One of my favorite bloggers at ThinkSaveRetire.com retired in December. His wife just retired and they’re setting ‘sail’ in their Airstream to tour the country full time. He tweeted that he’s already starting to hate weekends because there are all these people at their campground when it was lovely and empty throughout the week. That got me thinking: that’s a whole other reason to retire. I’ve only ever gone places when everyone else is there. Spring break, Christmas break, Weekends. What would it be like to be able to live my entire life off-peak? To hike famous mountains with no one around on a Monday morning? That sounds absolutely amazing to me.
Not only would my time feel less crowded with people, but I can also enjoy things that might not be there when I reach typical retirement age. By that time a lot of sights I want to see might not still exist. Global warming is raising our sea levels and will start flooding coastal cities. The Great Barrier Reef is disappearing (a post on a trip I’m planning to Australia to kick off retirement is coming soon!). I absolutely love clear blue water and watching tropical fish so I feel like I need to experience that. I almost became a marine biologist for that reason.
Speaking of flooding coastal cities: that’s where most high-paying jobs are. It will be incredibly convenient to not have to go through the next Hurricane Sandy just to get a paycheck. It will also be convenient to not worry when robots and AI would take over my job. I know blue collar jobs will mostly likely be the first to go (self-driving trucks will replace the largest workforce in America), but many other jobs can’t be far behind. This will amount to an insane amount of job loss unless we can create another industry for people. I won’t have to worry about that if I retire. Overall if the worst happens my partner, Mom and I can just sail into the sunset…maybe literally. It might be Waterworld – who knows?
These thoughts just popped into my head as additional reasons to retire early – on top of those I have already mentioned. To be fair my current job is extremely flexible and my boss is letting me work from my Mom’s house for a week in August (our slowest time at work because of the tech’s fiscal year). That is something I wouldn’t have expected before. That is in addition to working from the east coast for two weeks during the winter holidays and taking no days off. That’s lovely, but I am still very excited to live my entire life – not just a few weeks of the year – on my own terms.