Early Retirement

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it.

—Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

Today is a watershed moment for me - today is my last day as a salaried employee of a corporation. Today is the day I retire at the ripe old age of twenty-six. "Retirement" in this context is a word I got from Henry. What does it mean? It means I will never "work" again ... if we take "work" to mean the thing that people begrudgingly do until they are sixty-five, and then, with relief, stop doing it. If, when I'm sixty-five, I want to stop doing what I have been doing for my entire adult life, then this means I have been directing all the time and energy of my entire adult life toward exactly the wrong thing. If one gives one's time and energy to the right thing, the one doesn't want to stop, ever. The key is to do the right thing - the thing that requires passion, energy, bravery, love, skill, creativity, mental alertness, excellence - the emotional and spiritual realities that we crave, rightly so, and the very realities that "algorithmic production" - the sort of meaningless, rote, habitual "work" we do now that we desperately want to retire from - prevents us from cultivating and enjoying. If one has to retire to begin to cultivate and expand these realities, than one should retire now, and not at the age of sixty-five. Not only is it a shame to miss out on the extreme joy of human existence, as orchestrated by these realities - it is also an irresponsibility, a shirking of one's intended purpose and potential. It is not "realistic" or "practical" to resign oneself to "algorithmic production" for several decades before retirement, and thus sacrificing passion, energy, bravery, love, skill, creativity, mental alertness, excellence, just to "pay the bills" -- because that is not reality, and that is not what it is to practice the art of being a human. The ideology that the fact that one must suffer through work until retirement is "realistic" and "practical," that "this is just the way it is," is a false ideology, propagated by a consumer culture whose soul-destroying and earth-destroying engine is run by masses of dejected, defeated, resigned wage-slaves. Today marks my first practical step in unwraveling my own habitual belief in this ideology. Today is a day of repentance, a turning away from that ideology.

What do I want to do instead? The opposite of "work" - in the sense outlined above, in the sense of the dreary thing which one must endure until being released at the age of sixty-five - is not sleep, or sloth, or laziness. I want every moment of every day of my life to require the extremes of passion, energy, bravery, love, skill, creativity, mental alertness, and excellence. What will be my work - in the redeemed sense of the word, in the old sense of the word work - the thing which made human being dignified, fulfilled, the thing which revealed the unparalleled creativity of human beings? I'm not sure. There is a sense in which I have to let myself free-fall out of the old paradigm, and fall into the new one - whatever that is. What is the gravity that thrusts me out of the grasps of the old paradigm and hurtles me toward the new? I fiind in myself the desire to write. That desire is unescapable, and to ignore it would be to ignore the voice of God. In the Land of Ice, I hope to catch a glimpse of the truth that this desire to pushing me toward.

All that being said, there is good in everything. I will miss two things very much about this job: 1) the view and 2) the people. Both have been beautiful. Check out these pictures I look from my office window.

Love,

graham