I can relate. I was a principal in a successful computer services startup, cashed out, went to HBS, left, and ran various enterprises until I discovered I was about four months pregnant with a child we had long been told we couldn’t have. I tried to shoehorn him into my career, but it was exhausting and just did not work with DH’s constant travel. After about two years of that nonsense, I decided to stay home for a few years and bond with the child. I believe the other moms found my approach to parenting a bit “offputting,” to say the least. (Childproof the house? What are you talking about? If he gets into the Drano, that’ll teach him a lesson.)
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Sounds like you’ve pioneered the FAFO method of parenting! Good job. 
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Definitely. Another time, a mom across the street phoned to frantically tell me that our four-year-old was outside playing with some toy in the water rushing along the curb – in a thunderstorm! I told her I was aware and ensured he was wearing his bathing suit. “But there’s LIGHTENING!,” she shouted. “I know,” I replied, “but he’s short, it will probably hit your house first.” Click.
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Reminds me of my 1 1/2 year old happily wandering through a friend’s beautiful rose garden. But there are THORNS she said in a mild panic. So she’ll learn I replied. No one was quite sure how to respond. As far as I remember there were no tears that day.
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One of the few memories I have of being a very small child involve the rose bushes on the front of either our or a neighboring house against the sidewalk. We moved from that house by the time I was 2 or 3. I remember simply standing near them on the sidewalk and they’d reach out and scratch me!
edit: I don’t know if these are the same ones from decades below but this Google Streets view indeed shows rose bushes on the house next door. Makes for a good story anyway!
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Based on the people I know ( which is hardly a scientific sample);it seems like those with less flexible/traditional hour jobs were more anxious to retire than those with more flexibility / less traditional hours even if both worked the same number of hours. My friends who worked in corporations with nine to five or six work days were so happy to get to go to the grocery or the doctors office on a Tuesday or take off time without it having to think about their PTO bank. While my fellow attorneys ( not Big Law) as well as my friends who were (not elite firms) accountants have been less anxious to stop working. Almost all of us take up random time and make up the billable hours at night or weekends. My friends who worked more traditional corporate hours often said they thought this seemed awful since their nights and weekends were free, but I liked that flexibility as did my friends who were like me.
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I worked the corpoate hours AND the nights and weekends. When my friends talk about looking for purpose in retirement, i just feel tired! Still trying to catch up on vacation and down time!
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I used to tell people that I was sooo lucky my job enabled me to have flexible hours – I got to work day AND night.
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The 2nd half of my career was pretty intense, lots of work from home… often on nights and weekends (one year 22 weekends impacted by varying degrees… usually planned software upgrades but sometimes unplanned issues). Sometimes I’d head out at 3pm to get the mail, imagining neighbors thinking “it must be nice to work from home”….not know that I had started with 6am zoom meeting with Asian contacts, or sometimes 2am callouts. I miss it NOT. (Well I do miss the fabulous coworkers, most of them in many different states and countries. And I do miss the satisfaction of getting problems solved, projects completed - now there is very little excuse for my imperfect housekeeping.)
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Haha. A woman I knew when my kids were in elementary school volunteered at the school on a full time basis … she said that she did it because it beat having to clean her house.
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I wanted to retire so I would have all the time in the world to keep my house the way it should be kept.
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These sounds like a lot of unrealistic expectations in specific work spaces. An employment world expecting their employees to live to work not work to live.
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Personally, I think it’s why many people retire as early as they can. So little work/life balance when working. So you get the balance by doing them at different points in your life.
In countries where there are a lot of holidays and leave time as well as more normal expectations/regulations around how much people work (as well as social structures that support families) , it’s far more common for people to continue to work until much older ages.
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I would have continued working if I didn’t have such a demanding job. My bosses had been understanding & tried (unsuccessfully ) to get additional staff. My last boss, though, just told me that I needed to learn to let things go. That wasn’t possible - and because she practiced what she preached, my coworker & I had a lot of additional work due to her dropping the ball so often.
So, yeah, much depends on the demands of the job and the expectations of the management.
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Hey, it was the 80s. We were just trying to make as much money as we could. On a previous thread, someone posted an article describing the trend toward the “Lazy Girl” job that focuses on working less to live more. I didn’t want to work at all but would have loved a job like that. However, those jobs didn’t exist then, let alone the technology to enable them so, instead, I leaned in hard to make as much money as possible to achieve, not a day-to-day work-life balance, but a lifetime balance of working hard upfront so I could take it easy earlier later as @gardenstategal implied. I overlooked the early imbalance for an easy retirement. Though I achieved my goal, the downside was that I spent 35 years in a soul-sucking career.
