THE LIFE WE POSTPONE: Retirement Is a Very Strange Deal
Retirement is a fucking weird idea when you really think about it.
Not pensions.
Not stopping work because you want to.
Not reaching a point where you have enough money and deciding you'd rather spend your time doing something else.
Those things make perfect sense.
I mean the deal we have collectively built around retirement.
You become an adult somewhere around eighteen.
You probably spend the next forty-five to fifty years working.
Then, somewhere in your mid-to-late sixties, society effectively says:
Congratulations. You can have significantly more of your time back now.
Brilliant.
Thank you.
One minor question.
Could I possibly have had a bit more of it while my knees were younger?
The bargain sounds stranger when you say it plainly
The traditional life model is remarkably simple.
Learn when you're young.
Work while you're able.
Rest when you're old.
And because we have heard that sequence our entire lives, it feels natural.
But there is nothing natural about it.
Nature didn't invent retirement at 66.
A pension system did.
The UK State Pension age is currently transitioning from 66 to 67 between 2026 and 2028. Under current legislation it is scheduled to rise to 68 between 2044 and 2046, although State Pension age is reviewed periodically and future governments can change the timetable.
That isn't necessarily wrong.
Populations age.
People live longer.
Pension systems have to remain financially sustainable.
Somebody has to pay for the fucking thing.
But the economic logic and the human logic are not identical.
The economic question is:
How long can society reasonably support people after they stop working?
The human question is:
At what point in a life should a person gain meaningful control over their own time?
Those are very different questions.
And I'm not convinced we should let the first answer the second.
Retirement has become the promised land of time
Listen to the language people use.
“When I retire, I'm going to travel.”
“When I retire, I'll get back into fishing.”
“When I retire, we'll move somewhere quieter.”
“When I retire, I'll spend more time with the grandchildren.”
“When I retire, I want to learn Spanish.”
“When I retire, I'm going to slow down.”
Nobody finds those sentences unusual.
That's the strange part.
We've normalised the idea that a person might wait forty years to have enough time for something they already know matters to them.
Imagine applying that logic anywhere else.
“I absolutely love playing guitar. I'm planning to start again in 2049.”
“I've always wanted to spend more time outdoors. I'll deal with that when I'm 67.”
“My wife and I would love to travel together. We're pencilling enjoyment in for our late sixties.”
You'd think something had gone wrong.
Yet put the word retirement in the sentence and suddenly it sounds financially responsible.
There may be decades after retirement
I don't want to overstate the argument.
Reaching retirement age is not the same thing as reaching death's waiting room.
Far from it.
Latest ONS life-table estimates for 2022–2024 suggest that somebody who has already reached 65 in the UK could, on average, expect another 18.7 years of life if male and 21.2 years if female under the mortality rates observed in that period.
That's significant.
For many people, retirement really will be a long, active and brilliant stage of life.
People travel in their seventies.
Start businesses.
Exercise.
Date.
Volunteer.
Learn things.
Help raise grandchildren.
Write books.
Climb mountains.
Get married.
Behave disgracefully on cruise ships.
Age does not automatically remove agency.
I don't want to replace one ridiculous cultural story — that work owns adulthood — with another one in which everybody over 65 is assumed to be fucked.
That's ageist nonsense.
But there is still an unavoidable reality.
You do not control the condition in which those later years arrive.
Lifespan and healthspan aren't the same thing
This is where the statistics become uncomfortable.
The latest ONS figures estimate healthy life expectancy at birth across the UK at 60.7 years for males and 60.9 years for females in 2022–2024.
Those were the lowest UK figures in the ONS time series beginning in 2011–2013.
That does not mean everybody becomes unhealthy at 61.
Healthy life expectancy is a population measure based on expected years spent in self-reported good general health. It isn't an individual expiry date.
And if you've already reached 65 in reasonable health, your prospects are obviously different from an estimate calculated from birth.
Still, the broader point matters.
More years alive do not automatically mean more years physically capable of doing everything you imagined doing “one day”.
The body is involved in this plan.
And the body never agreed to the pension timetable.
