Excerpted from 55 and Out, Chapter 2: Time Is the Asset
The Compounding Nobody Talks About
· 3 min read
A friend once admonished me for being late: “When we choose a time and you are late, it’s like you’re spitting in my face. It is the ultimate form of disrespect.” That simple sentence reshaped my understanding of time. I had spent a lifetime treating my own time, and by extension, the time of others, as something endlessly renewable, something that could be squandered and then somehow made up. But time, unlike money, does not compound in the way we usually mean. It depreciates.
We are taught, correctly, that money compounds. A dollar invested at twenty-five can become many dollars by sixty-five. This is a powerful and important truth. But money has no physical form; it does not age or tire. Our bodies, on the other hand, do the opposite of compounding: they depreciate. Not always dramatically, but through a slow accumulation of limits. The knee that aches, the back that protests, the energy that flags. This is not a failure of character; it is biology.
The traditional retirement script often asks us to bet everything on our bodies remaining unchanged, capable of enjoying the fruits of decades of labor. This is magical thinking. None of us knows at twenty-five or thirty-five which body we will inhabit at sixty-five. Health that deteriorates does not return to baseline simply because a retirement account reaches a certain number.
Money you fail to accumulate can, in theory, be earned later. Years spent waiting cannot be recovered. And the costs of waiting are not just physical; they are psychological and emotional. Decades spent in a mode of deferral, always telling ourselves that fulfillment is somewhere in the future, creates a habit. This habit of postponing joy can be difficult to break, even when the financial freedom finally arrives.
There is a crucial difference between lifespan and healthspan. While modern medicine has stretched our lifespan, our healthspan often falls short. The script promises enjoyment in our later years, yet for many, those years come with diminished capacity. What is the point of saving for a vibrant retirement if the body can no longer participate fully? Planning around being the exception to this reality is hope, not a strategy.
Risk tolerance also changes with age. When we are young, failure in a new venture is a learning experience; at fifty-five, it can be a catastrophe. The script expects us to suddenly become bold and adventurous with our freedom in our golden years, but the habits of caution and the preference for security, developed over decades, do not simply disappear. If you want to take risks, to try something new, the time is when you have both the capacity for recovery and the psychological appetite for risk. Waiting means waiting until both have faded.
My father, at seventy-five, still searches for something he lost after retirement. He was happier in his fifties, when his body could still meet the demands of his work and his future felt shapable. The window of opportunity closed slowly, not with a bang, but with a quiet accumulation of lost Tuesdays. The regret of a life not fully lived is often quieter than we expect, arriving not as a crisis, but as a slow realization. We spend less time sending messages and more time attending funerals. We often spend our longest years on work, deferring living until our shortest years. This is not a wise trade; it is a trick of accounting.
What we compound, truly, is experience.