Tonight after work I went to a happy hour for one of my employees who is retiring after decades of service to the organization. I’m many, many years away from retirement myself, but watching my colleague certainly got me thinking. He was an individual that was very reticent to retire, but I’m assuming that eventually his wife convinced him otherwise. He loved working all the time, but finally he’s going to slow down a bit.

Maybe it’s all of my job musings lately, but I don’t think I will be that way when I get to retirement age. Maybe I’m being naive but I just can’t see myself being excited about working longer than I need to. At least not in my current career field, and probably many other career fields. I’m looking forward to a time when I can consider taking a trip, and not worrying about when I might come home. We can just pick up and go, and when we decide we’re done, we come back to home base for a while, before heading out again.

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I don’t know that people my age have nearly the commitment to be loyal to a company for that long. I know I certainly haven’t spent decades at a single place. All I know is that I will be very happy when the day comes when my time is my own and I can choose to do with it what I will. Hopefully, my wife and I will make it to an old age with out health and ambition to do all the things we dream about in our middle age.