I Will Work Till I Die

There is a lot of talk in the danish media at the moment about retirement age.

It seems like nobody wants to work till they are 75 years old. (Not even the politicians who makes the rules, and they retire way younger than the rest of the population)

I don’t blame them. Neither do I.

I want work for the rest my life.

“Oh my god?! What did Loui just say?! I thought he wanted to quit as soon as possible?!”

Furious reader

I took part in a documentary where a clever fella named Svend Brinkmann commented on the whole concept of trying to “retire” as early as possible.

He said:

“I don’t think that any people is trying to live a life completely unbounded from everything”

Svend Brinkmann

And I think he has a good point.

I’m an extrovert person. I love being around people. And I love being in exciting projects. The most important thing is that they cannot drain me.

My work needs to be fulfilling, fun and making a difference. And I would like it to be that all the way till the day I die.

Rethinking Work

Why does work has to drain? The vast majority of people I know think work is exhausting, and they would rather be free.

Why can’t we find work that gives our life purpose but without the stress, and lack of energy when we arrive home.

I think one of the major reason of why work is draining us, because we do it to much. Elite sportsmen doesn’t train 8 hours everyday because it doesn’t make sense. If you had to workout for 8 hours a day, the intensity and focus would be so low, that you would have way better results by training 3-4 hours/day. Then we can throw in some interval work, while we are super sharp on the technique.

And I can’t see why work should be any different from sports.

Imagine if you knew that you only had to work from 8 AM to 11 AM.

Would you work differently than you are today?

I think most of us would.

Rethinking Retirement

If you think about it.

Isn’t super weird that we work all of life, and then suddenly we don’t?

If we tell ourself that our work is so meaningful for our existence. That we need to do it for +40 years, why don’t we do till the day that we die?

As I said earlier. I can’t never imagine not being committed to something in my life.

I can still see myself as an 80 year old, fooling around in a rowing club (or something similar). Making sure that everything is ok.

How We Should Work

Let’s just take up work that makes us excited.

We don’t have to sit at desk for for 40 hours/week in order to make a change. In fact, every single one of us is replaceable. We don’t like to think it that way, but it is the truth.

So just take up work that sounds like fun. Do it for a couple of days each week. Or do it a couple of hours each day. And then leave the rest of the day with doing things you love to.

I look at the people who bring out food on their bike and admire their work. It looks like so much fun.

I really do think that we can have a work that we love. But I also think that doing the same thing year in and year out, for the vast majority of the day, can be killer to anything that we like.

In sports it is very acknowledged that in order to become better we need rest. And it needs to be good. The same goes for our working life. And there is no rest in working from 8-4, picking up kids, try not to argue with your spouse and then crash on the couch in front of the tv in order to “rest”, so that we can be ready for the next day.

Rest should be the majority of the time, not the 1 hour crash in front of the tv. In sports it is even normal to have a “rest season” after the olympics. I have never heard of someone who would take every 4th year off from work, just to have a nice time.

Let’s do that instead.