Excerpted from 55 and Out, Chapter 1: The Script You Didn't Write
Bodies Don't Compound
· 3 min read
The knee that aches when you climb stairs, the back that protests after a long flight, the energy that flags by mid-afternoon—these are not failures. They are biology. We are taught that money compounds, that a dollar invested at twenty-five can become many dollars by sixty-five. This is a crucial truth, and it forms the bedrock of much financial planning. But the logic that applies to money, which has no physical form and doesn't age or tire, does not apply to our bodies.
Our bodies do the opposite of compounding. They depreciate. Not always dramatically and rarely suddenly, but through a slow accumulation of limits. This gradual wear and tear is an inevitable part of being human. The script we inherit, with its promise of enjoying golden years after decades of work, asks us to bet everything on our bodies remaining unchanged and perfectly capable of enjoying the fruits of our labor, as if by magic. This is not a safe wager.
None of us truly know what our physical capacity will be at sixty-five. We bet on being the exception to the rule, a dangerous gamble with high stakes. Money we fail to accumulate can be earned later. But years spent waiting, years of declining health and diminishing physical capacity, cannot be recovered. Your health doesn't suddenly return to baseline just because your retirement account hits a target number.
This isn't merely about physical limitations; there are psychological and emotional costs to waiting. Decades spent in deferral — telling yourself that fulfillment is always somewhere in the future, never in the present — create a habit. This habit of postponement can be hard to break, even when the time and money finally arrive.
The script asks you to trade your longest years, the years that feel most expansive, when time moves most slowly, for the promise of freedom in your shortest years.
Think about the subjective experience of time: a year at eight feels enormous, while a year at forty feels fleeting. The script asks us to defer living until the years when life accelerates past us, when our physical capacity for certain experiences has inevitably shifted. The freedom to hike a mountain at thirty is not the same as the freedom to hike a mountain at seventy. Both are valuable, but they are not interchangeable.
Our culture too often treats time as infinitely fungible, as if a year at thirty is equivalent to a year at sixty. It is not. The experiences available to you, the energy you bring to them, the sheer physical ability to engage with the world—all these change with age. Neglecting this truth means missing the opportunity to live fully when your body is most capable.
What happens when freedom finally arrives into a body that is no longer able to fully use it? I have seen it in my father, happy in his fifties when the work was hard but his body could still do it, but searching in his seventies, his body reflecting a lifetime of physical labor. The window for certain experiences closes slowly, almost imperceptibly. It is a quiet regret, not a sudden crisis, that arrives on a Tuesday afternoon when you realize you cannot remember the last time you did something that mattered to you. The script fails us when it ignores the truth of our physical selves. We must account for the depreciation of our bodies as surely as we account for the compounding of our money.
The capacity to enjoy freedom is as important as the freedom itself.