Worse, the deal is not remotely equal
The national average hides enormous differences.
In England in 2022–2024, healthy life expectancy at birth in the most deprived areas was estimated at 49.8 years for males and 48.2 years for females.
In the least deprived areas it was 69.2 years for males and 68.5 years for females.
Read those numbers again.
The gap isn't a rounding error.
It is close to two decades.
So when we casually tell the population to work until roughly the same State Pension age, we are not actually asking people with the same expected health trajectory to participate in the same bargain.
Someone doing physically demanding work in a deprived area may experience the whole concept of “retirement at 67” very differently from a healthy professional with wealth, flexibility and good access to healthcare.
One might arrive at retirement ready to travel.
Another might arrive already managing years of poor health.
Same pension age.
Very different deal.
And people are leaving work later
The most recent Department for Work and Pensions figures make the direction clear.
In 2026, the average age of labour-market exit in the UK reached 65.8 for men and 65.1 for women.
For women, that was the highest recorded figure in the ONS-based annual series; the men's figure matched the highest level recorded the previous year.
Part of that reflects longer lives and changing pension rules.
Part reflects increased participation by older women.
Part may reflect people wanting to work longer.
And part, inevitably, reflects people who financially need to.
Those categories matter.
Working at 68 because you enjoy what you do is one thing.
Working at 68 because stopping means you can't pay the electricity bill is another.
The clock does not distinguish between them.
I don't actually want to retire
This is where my own thinking complicates the whole argument.
I don't aspire to retirement.
The idea of doing absolutely no meaningful work for the last twenty years of my life sounds fucking awful.
I like building things.
I like writing.
I like solving problems.
I like helping people.
I like having something to think about.
I like being useful.
If I'm 75 and still able to write, I hope I'm writing.
If I'm 80 and someone wants my advice about something I genuinely know about, I hope I'm still capable of giving it.
I don't want work to stop.
I want compulsion to stop.
That's different.
And perhaps that distinction exposes the real problem with retirement.
We have bundled two separate things together.
Work.
And:
Having to work.
One can be deeply meaningful.
The other can be deeply restrictive.
Work itself can be good for us
Research on retirement is nowhere near as simple as “retirement makes people healthier”.
A systematic review of longitudinal studies found reasonably strong evidence that retirement can benefit mental health, but evidence around physical and general health was much more mixed.
A later England-specific study using pension-age thresholds found retirement was associated with improvements in reported health and wellbeing, while detecting no immediate changes in mortality, cognition or several health behaviours.
Research into working beyond 64 is mixed too. A systematic review found that health effects depend heavily on job quality, worker health, socioeconomic status, voluntary versus involuntary work and other circumstances.
Which is exactly what you'd expect.
There is no biological switch at 66 where work changes from healthy to toxic.
The warehouse worker with chronic pain has a different relationship with continued employment from the consultant working three days a week because she loves her clients.
Context matters.
Choice matters.
Again and again, agency matters.
Maybe retirement feels good because control returns
There is something revealing in research showing improvements in wellbeing around retirement.
A 2026 UK study following adults aged 50–75 across thirteen waves of Understanding Society data found retirement associated with higher life satisfaction and lower psychological distress. The benefits were at least as strong — and sometimes stronger — among several economically vulnerable groups.
There could be lots of mechanisms behind that.
Less stress.
Less commuting.
More sleep.
More time with family.
Freedom from a physically demanding job.
Escaping a bad manager.
More control over daily routines.
But I keep returning to the obvious one.
Your time becomes more yours.
And if gaining control over your time at retirement improves life, perhaps we should be asking why meaningful control over time was treated as something that had to wait until retirement in the first place.
Imagine structuring money the way we structure time
Suppose someone offered you this financial arrangement.
For most of your adult life, we'll control the majority of your disposable income.
Don't worry.
When you're 67, we'll give you much more control over whatever is left.
Nobody would accept that without asking some fairly aggressive questions.
But that's basically what we do with time.
When you are young and healthy, the years in which you may have the greatest combination of physical capacity, energy and possibility, we heavily allocate your weekdays.