Many of the jobs that pay the most, even today, require a huge sacrifice of time and personal commitment and many are willing to make it, just depends on your goals.
Our son and his cohort work round the clock, but they love what they do, so it doesn’t seem like work to them. I think they find sleep a waste of time.
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I encouraged my daughter to have a “career” because I put mine on the back burner. Someone had to, my husband felt his job was all encompassing. He rarely took vacation, there was a period of 2 years that he worked 7 days a week. Even after that period, it was a lot of hours and not a lot of time off. I love my husband but I didn’t love his commitment to his job.
I hoped society was evolving. Is it? Some. My son is much more hands on and less consumed with his job. His wife’s job is managerial. They make it work but of course there are sacrifices. My son’s job is reasonably flexible.
My daughter on the other hand is finding that the career she is in now is difficult to find balance. Her husband’s job is not flexible, the hours are long and all encompassing. He is very well compensated and has a huge cache of time off. When he is working, that’s what he’s doing.
My daughter is finding that she’s the one who has to be flexible. Lately because of some circumstances, she is finding that the job she’s in now isn’t working as well for her life. She’s thinking of going back to school for a pivot. She will be over educated by a lot.
I feel sad that while I had hoped society had changed, it’s still the same in many aspects.
I think retirement is the same. Some jobs work better than others and some you can be happier with the workload and some can’t
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My S didn’t like the hours of his job. It was 9-5ish, 5 days a week, with some travel to large cities that he liked & knew people in. He stuck with it for nearly a decade and then when COVID hit, he took a year leave and mostly stayed with us in HI (his sister came down too and all 4 of us hunkered down). He made more with his part-time gig that he had had since starting it before college while he was on leave. He was happier with the gig because it allowed him a ton of flexility and he was/is very good at his job and it is quite profitable.
He took another year of leave and passed his professional engineering exam, so is now a licensed PE. He went back to his job after the 2nd year was up but didn’t like the options he was given for his job, so after working for a bit, he left his federal job for good and is happily doing his “gig” full-time. His wife has had a series of jobs, some full-time, some gigs. Both seem pretty content. When she has a full-time job with benefits, they don’t have to have seperate health insurance, so that’s a savings. I’m glad they have found a balance that works for them and allow them to travel as they enjoy it so much.
I hope I can retire on June 30, 2030. At this point, I work for medical benefits. I really can’t afford to retire until we are both eligible for Medicare. I also work in a dying industry, higher ed. I can’t say this on the other forums or in person, and I don’t want to stoke anxiety among parents whose children are going through the college application process, but we are in for a huge shakeup as AI and high costs are going to disrupt the higher ed industry. My granddaughter is 10 months old. She would be the 7th generation to go to college. I don’t know if she will go. The signalling value of college is being destroyed (AI cheating is rampant), and will take a few years, but eventually acceptance of this reality will trickle down into the general consciousness. The classic liberal arts education (impractical but stimulating and glorious) is no longer available at any price, and AI is going to wipe out enormous swathes of white collar employment.
I also am watching my father, almost 97, burn through his money at an alarming rate. He has dementia, he’s blind, he’s wheelchair bound. His care costs 17,500 a month now. And that’s Midwest cheap.
We just can’t know and game out everything that will happen.
I also know that I am going to reach the point where I will be one of those old professors whose classes no one wants to take. I want to retire before I really lose it in the classroom. I am fortunate in that I can’t be forced out because of my tenure contract, but my ego is such that I don’t want to go on past the point where I’m not effective and I’ve become an object of pity and scorn. I’ve seen it happen to colleagues who didn’t know when to hang it up.
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Thank you for this insightful honest post.
I have a couple family members in higher ed and they would agree with you.
I think this would be an excellent topic for a new thread as well.
Bringing it back to the thread, I think many have to stay working do health insurance/medicaid. It can be a struggle to get there and it’s a mental load to have to stick with a job largely just because health insurance even for a short time is so unaffordable
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H has vaguely mentioned retiring 12/31/28, after he reaches full SS FRA. I don’t believe it for a minute. Work is his total identity and he has no other hobbies besides reading in the recliner. Not having the intellectual stimulation of work would be deadly for him.
I medically retired in 2012 at age 51. I miss not having my own income and the collegiality of work friends. Have plenty of hobbies and am happy to travel solo to see family and friends, plus have been president of our synagogue for the past three years (which itself is a FT job). Am looking forward to when my term ends, as I have missed quilting, and I want to get rid of stuff in the house!
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