Retirement's Big Lie

We are not a footnote to our own lives

A young woman sat in front of a computer, considering whether to enroll in an online university. The music swelled. The narrator talked about possibilities and opportunities and building a bright future.

Future.

That word caught my attention. Not because of the young woman. Because of the people I write for.

Have you ever noticed that the word future is almost exclusively attached to young people? Future students, future professionals, future leaders — as if the rest of us somehow used ours up. As if the word itself has an age limit nobody bothered to post.

A healthy 70-year-old woman may have twenty or thirty years ahead of her. Twenty years is not a footnote. It’s not the closing credits or the little bit left over at the end. Twenty years is enough time to start something, build something, discover something, become something entirely unexpected. And yet we almost never talk about those years as a future.

We talk about them as maintenance.

That’s where things get interesting.

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Young people are sold possibility. Older people are sold preservation. The cultural conversation aimed at younger generations says build something, expand, go further — while the conversation aimed at people over 60 quietly shifts to protect what you have, manage the risks, don’t lose ground. The adventure narrative gets replaced by a caution narrative so gradually that most people don’t notice the switch until they’re already living inside it.

The message becomes smaller. Safer. Less alive.

It’s as if society collectively exhales and says: thank you for your contribution. Now try not to break anything.

I don’t think most people consciously believe that about the people they love who are over 60. But I think many of us absorb it anyway — and then enforce it on ourselves. We stop asking big questions. We stop imagining what’s possible. Not because we’re incapable, but because nobody is speaking to that part of us anymore. The culture stopped inviting us into the conversation about what comes next, and somewhere along the way we stopped inviting ourselves.

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And yet every day I hear from people who are hungry for exactly that invitation.

Not because they want another career or another accomplishment or another item on the list. Because they want to feel genuinely alive. Curious. Awake to the sense that something meaningful still lies ahead — not behind, not managed, not preserved. Ahead.

I’ve come to believe that retirement doesn’t create a crisis of purpose. It exposes one that was always there, waiting for enough quiet to be heard. The moment the job ends or the children leave or the schedule disappears, a question surfaces that was submerged for decades:

Now that nobody is telling me who to be — who do I actually want to become?

That’s not a retirement question. That’s a human question. And perhaps that’s why so many people feel disoriented when they arrive here — not because something has gone wrong, but because nobody prepared them for a stage of life where freedom itself becomes the assignment.

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I keep writing what I write because I refuse to accept the idea that future belongs exclusively to the young.

It doesn’t. A future is not something you age out of. It’s something you continue creating for as long as you’re willing to keep asking what comes next — not with the urgency of someone who has everything to prove, but with the particular authority of someone who has already survived everything that tried to stop her.

That’s not a small thing. That’s not maintenance.

That’s a future.

So here’s what I want us to sit with today — and I mean this as a genuine question, not a rhetorical one:

What would you attempt if you fully believed the next chapter was as real and as open as any chapter that came before it?

If this landed somewhere real for you — if you recognized yourself in the conversation that quietly stopped inviting you in — come be in the room on Tuesday.

A small group of us gather every week on Zoom. No caution narrative. No preservation agenda. Just women who have decided that future is not a word that belongs to someone else.

It’s called BR3EAKTHROUHG, because we are - toghether- collectively breaking through the noise within ourselves that says we don’t have a future, but a maintence program of our lives.

But so is the conversation.

One more thing.

After I wrote this piece, I sat down with Mike Searles and we ended up having a fascinating conversation about this very question.

Why do we assume that younger people have a future filled with possibility while older people are expected to focus on preservation?

We talked about retirement, identity, choice, and what happens when people stop imagining a future for themselves simply because they’ve reached a certain age.

The conversation surprised me in a few places and challenged me in others.

If this article resonated with you, you might enjoy listening to the discussion.

You can watch it here: