I’m 42 and I want to retire

IT MIGHT be financially impossible but I’m ready to retire. And so are all my friends. I’d be quite happy hanging around doing pottery.

I’M 42 and I’ve just retired.

Emotionally and mentally that is.

Financially I still have to be in work until I’m 263 or until I can afford a deposit on a Sydney home, whichever comes first. And I think we all know the answer to that one.

So, I never want to work again, nope. This is not a Monday morning bleary-eyed gripe, or unhappiness with my job or position in life. It’s not because today is officially the most depressing day of the year.

It’s just that after working my tits off for 25 years and climbing to a position of reasonable power in a dynamic and desirable industry, I have nothing left to prove and the fire in my belly’s out. I’ve been looking for that flame of ambition I used to have and it’s fizzled out like a ciggie butt in a puddle leaving me with a full-blown physiological-down-to-the-quantum-level aversion to doing any kind of work, ever ever ever again.

Instead, I want to do stuff n’ things. Meet people of intrigue and fascination. But mostly I just want to meander in my underpants more than I do already. I wish to potter. A lot. I wish to do more hardcore Pottering than Ginny Weasley.

I’m in a roaring mid-life crisis, I know that. So let’s just skip the usual, “I’ll never own a home in Sydney, what’s the point in working, what am I doing with my life, I found a grey pubic hair and I’m now careening, silver-bollock-naked down the buttery slip n’ slide into DEATH” rant, and delve a bit deeper, shall we?

I don’t feel guilty about my utterly incandescent apathy. I feel naughty and alive. Granted I have a family to support and I’m doing just enough easy-peasy work to prevent us all selling our organs or, god forbid, any of my video games, but a lot of my energy goes into figuring out how little I can work (and doing said work using as little brainpower as possible) and still get by with enough time and energy to do stuff I care about.

I’m slumming it HARD and it feels like a big, sniggering two fingers up at the system.

To my delight I’ve discovered I’m not the only one who feels like this. Many people my age, across a spectrum of socio-economics have expressed to me in furtive whispers, “I’m kinda done. Is that bad?” I believe I have cultivated the perfect response. I hop from foot to foot chanting, “One of us! One of us!”, shove a mimosa and a Winnie Blue in their gob and then lead them, conga-style, to a never-ending parade of brunches. Doesn’t matter what time you start. If the sun’s up and you should be working, it’s brunch, baby.

I look at millennials and then I look back at my old 9-5(ish) office life and I think some of them have the right idea. They dabble in more than one job to keep things fresh and interesting, work from home or from some communal work/space/live/space thingies with skate ramps and labradoodle baristas. I want that. I honestly can’t believe we still do the office/commute thing when there’s oodles of research out there saying it’s inefficient, costly and a right ballache mentally.

Plus, more and more industries are becoming automated. For a lot of us, this could seem terrifying as the looming cloud of digitalisation wipes out entire classes of jobs. But I’m an eternal optimist. All this means is that the boring, repetitive jobs will go while non-repetitive jobs and “intellectual capitalism” — like human creativity and adaptive behaviour — will be desired assets across all blue and white-collar industries. We’ll have to evolve sure, but we’ll have more free time and more interesting jobs that could maybe give us more day-to-day meaning.

So maybe my apathy is only directed at working for The Man. Who knows, with all this spare time and intellectual capitalism potentially on the horizon, us common folk could have the freedom to make the world a better place. Because the elites have proven spectacularly crap at doing that lately. Then again, even if all the future consists of is spending even more time in our knickers, then I’ll take that too.

In the meantime, while I wait for this glorious future gentrification to justify my rampant, undergarmented Netflixery, I have one more thing to say: Tilda Swinton, if you’d like another man to add to your love menagerie, I’ll happily let you be my sugar momma. I make a mean mimosa. In my grundies, of course.