Their ideas seem less like freedom and more like carefully orchestrated presentations of purpose.

The pressure to accomplish purpose

At a retirement planning conference my firm sponsored last week, the instructor separated us into groups to explore our “encore careers.” Around me, voices surge with passion.

A manager intends to create a strategic consulting business. An analyst dreams of founding a tech firm. An administrator plots out a second life as a travel blogger.

When my time comes, I stop. “I want to read books without taking notes,” I say ultimately. “To watch birds without identifying them. To stroll with my dog without calculating my steps.”

The quiet is unsettling. Someone laughs uncomfortably. The facilitator swiftly goes on.

Walking back to my work, I pass our company’s “Wall of Achievement"—photos of employees earning accolades, completing transactions, and accomplishing milestones.

Even our celebrations of retirement center on quantitative impact: volunteer hours clocked, countries visited, new companies founded. We’ve made life’s last chapter into another performance assessment.

While others plotted encore careers and second acts, I wished for an existence without plotlines—a life defined not in achievements but in peaceful moments.

Yet this fixation with productivity in every stage of life isn’t new. It dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when time became organized into hours and minutes to enhance industry production.

Sociologist Max Weber attributed this transition to the “Protestant work ethic,” where effort was moralized and idleness became sin. We’ve inherited this worldview, where even the rest must justify its usefulness.

My objection to this story of purposeful retirement evolved not from philosophy but from tiredness. After decades of maximizing every hour, of turning hobbies into side hustles, of measuring value in production, my soul desires idle time.

Witnesses to another way

On my lunch hour, I take sanctuary at a vast metropolitan library near my job. Here, in a bright reading area, I witness a distinct attitude to time.

A guy, maybe a decade older than me, reads poetry with great immersion, writing lines that move him into a leather notebook. No metrics measure his literature intake. No aims warrant his scrupulous copying of lyrics.

One day, gaining bravery, I inquired about his retirement. “My colleagues warned me about the void,” he informs me, shutting his book. “They said I’d need projects, goals, and structure. But what I needed was room to rediscover who I am beyond success. To read not for information but for wonder.”

I appreciated hearing this and asked myself some questions in response. How long has it been since I approached something with genuine curiosity? When did curiosity become a luxury I couldn’t afford?

The commercialization of retirement

The retirement business sells us back our own anxieties. Cruise ships promote “active lifestyle getaways.” Financial gurus caution against “wasting” our elderly years.

Medicare advertising portrays silver-haired couples zip-lining through jungles. The message is clear: halting feels like vanishing. Only continual motion confirms we’re still here.

My own organization provides retirement coaching focusing exclusively on “encore careers” and “legacy building.” In one session, the coach asked us to brand our retirement persona. “Who will you be,” she wonders, “when you’re not your job title?”

I want to say: A human being. Not a brand, not a legacy, not a well-managed portfolio of significant activities. Just a human going through life, paying attention.

Learning from the garden

My aunt Martha resigned from being a college professor and researcher fifteen years ago. When questioned about her retirement plans, she answered simply, “I’m going to grow tomatoes.”

Her colleagues waited for more—surely this experienced educator had greater ambitions? But she stuck fast to her modest goal, unaffected by the pressure to make her retirement “count.”

A few months back, I sat in her garden refuge, where morning glories climb trellises and bees murmur amid the herb beds. She spends hours studying minute changes in her plants, regulating water and nutrients with the accuracy of a scientist. Her tomatoes taste like summer distilled into fruit.

In the tranquility of her garden, I recognized what decades of careerism had obscured: some of life’s most significant development occurs unnoticed, in the empty intervals between duties.

The garden’s cadence is leisurely and unapologetic, rejecting the urge to produce on a deadline. Retirement, I understood, may be less about collecting successes and more about nurturing presence.

“Teaching was about pushing things to grow on schedule,” she says to me, gently tying back a hefty vine. “Always racing toward measurable outcomes. The garden teaches me to wait, to observe, to let things grow at their own pace.”

She offers me a sun-warmed tomato. “Boredom makes space for paying attention.”

I adore the wisdom in her statements. The garden is a place where patience prevails over production, where nurturing is more vital than tallying.

With her, I perceive a new measure of time. Not business quarters or economic years, but the leisurely passing of seasons. Not performance measurements, but the slow ripening of fruit. Not accomplishment, but attention.

The fear we can’t identify

After dropping off a book I was loaning her, my retirement-obsessed neighbor Angela discloses what motivates her detailed preparation. She’s been pushed into retirement by her work and has been apprehensive about the move for months.

She shows me her laptop screen of spreadsheets—her post-retirement schedule separated into 30-minute intervals. There’s a lot of volunteering and hours of volleyball.

“I’m afraid of disappearing,” she murmurs, glancing at the cells packed with scheduled activities. “If I’m not achieving something or producing something, who am I?” Her voice catches. “What if I’m boring?”

Her anxiety isn’t hers alone—it's the dread we’ve all been taught: that our value depends on our production and that without work, we evaporate. We’ve so fully accepted capitalism’s imperative to create that vacant time that seems like erasure.

We fill retirement with bustle to ensure we still exist after our employment goes away.

The radical possibilities of unoccupied time

My retirement strategy relies on conventional metrics—compound interest, diversified assets, and predicted returns. But I’m also betting on less tangible assets: ideas I want to investigate without hurry, books I want to ingest without purpose, and talents I want to try poorly with no obligation to improve.

I’m storing room for the type of ideas that only come in extended silences. For the initiatives that require prolonged time to mature. For the attention my aunt gives her tomatoes, my library buddy provides his poems. For the luxury of being unproductive, unscheduled, and unmeasured.

This image of retirement could appear unambitious in a world that expects perpetual advancement. No accomplishments to report in holiday letters. No metrics to monitor progress. No personal brand to build.

But if choosing idle time constitutes a silent revolt against the monetization of existence,. A reclaiming of human value beyond productivity.

The bravery to be dull

In my most weary times, when deadlines loom and meetings mount, I resort to a memory: my grandpa sitting on the porch, watching the neighbors walk their dogs and the sun sink below the row of homes across the street.

No phone in sight. No ambitions to attain. Just presence, attentiveness, astonishment.

“Aren’t you bored?” I questioned him once, young enough to assume that meaning needed action.

“Bored?” He grinned, indicating the hue of the sky. “I’m too busy noticing the beauty around me to be bored.”

In a world that considers quiet as failure, I want to embrace boredom as a haven. To squander time entirely and gloriously on things that matter only to me.

Because what my grandpa understood, what my aunt’s garden showed, and what we all risk losing is this: Life’s best moments aren’t won by trying but granted to us when we dare to just be.

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