Excerpted from 55 and Out, Chapter 1: The Script You Didn't Write
The Cost of Waiting
· 3 min read
My father retired at sixty-seven, not because he particularly wanted to, but because his body gave out. Forty-one years in pest control had taken their toll. He had pursued a lifetime of diligent work with the promise that freedom and enjoyment awaited him at the end. But when that freedom finally arrived, his body was too worn to fully embrace it.
This outcome wasn't unique to him; it's a subtle trick of a script many of us inherit without question: work hard, save diligently, and retire around sixty-five. This plan suggests that the years we push aside today can be fully reclaimed tomorrow. However, this assumption is fundamentally flawed. Time doesn't move at a constant speed; its subjective experience compresses as we age. A year at thirty feels much longer than a year at sixty.
The script asks us to trade our most expansive years, when time feels slowest and our physical capacity is often at its peak, for a promise of leisure when life accelerates past us. This trade is not only unwise but also ignores a crucial biological truth: bodies do not compound. Unlike money, which grows exponentially over time, our physical selves depreciate. The knee that aches or the back that protests are not failures but biological realities that accumulate over decades.
While we bet on our money growing, we often disregard the decline of our physical health, assuming our bodies will wait unchanged to enjoy the fruits of our labor. This is magical thinking. Money not accumulated can, in theory, be earned later. Years spent waiting, however, cannot be recovered, nor can health that deteriorates. The freedom to hike a mountain at thirty is simply not the same as at seventy; they are both valuable, but not interchangeable.
"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
The costs of waiting are not merely physical, but deeply psychological and emotional. A life lived in deferral, constantly postponed until "someday, when I can afford to," cultivates a powerful habit. The person who practices putting off their desires for forty years often finds that deferral becomes their default mode. Even when time and money are finally abundant, the ability or desire to pursue long-held dreams may have dwindled.
My father, surrounded by old cars he would never restore, found himself in this very situation. The freedom he had earned arrived, but his capacity to use it had been slowly eroded by decades of postponement. He had waited so long that he no longer knew how to stop waiting. This quiet erosion is something many people only recognize when it's too late, realizing one Tuesday that they can't remember the last time they did something that truly mattered to them.
The alternative is not to wait, but to live now, with intention.