The Inner Monologue

Somewhere in your forties, if you’ve lived with even a hint of foresight, a quiet reckoning begins. It’s not about promotions or pay raises anymore. It’s about math. The kind that doesn’t lie. The kind that sits on a spreadsheet in the quiet hours of the evening and tells you, without emotion or excuse, when you could stop working if you really wanted to.

For most of our adult lives, work is the axis around which everything spins. We measure time by careers, status by titles, worth by productivity. But in your forties, the illusion starts to crack. The kids are growing up, the mortgage balance is shrinking, the retirement accounts are finally looking more like lifeboats than leaky rafts. And if you’ve done things reasonably right, the math starts whispering something you never quite expected to hear: you could retire.

That moment changes everything.

Because once you realize you can retire, the question flips. It’s no longer should I retire? It’s why shouldn’t I? And that’s when you have to start testing your reasons on what I call the bullshit scale.

Too many people cling to work long after they’ve earned the right to walk away, inventing noble-sounding reasons that wilt under the smallest dose of honesty. “I’d be bored.” Really? You’re already bored. You just call it a job. “I’d miss the people.” Sure, the same people who send you calendar invites for meetings that could have been emails? “I need a purpose.” You mean the purpose of boosting shareholder value or hitting arbitrary quarterly metrics? Come on.

The bullshit scale is brutal, but it’s fair. It measures not how good your reasons sound, but how real they are. When you can live off your investments, when your time is finally your own, and you still choose to trade it for conference calls, deadlines, and office politics, you’d better have a damn good reason. Because time, at that stage, is the one thing you can’t earn more of.

We were raised in a culture that worships work. It’s the American religion. You must hustle. You must grind. You must stay productive. The very word retire is treated like surrender. But what if that’s backward? What if real success isn’t about working as long as possible, but escaping as soon as it’s reasonable?

Think about it. The world is full of sixty-year-olds still stuck in offices, clutching their coffee mugs, mumbling about “just a few more years.” They could leave tomorrow, but they don’t. They tell themselves they like being needed, or that they’re saving a little extra “just in case.” But deep down, many are just afraid—afraid of who they’ll be when the job title disappears.

Retirement doesn’t just test your finances. It tests your identity. If all you’ve ever been is your profession, retirement can feel like erasure. That’s why so many delay it even when they don’t need to. They confuse ending their job with ending their usefulness. They forget that life was never supposed to be lived entirely in service of someone else’s schedule.

The truth is, retirement isn’t the end of work—it’s the end of obligatory work. The end of performing for a paycheck. It’s the rediscovery of voluntary purpose: the projects, passions, and pursuits that make life meaningful without the need for an HR department to approve your time off.

So if you’re in your forties, do the math. Figure out what number buys your freedom. Don’t wait for someone to give you permission. When that day comes—and it will—don’t waste it second-guessing whether you deserve it.

Instead, ask one question and one question only: Why shouldn’t I retire?

Then take every answer that comes to mind and put it to the bullshit test. Because when the numbers say you can walk away, any reason you come up with to stay should have to fight for its life.

And if, after all that, you still want to keep working—fine. But at least you’ll know it’s by choice, not by conditioning.

The day you stop working shouldn’t be the day you run out of energy. It should be the day you finally realize your life is no longer on lease.