Recently, I came across another early retirement post on LinkedIn – the kind that comes with heartfelt reflections, sincere gratitude, and a new chapter wrapped in a bow. I paused, smiled, and genuinely appreciated the discipline, intention, and optimism it takes to design a life that allows for that choice. But, as I’ve done many times before, I found myself not inspired, but unsettled.
Not because I begrudge anyone their freedom – quite the opposite. But because I continue to wrestle with the dominant narrative that retirement is the final frontier of freedom. That the highest form of wealth is waking up and doing “whatever you want.” That liberation from work is the dream we’re all meant to chase. This fixation with retirement – and especially with retiring early – is telling us something about our relationship to work, and I think we need to pay attention to it.
Too often, work is seen either as the exclusive container for all our purpose or as the primary obstacle standing in the way of it. One extreme seeks complete meaning from a job; the other, complete escape from it. But why can’t both coexist in different measures, in different seasons, even in different roles?
I used to imagine retirement too – usually when work felt transactional, tedious, or extractive. When joy was rationed and time belonged to someone else. But I don’t feel the same anymore. I’ve learned that the answer wasn’t waiting at the end of my career. It was in understanding how I wanted to relate to work – and to the rest of my life – right now.
This isn’t about toxic positivity or glorifying hustle. Some parts of my day, my work, or my week are not thrilling. They ask for my time, energy, and responsibility – and no, they don’t always align perfectly with my deepest passions. But that’s life. And when I zoom out, there is more than enough I enjoy, love, and find meaningful. That’s enough.
We often get trapped in the idea that joy, purpose, creativity, care, and money must all sit in one neat overlapping circle. But what if they don’t? What if they each have their own space, and our job is not to collapse them into one identity, but to honour them without needing to escape from one to pursue another?
I’ve become more intentional about understanding the roles different parts of my work play. What I do to earn. What I do to serve. What I do to feel alive creatively. What I do to show up emotionally for those I love. Sometimes they converge. Sometimes they don’t. That’s okay. Integration doesn’t have to mean uniformity.
This is where I find templates like FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) both appealing and problematic. On the surface, it’s hard to argue against financial literacy, frugality, saving, and intentional living. Those are wise and worthwhile values. But once a framework like FIRE becomes a movement, a lifestyle, a badge of honour, a fixation – it risks turning life into a race to optimize everything: time, money, purpose, and even happiness. It risks introducing yet another performance metric into a life already cluttered with them.
There’s also something quietly insidious in the popular quote: “The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, ‘I can do whatever I want today.’” It sounds liberating – until you realize that for many people, that definition turns their everyday reality into a prison. It implies that if you’re not free to opt out of everything, you’re not truly free. That if you still show up to work every day, you’ve settled. That if you haven’t reached “escape velocity,” you must not have lived wisely enough.
But life is rarely that binary. Most of us are not trying to escape life – we’re trying to live it fully, with grace and balance. We’re trying to carry responsibility and joy, work and play, ambition and rest. Not because we have to, but because we choose to. Because it’s meaningful. Because it’s real.
And maybe that’s the bigger problem: the way modern life encourages us to think in templates. Whether it’s the dream job, the dream house, or the dream retirement. Templates are useful until they become dogma. Until they lead us to believe there’s only one right way to build a good life. Until they introduce new anxieties into the very space where we were looking for peace.
So I say this not as a critique of early retirees, but as a reflection on a larger story we’re all telling ourselves. One where work must either be transcendent or terrible. Where time must be perfectly owned or completely lost. Where freedom comes only at the end of a finish line.
What if we stopped dreaming of retirement as the ultimate freedom and instead started dreaming of alignment – where we work not to escape, but to express. Where responsibility doesn’t cancel purpose, and earning doesn’t eclipse living. Where we don’t need to disappear from work to finally show up in life.
If that sounds less like a fantasy and more like a quiet, sustainable truth – then maybe that’s the freedom worth pursuing.