Retirement Thoughts - Part One

I can collect my State Pension from the 6th January 2020, about eight months later than they originally promised the schoolboy me. For some reason, this thought is at the front of my mind a lot of the time. Being able to ‘retire’, to give up the daily grind, to lay in bed until I want to get up, instead of when overcrowded trains say I need to get up. And most of all, never to have to go through the annual appraisal process, which is like going into a dark room where someone might throw the lights on and shout ‘Suprise’, or they might just stab you in the back over and over and then expect you to get back to your desk and work.

However, I’m cranky and odd enough at the moment as an older man who lives alone. Withdrawing from all contact with the human race might not be good for me. Except...

Was I the only person who wondered about equating dealing with the people at work and on trains as ‘contact with the human race’? Is it really? Are they really? I don’t mean that they may as well be Russian bots... no actually I do. Because the contact we have with people at work is not the contact the therapists and psychologists allege we need. And it’s certainly not the ‘intimate’ - the great weasel word of pop-psychology - contact they promise will make us all feel better.

Retirement partly promises a respite: the end of all the keeping-up-appearances for the sake of what-for-Christ’s-sake? Partly it’s a threat: much smaller income, no protection from inflation, continued exposure to property taxes and income tax. And sometimes I look at it as an opportunity: time to rest at last, to watch movies, to read and re-read, to potter round the house and garden, because that’s self-care as well, to work out at the local gym in the quiet periods. And maybe to go on the occasional Diamond Geezer-esque excursion on my Freedom Pass. I don’t want to go round the world: it’s not what it was when I was at school, and I can’t afford it.

So how long do I go on working? Until January 2020 at least. And unless I get a bad appraisal, I may as well hang around to collect what little bonus it will be, which means I stay until June. If I don’t take much holiday, I can walk away with three week’s holiday money as well.

Or I could ask to do a four-day week, and work from home Mondays. This still brings money in, but it’s the expensive option. I lose twenty per cent of my income and that’s where a lot of the cash saving is coming from. Reduced days feels like a compromise that won’t really work. The point is to be free of work forever, to change the way I live, not just to have an extra day off. ‘Working from home’ on Fridays gets much the same thing accomplished.

I retire full-time or carry on working full-time. And I do that until I really can’t do it anymore. As in, I get half-way to work on the morning commute and go sit in a caff until the rush hour passes. That’s going to be a long time.

Until then, and to get through to at least June 2020, I need to adjust how I’m eating, working, exercising, challenging and entertaining myself. It really is getting to the point where I believe that simply going through the commute-work-gym-commute cycle is taking as much energy as I have. This is not true, but thinking makes it so. It’s not forever, but the next twenty months. I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that. I may carry on working until I drop, or I may barely make it to June 2020. All sorts of political and economic mayhem can happen between now and then, and I may be working for the rest of my life, or lots of us might be out of work.