I’m 67 and Just Realized I’ve Been Lied To About Retirement
The brochure made it look simple.
Work hard for forty years. Retire at sixty-five. Play golf. Watch the grandchildren. Fade quietly into irrelevance while the world moves on without you.
I bought it. Most of us did. Then six months in, sitting in my kitchen on a Tuesday morning with nothing particular to do, I realized something unsettling: I’d been sold a story that made no sense.
The Lie Nobody Mentions
Here’s what they don’t tell you about retirement: it’s designed for a world that no longer exists.
The retirement model was built in the 1950s when life expectancy was sixty-eight. You worked until sixty-five, enjoyed three years of rest, and died. Clean. Simple. Actuarially sound.
Except now we live thirty years longer.
Thirty years. That’s not a wind-down. That’s an entire second career. Another act. Possibly the most interesting one, if you don’t waste it watching daytime television and pretending you’re “done.”
But the system — pensions, healthcare, social expectations — still assumes you’ll vanish at sixty-five. It assumes you’ll stop mattering. Stop contributing. Stop having ideas worth hearing.
That assumption is the lie.
What Actually Happens…..
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