Everybody knows that guy that spent his whole life working, then got to 62/65/whatever age you and I might get to retire, then sat in a chair watching TV and died of a heart-attack a year later.

A lot of people don't have enough to fill their lives with after they get done working. God help you if you don't have family, friends, interests, or some higher purpose to sustain you outside of work. For all the talk of work-life balance, I worry about this - work seems to be expanding to take up an even bigger chunk of our lives all the time.

Oh well, with my family history, I won't have to worry about living to retirement age, and without some major changes to demographics or policy, Social Security won't either.

I'm sure this sounds very strange, but I retired at the age of 39... without much money in the bank. I quit my job and went to Japan to teach English. If you ever interview me for a job, the narrative goes, "I wanted to improve my people skills, especially my presentation skills because I was doing more coaching than programming. But I also wanted to learn Japanese". This is not untrue, but to be honest I knew at the time that making such a radical change might mean that it was impossible to return to my programming career. So I retired.

I worked for 5 years teaching English and enjoyed every second of it. I got married in Japan and my wife wanted to learn English, so we moved to the UK. At that point, I got a programming job again. However, in my mind, I'm still retired.

You have to do something with your life. I suppose some people dream of the ability to lie on a beach every day and get drunk, or whatever. I've never been that way. I want interesting challenges. My "job" furnishes me with those.

I don't really treat my "career" seriously any more. I like programming. I program. People give me money. I'm happy. I don't show up for my 9-6 (or 8am-12pm as I used to do when I was young) and push bits for money. I just write code for fun because I'm retired. My "employers" give me money because they like my code.

I think the only thing that gets me down is interacting with people in difficult situations. If your personalities don't mesh, or if the person is going through one of those times as a programmer where they are as annoying as hell (and everyone has times like that)... But that's life, isn't it. Even when you are retired, it's not like all the ass-hats of the world will suddenly disappear.

So if you feel like it, I highly recommend retiring as well. What do you want to do in your retirement? I want to write code.

That's a pretty amazing mindset. Thanks for sharing. Also I enjoy the writing style of your comments in general.

That's not a usual, or even useful, definition of 'retired'.

I admit it is not usual. "Useful" is in the eye of the beholder. It's quite useful for me. Sorry it isn't for you.

My dad always talks about how his dad worked his ass off all his life, saved for retirement, and never got to enjoy it because the second he retired he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

"He worked all his life, and for what? He didn't even get to enjoy what he worked for. Fuck that." Dad shuts down business to live a simpler lifestyle

The announcer on Hyundai commercial on TV lately says "When did leaving work on time become an act of courage?"

So true!

Anecdotes don't mean much. I can cancel out that dead guy because I retired over 8 years ago and I'm fine.

Or people with health problems unlikely to retire later.

Yep. The correlation/causation problem is strong with this one. It's not that old Mr Smith is alive because he still comes to the office. He still comes to the office because he's alive.

A related idea: Maybe people who do physical work for 40 years fare far worse when they stop "exercising".

Nice try government.

The mechanism of the correlation may be subtle. There is the obvious example of the person diagnosed with cancer who then retires. But there may be another pattern: I lead a no-audition church band with musicians in their 70's. Twice, players have quit the band, saying that it "isn't fun anymore." It was hard to play their instrument. Everything was annoying. They were then diagnosed with their cancer several months later. So another pattern may be that the worker feels chronically crappy before their illness is diagnosed, and considers retirement just because getting up the morning is very unpleasant.

Considering how some politicians want to raise the eligibility age for social security and medicare, this might be more accurate than they think.

They don't want to. They have to. The whole system will collapse when the Boomers retire. I'm pretty sure I'll never see a dime of social security, myself.

When I read the headline I thought it was that being a night owl is better for your health.

Maybe it's the other way round. If you feel healthy you don't mind working longer..

Still worth it.