Retirement as a Career Goal
This evening I had an interesting conversation with my housemate about what age I would ideally like to retire. Retirement isn't something I've given any great deal of thought to yet, given my career has barely even started, but I think setting your career goals in such a way that you can maximise your enjoyment of your retirement could be a legitimate way to calibrate your desired trajectory.
The question of what age I would want to retire is decided in my mind by two questions: what do I see myself retiring out of, and what would I do once I retired? If I stay in technology, it feels somewhat difficult to keep pace once you reach a certain age, unless of course you're a COBOL programmer. I would imagine my desire to keep my hands dirty could lessen over the years, so perhaps that won't matter - maybe I'll be in management of some kind, or an executive if I get really lucky. Either way, I think it will depend a lot on what kind of work I am doing - if it something I truly believe in, then naturally I'll want to stay, and if not, I think I'd like to go asap, especially given that I have a pretty good idea for what I would do with my free time as retiree...
... which would be read a lot of books, and hopefully write one as well. I'm never going to read every book I want to, even if I could dedicate an entire lifetime to it. There's so many classics to catch up on, magnum opuses to marvel at, tomes to trawl through - it would be rather nice to have the time to at least make a dent. After all that time spent reading, it'd seem a shame not to at least take a stab at writing a novella of my own, to see if I could distill all the greatness that had gone before me into something at least passable. Perhaps nobody would ever read it during my lifetime but then it'd sell millions of copies after my death - it might even bring me some comfort in my twilight years, knowing that there was the possibility that what I was doing might have some impact, that I might be in the process of achieving something monumental and I'd never even realise it.