Excerpted from 55 and Out, Chapter 1: The Script You Didn't Write
The Script You Didn't Write
· 3 min read
My father retired at sixty-seven, not because he chose to, but because his body, worn from forty-one years in pest control, simply refused to do the work anymore. He tried to keep busy, finding side jobs and working for the new owner of the company I helped him start. My mother, on the other hand, retired earlier at sixty, taking an early pension and living carefree, always generous with her limited money.
They had both followed the script: work hard, stay loyal, save what you can, and retire when told it's time. This script promised relief and reward, but instead, it left my father searching for purpose and my mother navigating uncertainty. They divorced in their sixties, splitting a small nest egg. The freedom my father earned arrived in a body too tired to truly enjoy it, and dreams like traveling to Ecuador never materialized.
This script, which many of us inherit, dictates a life path: grow up, go to school, get a job, work for forty or forty-five years, and then stop working somewhere in your sixties to finally rest. It feels like a law of nature, but the age sixty-five is a relatively recent invention. Otto von Bismarck proposed the first government-run retirement system in 1881, setting the retirement age at seventy, when life expectancy was around forty-five. It was a system designed with the quiet confidence that most workers would be gone before they could collect.
When the United States created Social Security in 1935, the retirement age was set at sixty-five, with a life expectancy of around sixty-one. The world this script was designed for—one where work was physical, bodies wore out, and pensions were common—is gone. Yet, the script remains.
Our parents passed on the best map they had, based on their economic reality. Pensions existed, company loyalty was rewarded, and a single income could support a family. For its time, the advice to work hard and trust the system made sense. But beliefs can be time-bound. The idea that sixty-five is the right age to stop working is not timeless; it's contextual.
"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
The most dangerous part of this script isn't the number sixty-five, but the assumption that time moves at a constant speed, and that deferred years can be reclaimed. Time compresses as we age; a year at forty feels shorter than a year at eight. The script asks us to trade our longest, most expansive years, when time feels slow, for freedom in our shortest years, when life accelerates. This is a poor trade. The energy and physical capacity available at thirty are not the same as at seventy. Bodies depreciate; they don't compound like money. Years spent waiting cannot be recovered, and health rarely returns to baseline just because a retirement account reaches a certain number.
The cost of waiting isn't just physical; it's psychological. Decades of deferral cultivate a habit of postponing fulfillment. When freedom finally arrives, the habit of waiting can be so ingrained that one no longer remembers what they wanted to do with their time or no longer trusts themselves to pursue it. My father, with his garage full of un-restored cars, found freedom arriving when the capacity to use it had worn away. He wasn't a failure; the script failed him. We have the chance to see this script for what it is—a story, not a law—and question what else it was wrong about, starting with the invaluable asset of time. We do not need to follow a map drawn for a territory that no longer exists.
The script they gave us was never meant to be followed blindly.