I have spent about two decades in various corporate roles. Some more life consuming than others. In one job, for two years, I had to commute to another city every week, boarding a plane 6am every Monday morning, spend my week at an Airbnb, and fly home Thursday late night. My carry-on was never fully unpacked the whole time. I almost did not take any vacation for the entire two years, and was proud of my commitment. My wife stopped asking when we were taking our next vacation.
When I was not travelling, the work was equally busy. Doing calls late at night, early in the morning, or even staying available and taking meetings during vacations. By the time my day was over the house would often have gone silent, and my wife had fallen asleep. The unsettling part about it was how normal it felt. Just another day at the office.
I had learned how to be useful to a corporation, and had come to justify how necessary all of this was.
There was a sense of satisfaction in feeling needed. Someone people relied on to get things done. I was good at turning complicated data into easily digestible information for executives. That meant I got pulled into sensitive projects that would impact the company's direction, acquisitions, or large layoffs. I valued the trust behind those assignments.
The money was also enticing. I grew up in a lower middle class family. My family never had a car. I was twenty-two the first time I flew on a plane. When I was a child, I worried when the house needed a repair. A broken pipe meant wondering how we would pay to fix it. Even a toothache came with another worry about how we were going to pay the dentist. Having some savings changed what those things meant.
I still had plans to travel, experience the world, and work on personal projects. The compromise in my head was always I spend some years now, and when I have saved enough, I can slow down work, and focus on living. Grind six years to get my doctorate, uproot myself to follow opportunities, take the job with better pay that required me to travel hundreds of miles away. Every time I postponed life, it felt temporary. In my head, I always had plenty of time to do life.
Each of those decisions felt small. And I have been rewarded for them with more money. I never sat down and decided that I am going to dedicate my life to corporations. I just kept responding to incentives they laid for me, slowly, assuming my life would fit around it.
Every milestone was followed by another. Two years of weekly flights were followed by another assignment requiring monthly international travel. I was away for weeks at a time.
I kept thinking of the life I wanted as something I was preparing for. I always wanted to travel the world, not as a tourist with a map and camera going to museums and parks, but living among people experiencing what it was like to live there, eat with them, and walk the streets. I also wanted to write, and express my thoughts freely without worrying about adhering to a certain corporate line. And maybe indulge in my love for architecture.
My wife and I discussed when the right time was over the years and there was always a reason we need to wait a little longer, thinking today is not that day.
The problem was I could see my progress at work and how much more I had been able to save, but there was no number attached to what waiting another year would cost me.
In a way, I was proud of the sacrifices I was making. The long hours, the unused vacations, all seemed to validate me. The cost of postponing life was evidence that it was worthwhile. I never stopped to examine the whole arrangement.
Some of you have lived a version of this. How you might have postponed living to get things ready. Focused on doing better at work, and getting the next promotion first or paying off the loans you took to renovate the house. It seemed foolish to go anywhere while you were still paying interest to a bank. Then someone in the family needed care and you had to spend a few years attending to them. After that, a health problem showed up, slowing you down for another year or two.
Every one of those conditions was real and they all made sense on their own. You could have talked to any friend or called into any personal finance show and most would have nodded in agreement with the decisions you made.
You have enjoyed watching your savings grow. That was the feeling that helped you build your savings. That same instinct can also make it difficult to spend any of it. You can understand that the money is there to be used and still feel better about leaving it untouched.
I recognize that pride. The same feeling that made me postpone life can encourage you to postpone spending for a long time, even years into retirement. And it can always dress itself up as a virtue: I was careful.
For people who make it to sixty-five, the CDC says they have a little less than twenty years left. A little more for women and a little less for men. We often forget how few years we have left.
But the number that is even more important than how long you have left to live is how many of those will be in good health. And that is only about fourteen years according to a separate study from 2007 to 2009, where people rated their own health.
Most sixty-five-year-olds I talk to do not plan life based on the assumption that they might only have fourteen good years left. Everyone plans for several decades of active life until you are almost a hundred.
When you are in your late fifties or sixties, the years you can carry the bag, sleep in random hotels, go on a safari, or climb a hill to see what is on the other side are very limited.
Even people who have saved millions or tens of millions of dollars do the same thing.
Researchers at the Employee Benefit Research Institute have studied how Americans spend their savings in retirement. Twenty-two years into retirement, one household in three still had savings equal to or more than what they started with.
Some did not need to use them as they relied on Social Security and pensions. Some were afraid, and for others, the size of their savings was a sign of pride, reminding them they had succeeded.
You can always find a well-justified reason why you should not touch your savings. One year, the market is down, and you do not want to withdraw. Next, you need to keep the money for one of the kids that is not doing well. Third year, you feel the house might need repairs soon.
The habit that built the savings is what guards against spending them.
You know you should do life. Knowing has never been the problem. The problem is you have been postponing it for a later that might never show up or show up very late. No one told you to keep postponing it. You just followed the habit that was built over many years. You never thought to go back and check.
It took me twenty years to realize this was not the life I wanted to live. I left my corporate job nine months ago. My carry-on is unpacked. I am still learning to get used to it.
Sources
- National Center for Health Statistics, United States Life Tables, 2024, National Vital Statistics Reports vol. 75 no. 5, 25 August 2026. Life expectancy at 65: 19.7 years (women 20.8, men 18.4). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr75/nvsr75-05.pdf
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "State-Specific Healthy Life Expectancy at Age 65 Years, United States, 2007-2009," MMWR. Healthy life expectancy at 65: 13.9 years of 19.1; self-rated health; unweighted average across 51 jurisdictions. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4604810/
- Employee Benefit Research Institute (Leslie Muller), "Asset Decumulation Over Retirement and the Role of Guaranteed Income Streams," Issue Brief, 30 April 2026. Health and Retirement Study 1992 to 2022; households holding 100 percent or more of starting assets at 21 to 22 years after retirement: 33, 43 and 31 percent of the low-, middle- and high-asset groups. https://www.ebri.org/retirement/content/asset-decumulation-over-retirement-and-the-role-of-guaranteed-income-streams
