I’ve got another two quarters.
I was talking to a friend recently about retirement, yeah, I know the casual stuff - ha ha. And to be honest, I can’t even remember exactly how we got onto it. But what I love the most about my conversations with Emily is that we always go a bit deeper and started talking about how much of the rule book around work probably needs ripping up anyway.
I mean, this idea that you work for 40-odd years, hopefully keep progressing, earn more as you get older and then, somewhere around 65 or 67, you just stop. Especially if we’re all going to live longer, it just started to feel like quite a strange way to organise an entire life.
And I found myself telling her about Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, whose work I’d come across on longevity.
She has this idea of thinking about your 100-year life in four quarters:
Q1 is roughly 0–25 years,
Q2 is 25–50 years
Q3 is 50–75 years
Q4 is 75–100 years
I remember hearing her talk and asking us all why we are in such a rush with our lives. And that really lodged itself in my brain because, hang on, I’m 45, and so I’m in Q2. Which means I’ve got another two quarters to go!
Honestly, that has been game-changing for me. I think somewhere in my head I had absorbed this idea that I should be getting increasingly definite by now. You spend your twenties working things out, your thirties building, your forties… I don’t know, presumably being very senior and knowing exactly who you are, and then at some point you start talking about retirement. But if I’ve potentially got another 50 years, why am I behaving as though I need to have the next version of my life sorted by Christmas?
And I think that’s why the conversation about retirement became much more interesting to me. Maybe the question isn’t just whether we retire at 60, 65, 70 or whatever number we’re currently arguing about. Maybe the whole shape of our lives could be different. Why does education get crammed into the beginning, followed by this enormous uninterrupted block called work, with all the freedom supposedly waiting for us at the end?
Could there be periods of study again, periods of earning loads, periods of earning enough, periods where work takes up less space, periods where something else takes up more?
I don’t know. But I do know I’m playing with some of that now.
My life looks quite different from the one I had even a year ago. I’m at university. I’m reading things I would never have had time to read before. I’m experimenting with new ways of bringing people together. I’m writing. I’m having long conversations with people about things I didn’t even have language for a year ago. And I’ve just started doing shifts at a hotel, which is probably the bit that looks strangest if I try to put it onto the old career timeline.
Because I can already feel the temptation to explain it. I was a senior marketing leader in big tech, and now I’m doing event shifts at a hotel while I do my MBA. There must be a strategy here. Surely it’s funding the real thing, or teaching me something about hospitality for my research, or leading somewhere that will eventually make the whole story make sense.
Maybe.
Or maybe I’m doing shifts at a hotel because I need to fund my life, and it gives me space for some of the other stuff to happen. I genuinely don’t know yet. And I’m trying to get more comfortable with the idea that everything I do doesn’t have to immediately explain where it sits on a trajectory.
I’ve also been deliberately looking backwards, which I think is partly because I’ve become quite discouraged by where we are now, not in a nostalgic, everything-was-better-before kind of way, because obviously it wasn’t.
That’s partly what has taken me into Akan philosophy and some of the ideas I’ve been reading around time, ancestry and continuity. I’m a British-born Ghanaian woman, and somehow I’ve got to my mid-40s without properly encountering a lot of this thinking, which is a whole other conversation, but weirdly, the more discouraged I feel by where we are now, the more natural it has felt to go back and look at what was already there.
I’m still learning, and I’m wary of doing that thing where I read three things and suddenly announce that Western time is linear and African time is cyclical. I do think it’s much richer than that, and I don’t understand enough yet. But it is making me question some of the assumptions I’ve had about time and progress, and even the language is interesting when you start noticing it. Career trajectory. Career progression. Moving forward. Falling behind. Taking a step back.
Behind what?
And then there’s Ruha Benjamin, who has been another huge aha for me recently. I am really enjoying her book ‘The Imagination Manifesto’ where she talks about imagination as something we practise, like a muscle, but she also plays with what else AI could mean, including ancestral intelligence.
I love that too.
In a moment when so much of the conversation about AI is about acceleration and what’s coming next, there’s something about turning around and asking what we might have forgotten, or what was already there, that I’m finding really interesting.
Maybe ripping up the rule book doesn’t only mean inventing an entirely new one.
And maybe I don’t need to decide what Q3 looks like while I’m still standing in Q2.
I’ve got another two quarters.
What’s the bloody rush?