Then we gradually return autonomy later.
It is almost the inverse of how you'd design a system if your objective were to distribute freedom evenly across a human life.
We save money for retirement but barely save time for now
Pensions are one of the few areas where society is extremely comfortable talking about future scarcity.
Save now.
Compound interest.
Think long term.
Don't leave it too late.
Small contributions over decades matter.
Excellent advice.
But why don't we think about time the same way?
Time does not compound in an account.
You cannot save ten Saturdays at 42 and withdraw them at 72.
You cannot defer a school run.
You cannot stockpile summers while your children are eight.
You cannot save your parents at their current age.
Time is consumed at the point of receipt.
Every week expires.
Which means our entire economic logic around retirement has an odd asymmetry.
We understand that future money needs protecting.
But we behave as though present time is replaceable.
It isn't.
The children will not wait for your retirement
This becomes painfully obvious when you have children.
If I waited until retirement to become truly available to my daughters, they would be adults with lives of their own.
I cannot say:
“Sorry I missed loads when you were ten. Good news, though — Daddy's pension is looking fucking excellent.”
Childhood has no rollover facility.
A six-year-old becomes seven whether you're available or not.
A ten-year-old becomes eleven.
The ordinary days disappear.
The conversations change.
They stop needing the same things from you.
Eventually, they stop living with you.
The whole thing moves regardless of whether your career is currently busy.
That doesn't mean parents shouldn't work.
Of course we should.
Children also need homes, food and financial stability.
Again, this is about balance, not fantasy.
But “I'll have more time later” is particularly dangerous when the person you want to spend it with is changing rapidly while you wait.
Later time is not identical time.
Neither will your parents
The same thing happens at the other end.
Parents age.
One year they are the people you call when something breaks.
Then gradually you notice they need help with things.
Health changes.
Mobility changes.
Energy changes.
Eventually there are conversations you wish you'd had earlier.
Places you wish you'd gone.
Days you assumed there would be more of.
This is not morbid.
It is arithmetic.
People are temporary.
That fact should change how we value ordinary availability.
Retirement is sold like a permanent Saturday
Look at the imagery used around retirement.
Beaches.
Golf.
Camper vans.
Cruise ships.
Gardening.
Couples walking along the coast in suspiciously clean linen.
Nobody appears to have arthritis.
Nobody has caring responsibilities.
Nobody is checking whether their pension actually covers the heating.
It is adulthood's final marketing campaign.
You did it. Now enjoy yourself.
And in many cases, people genuinely will.
But retirement also brings transitions people rarely put on brochures.
Loss of professional identity.
Reduced social contact.
Financial anxiety.
Caring for a partner.
Bereavement.
Health changes.
Loss of structure.
Research on retirement wellbeing repeatedly finds that the experience varies substantially according to health, finances, relationships, expectations, voluntariness and how people replace the structure and meaning that employment previously provided.
Retirement isn't automatically freedom.
It is simply a different phase of life.
Which makes postponing happiness until it even more questionable.
The problem with “earning” rest
There's a moral layer to retirement culture too.
You have worked hard.
Now you've earned your rest.
I understand the sentiment.
But what does it imply?
That rest before then hasn't been earned?
That leisure is payment for decades of productivity?
That you must first demonstrate enough economic usefulness before your time legitimately belongs to you?
We do this throughout adulthood.
Finish the job, then rest.
Finish the week, then enjoy yourself.
Finish the project, then take time off.
Finish the mortgage, then slow down.
Finish your career, then live differently.
There is always another condition attached to permission.
And because work is never genuinely finished, rest remains perpetually conditional.
What if we redistributed retirement?
Not literally.
I'm not proposing the Treasury sends everybody home every fourth year.
Although that would certainly make the Budget interesting.
I mean philosophically.
What if instead of imagining freedom as one large block waiting at the end, we distributed more of it throughout adulthood?
A four-day week for a period.
A three-month sabbatical.
Working intensively for part of the year and less for another.
Turning down income occasionally to buy time.
Taking the afternoon without feeling guilty.
