What Should You Do With Your Life Once You Retire?

A lot of people delay their personal happiness until they retire one day. But the question is this:

What do you even want to do with your life once you retire?

Why wait until retirement to do what you truly desire to do in your life?

First of all, I think it is a bad life strategy to wait until you retire to do what you really desire to do. Because it is possible that you can die today.

Do you know what you truly desire to do, achieve, create, or become in life?

This is the thing:

I think most people don’t really know what they truly desire to do, create, or become in their lives.

This is the problem:

  1. Most of us are so busy with our everyday lives with work, family, etc– so we don’t even have the opportunity to reflect and determine what we truly want with our lives.
  2. A lot of what we think are our “true preferences” are actually “false preferences”, which means: Modern society, advertising, consumerism CONFUSES us into thinking that we really want x, y, z (whereas in reality, even if we obtained those things, we won’t gain true happiness).

So the solution is:

  1. Create negative space for you to think, reflect, and determine what you truly desire to do, create, become and achieve in your life. This might mean distancing yourself from others, ignoring all incoming messages and emails, and to empty your mind in order to think. To ruthlessly cut out all distractions from your life.
  2. Challenge everything we’ve been taught in life: Question our personal morals, ethics, and values which have been fed to us by our teachers, by society, and by our parents. Recognize there are no such thing as ‘universal truths’ or ‘universal morals, ethics, and values’ in life. The answer is to discover your own personal truths in life! What is good for you isn’t good for others; and what is good for others isn’t good for you.

Create.

I’ve thought a lot about this, but once you’re “retired”, it seems the only meaningful thing we can do is to create.

To create anything! To create books, blog posts, articles, videos, vlogs, to teach, make photos.

Producerism

The personal lifestyle follows “producerism“– for us to seek our personal happiness through creating and producing things, instead of acquiring stuff, and buying stuff.

Once you have enough food, have a bed to sleep on, and you have ample free time and otium (leisure/free time), it seems the best effective use of our human metabolism is to create. For us to reach our own personal apotheosis (becoming demi-gods) through creating.

Devote all your human metabolism to your creative work

Ultimately, I think once you retire, the focus should be your creative work.

And ask yourself:

Can I still do my creative work right now, regardless of my day job, or however I make an income?

A day in the life of ERIC KIM

What do you even do once you’re retired?

Technically I feel retired. For myself, “retirement” means to no longer do work you don’t want to do. All the work I do is meaningful and important to me, thus it doesn’t feel like “toilsome labor” (when people think ‘work’ — they always think it negatively, but if you’re working on something you truly care about– it is noble hustle; “good” work).

So even though I still work for a living; it is a choice, not an obligation! I also technically have ‘financial independence‘; I have enough money to continue my ascetic lifestyle almost indefinitely.

My day generally looks something like this:

  • Wake up without an alarm clock, whenever I feel awake.
  • Have coffee
  • Go to the gym and lift weights (deadlift, squats, dumbbell press), with the powerlifting ‘one rep max’ style. Then take a sauna, shower, then drive home
  • Once I get the post-gym “pump”, I start to get lots of good creative ideas to write about or make videos for my YouTube channel.
  • Drink more coffee at home, do work at home, go to coffee shop, drink more coffee, do more creative work, write, think more, read more, drink more coffee.
  • Have dinner outside with Cindy, or cook dinner at home
  • Maybe drink some cocoa and make more videos and write more or think more
  • Pillow talk with Cindy in bed, and sleep
  • Wake up the next day, do the same thing.

This is just how I live my life; this ain’t how you should live your own life. But I just want to let you know that once you’re “retired”, the simple joys in life are where it is at.

You don’t need an Uber-exotic lifestyle. You don’t need to always be traveling, or living nomadically.

You got the power.

Just dictate for yourself:

This is my passion, and this is what I desire to devote my life to.

Then figure out your personal strategy how to maximize your time and effort to doing that.

LIVE ON!

ERIC