His Retirement Plan vs My Retirement Plan

Here is the latest e-mail that I received about The Joy of Not Working:

Ernie,

I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed The Joy of Not Working on the beaches of Playa Del Carmen recently.

It makes a lot of sense!

A lot of the things you mention like the North American work ethic of living to work instead of working to live. How workaholics [don't have fun at work and] actually produce less than normal workers, having coffee breaks to re-juvenate yourself, pursuing more leisure, fun activities etc. [real success] are things I always believed in.

Thx

Doug

PS: My youngest brother retired at 47 and has never looked back, or regretted it!

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Here is the latest e-mail about How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free from a gentleman whose retirement plan is different from my retirement plan.

Hey Ernie,

Just an update [to my e-mail earlier about How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free].

My company went public with my retirement last week and we have named my successor. I have decided not to call it retirement but rather the death of "corporate Jay" my friends are holding a wake instead of a retirement party. April fools day is the last day of my corporate life! Btw I could use a couple of snappy responses to "your too young to retire" and "what are you going to do all day"

... Jay:

This was my response to Jay:

Congratulations on your retirement: I don't believe that you need any retirement advice.

From my book The Joy of Being Retired: 365 Reasons Why You Will Love Retirement here are 10 of the reasons why you should love retirement.

1. Retirement allows you to pursue your first love — which is living life to the fullest!


2. You get to appreciate one of life’s great pleasures — lots of time on your hands.


3. By having retired early, you don’t have to wind up like so many people who retire too late — they have given so much of themselves to their companies that they don’t have anything left in the tank for their retirement years.


4. If a Meyer-Briggs professional personality assessment test given by your employer indicated that you were best suited for retirement, you can now put your skills and talent to good use.


5. You can wake up in the morning with nothing to do and by bedtime be in a position of only having done only half of it — with no consequences.


6. When you take early retirement from a stressful job you immediately look about seventeen years younger — simply because you feel about seventeen years younger.


7. Working long hours can sometimes be rewarding, without doubt, but so can goofing off and enjoying life. As they say in Spain, “How nice it is to do nothing all day and then rest afterward.”


8. You get to spend a lot more time with your spouse and learn how to compromise, how to pick the right battles, and how not to kill each other.


9. You have all the time in the world to prove The Law of Napping — A Body at Rest Remains at Rest.


10. You can now preach the shortcomings of the work ethic and proclaim to the world —as the great philosopher Bertrand Russell once did — that “the morality of work is the morality of slaves and the world has no need for more slavery.”

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