Designing work around school years.
Changing roles when life requires something different.
Working later in life if the work is enjoyable, but less when the children are small.
Periods of acceleration.
Periods of slowing down.
Not one enormous binary switch marked:
WORK / RETIRED
Real lives don't fit that cleanly.
Why should working lives?
Of course, not everybody can do this
This is where lifestyle philosophy can quickly become privileged bollocks.
Some people cannot negotiate a four-day week.
Some cannot take unpaid leave.
Some have no pension beyond the state.
Some have debts.
Some support relatives.
Some are one missed wage away from serious trouble.
Some employers offer almost no flexibility.
For those people, the problem is structural, not a failure of mindset.
Telling someone on minimum wage to “buy back their time” when rent takes half their income is insulting.
But the existence of genuine constraint doesn't mean everybody else should pretend they have none.
There are people earning far more money than they need while continually trading away time because they have never stopped to question the exchange.
There are people chasing the next salary increase with no idea what the extra money is actually for.
There are people who could work four days but fear appearing uncommitted.
People who could take the holiday but don't.
People who could go home but stay because everybody else is still at their desk.
People who aren't trapped economically.
They're trapped culturally.
That is different.
“Enough” might be the most important retirement number
Retirement planning asks:
How much money will you need?
Reasonable question.
But there is another one:
How much is enough now?
At what point does another £10,000 produce less value than another day of your week?
At what point does a bigger house cost more life than it adds happiness?
At what point does the promotion stop being an opportunity and start being a purchase you make with evenings?
At what point have you secured the future sufficiently that continuously sacrificing the present becomes irrational?
No financial adviser can answer that for you.
Because it isn't purely a financial calculation.
It's a life calculation.
Some people should keep working
There is another part of this conversation that matters.
Stopping work is not automatically the objective.
For somebody with meaningful work, control, good health and strong relationships, continuing to work could be brilliant.
The most recent UK figures show plenty of older adults remaining economically active, and average labour-market exit ages are now above 65 for both men and women.
That should not automatically be treated as failure.
If a 72-year-old loves working three days a week, why should they stop because the cultural script says they have crossed an arbitrary line?
Maybe the real revolution isn't earlier retirement.
Maybe it's destroying the idea that work and freedom have to exist on opposite sides of a birthday.
Work when it adds something.
Reduce it when it takes too much.
Stop when you want to.
Return if you miss it.
Earn money.
Create things.
Rest.
Contribute.
Play.
There is no reason those things have to happen in neatly separated decades.
I don't want the gold watch
The traditional image of retirement used to involve the presentation.
Thank you for your service.
Forty years.
Here is a watch.
Which is almost too perfect.
You give an organisation enormous quantities of your time.
At the end, they give you something that tells you what time it is.
Bit fucking late.
I don't want recognition for having survived decades of work.
I want those decades themselves to be good.
I want to work hard.
I want to build useful things.
I want financial security.
I want to provide for my family.
I want money invested for later.
But I also want Wednesday afternoon occasionally.
I want school performances.
Dog walks.
Long lunches.
Stupid conversations with my wife.
Holidays without checking email.
Space to write.
Space to think.
Space to do absolutely fuck all without needing to explain how it contributes to my long-term objectives.
I don't want retirement to be the first point at which my diary finally recognises that I am a human being.
Later-you is not more deserving than present-you
Saving for retirement is essentially an act of kindness towards a future version of yourself.
You sacrifice some money today so that older-you has options.
I love that idea.
But present-you deserves some kindness too.
Forty-two-year-old you matters.
Thirty-five-year-old you matters.
Fifty-year-old you matters.
The version of you whose children are still living at home matters.
The version whose parents are still alive matters.
The version whose joints currently work matters.
The future deserves preparation.
The present deserves participation.
Neither should consume the other.
Retirement should be a financial milestone, not permission to start living
Maybe that's where I land.
Have the pension.
Build the investments.
Plan properly.
Know your numbers.
Give future-you every possible chance of a secure, healthy and interesting later life.
But don't turn retirement into a psychological border crossing.
