# On retirement

By [0xuep](https://paragraph.com/@0xuep) · 2023-10-31

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Just recently while talking to my girlfriend she asked me “so when you retire, what do you want to do” ? She should have known better, but the concept of retirement does not exist to me. You retire from a 9-5 job which you do not want to do, but have to do because of economic pressure. You retire from selling your precious time for money, and in parallel you pay the government for being able to do so (something commonly called income tax). You often also pay the government a monthly “contribution” which it will manage and over time build up to something called your retirement pension. The effective ROI on your contributions to this pension might actually not be great, but hey it is a generational agreement that the younger pay for the elder, it always has been. Well, at least since Bismarck invented the system more than hundred years ago, and most of the people did not make it to retirement since they died before.

What I am trying to say here is that the whole system is fucked up and unsustainable.

Which is why there is no retirement for me. There is financial freedom, and that is a goal worth pursuing. Financial freedom means that your wealth and/or passive income enable you to live in a way that you have enough to cover your basic needs, whatever they are, without having to worry. And the rest of the time, you do whatever you want to do. And surprisingly, that often even includes working. But working on things you like, and with the freedom to define how many hours and when.

That is why I never want to retire. I want to have the freedom of choice, and then work on what I like.

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*Originally published on [0xuep](https://paragraph.com/@0xuep/on-retirement)*