life

Retirement and pension are illusions

Retirement planning is like making a life insurance. It should be viewed as nothing more than a small plaster on the wound if worst case scenario should happen and you become physically incapable of working and need a reservoir of capital to survive.

Timothy Ferriss makes a strong case for this in his book “The 4-Hour Workweek” and I must say that his arguments are hard to beat. Here goes:

Retirement as a goal or final redemption is flawed for at least three solid reasons:

1. It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter – nothing can justify that sacrifice.

2. Most people will never be able to retire and maintain even a hot dogs-for-dinner standard of living. Even one million is chump change in a world where traditional retirement could span 30 years and inflation lowers your purchasing power 2-4 % per year. The math doesn’t work. The golden years become lower-midlle-class life revisited. That’s a bittersweet ending.

3. If the math does work, it means that you are one ambitious, hardworking machine. If that’s the case, guess what? One week into retirement, you’ll be so damn bored that you’ll want to stick bicycle spokes in your eyes. You’ll probably opt to look for a new job or start another company. Kinda defeats the purpose of waiting, doesn’t it?

“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you!

This is the reason why I have chosen to spend all of my 20s and half of my 30s travelling. This has always been my dream – to see the whole world. So by now I have lived most of my dreams and have travelled more than 50 countries in the world. I don’t dare to postpone.
And I don’t take life or “tomorrow” for granted. I don’t take for granted that I will be old or even live until I am 50. And should I be so blessed to have 70 years to experience the world, I can’t take for granted that I can even walk by the time I “retire” and so how can I travel the world if I am not physically well? There are no garantees in life and certainly not on time. I am not a pessimist – I am realist.

I will never say that I will travel when I get retired – because by then I have seen it all. For sure!

Slow dance

This poem was written by a terminally ill young girl in a New York Hospital. I love it because it reminds us that time is really short and we need to enjoy every single moment of every single little thing. Life is beautiful.

SLOW DANCE

Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Do you run through each day
On the fly?

When you ask “How are you?”
Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done
Do you lie in your bed

With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?

You’d better slow down
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Ever told your child,
We’ll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die

Cause you never had time
To call and say “Hi”?

You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift….

Thrown away.
Life is not a race.

Do take it slower
Hear the music

Before the song is over.

Time is irreplacable and priceless

When we look at life it can sometimes be difficult to see the red thread…the one thing that has always been there, that has always mattered to us. We have different jobs, different places we live, different holidays, maybe different friends, different boyfriends…where is the red thread?

When I think about all the different places I have lived, all the different people I have met, my different jobs, different boyfriends – one thing has always been important to me is: TIME.

Time is the one thing we cannot replace. No matter how much we pay – we can never retrieve lost time. And for that reason I have always been an impatient person: I don’t like waiting for people who are late for instance because they are wasting my time. It is the reason why I don’t have a TV – because I know that spending time watching TV will be something I look back at as a waste. It is the reason why I have never postponed any dreams like travelling because I don’t believe there is time…I never take time for granted. It is a precious gift that I can never replace or replenish.

For that reason I also view having a long extra-marital/relationship affair as unforgivable. Not because the adulterous have sex with someone else, but because they waste their partner’s time. This to me is the worst thing you can do. To deliberately waste someone’s time.

We are responsible for our own use of time – but when it comes to other people’s time – let us at least do our best (be aware) not to waste their most irreplaceable commodity.

"Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t
own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep
it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it
you can never get it back."