Don't spend decades believing freedom begins on the other side.
Don't wait until 67 to discover hobbies.
Don't wait until 67 to see your friends.
Don't wait until 67 to travel.
Don't wait until 67 to protect your health.
Don't wait until 67 to spend time with your partner.
Don't wait until 67 to have weekdays you actually enjoy.
And definitely don't spend the entire journey looking forward to the destination so intensely that you fail to notice you're getting older on the way there.
Retirement may be brilliant.
I hope mine is.
If I ever actually retire.
But I'm not prepared to make it carry the responsibility for all the living I postponed getting there.
Because that's a ridiculous amount of pressure to put on the final chapter.
Sources
UK Government, State Pension age timetable. State Pension age is rising from 66 to 67 between 2026 and 2028 under current legislation, with a later legislated rise to 68 between 2044 and 2046, subject to future reviews and legislative change.
Office for National Statistics, National life tables – life expectancy in the UK: 2022 to 2024. At age 65, period life expectancy was 18.7 further years for males and 21.2 for females in the UK.
Office for National Statistics, Healthy life expectancy, UK: between 2011 to 2013 and 2022 to 2024. Healthy life expectancy at birth was estimated at 60.7 years for males and 60.9 years for females across the UK, the lowest levels in the current ONS time series.
Office for National Statistics, Healthy life expectancy by national area deprivation, England and Wales: between 2013 to 2015 and 2022 to 2024. Large inequalities were observed between the most and least deprived areas of England, including substantial gaps in healthy life expectancy.
Department for Work and Pensions, Economic labour market status of individuals aged 50 and over, trends over time: September 2026. Average labour-market exit age in 2026 was 65.8 years for men and 65.1 for women; the publication also documents rising employment among older workers and differences in reasons for economic inactivity.
Rose, L. (2020), Retirement and health: Evidence from England, Journal of Health Economics. Using retirement-age thresholds, the study found retirement associated with improved reported health and wellbeing but no immediate effects across several other health outcomes.
van der Heide, I. et al. (2013), Is retirement good for your health? A systematic review of longitudinal studies, BMC Public Health. The review found strong evidence of beneficial mental-health effects from retirement but mixed evidence concerning physical and general health.
Baxter, S. et al. (2021), Is working in later life good for your health? A systematic review of health outcomes resulting from extended working lives, BMC Public Health. The review found no universal health effect of later-life work, with outcomes influenced by worker, job and socioeconomic circumstances.
Retirement, Economic Vulnerability, and Subjective Wellbeing: A 13-Year Panel Study from the UK (2026), Work, Aging and Retirement. Analysis of Understanding Society data found retirement associated with higher life satisfaction and lower psychological distress, including among several economically vulnerable groups.
Research gaps
Retirement research is particularly vulnerable to selection effects. People may retire because their health has deteriorated, because they can financially afford to, because of redundancy, because they dislike their work or because they simply want to stop. Those very different pathways make it difficult to isolate retirement itself as the cause of later changes in health or wellbeing.
Healthy life expectancy also requires careful interpretation. The ONS measures are population-level estimates incorporating self-reported health and should not be interpreted as predicting when any individual person will become unhealthy. Healthy life expectancy at birth is also not directly equivalent to remaining healthy life expectancy for someone who has already reached retirement age.
State Pension age is likewise not the same as actual retirement age. People may leave paid employment before it, continue working beyond it, reduce hours gradually or move between employment and retirement. The latest DWP figures on average labour-market exit describe population behaviour rather than a compulsory retirement point.
The substantial socioeconomic inequalities in healthy life expectancy strengthen the case for examining whether a single pension timetable affects groups differently, but they do not by themselves establish what the correct State Pension age should be. That requires economic, demographic and public-finance analysis beyond the scope of this essay.
Finally, the central argument — that modern societies concentrate too much autonomy and anticipated leisure at the end of working life — is philosophical. Evidence can describe retirement timing, health, wellbeing and labour-market behaviour, but it cannot determine the morally or personally ideal distribution of work and free time across an individual life.