The question of when to retire is usually framed as a financial one. Have you done the sums? Will the pension stretch? Can you afford to stop? These matter. But they are the wrong starting point.
As a psychologist who has spent years researching the 60-to-80 life phase, I’ve watched people make what looks, on paper, like a perfectly timed retirement decision – only to find themselves either unmoored in the first months or still waiting at 73 for the “right moment” that never quite arrived.
Both are forms of the same mistake. And both tend to come from asking the wrong question.
The one I’d want every person approaching this threshold to sit with is this: what are you going to do with your body while it can still do things?
I don’t mean this flippantly. I mean it as the most practical question you may face.
The years between 60 and 80 are not a gentle slope into quietude. For most people, at least the earlier part of that span offers real physical vitality: the capacity to travel, to walk, to take up something new, to be present in a way that demands energy. And then, gradually, it doesn’t. Knees. Hips. The slower recovery. The things that were always going to happen, but sooner than expected.
I think of a man I worked with who had kept meaning to take a long motorbike trip across Europe. He’d always said: next year, when things settle down. He retired at 71. By then, the motorbike trip was no longer an option. He wasn’t unusual. He was typical.
One of the most persistent myths about retirement is that staying in work longer is always the cautious, responsible choice. Work gives structure, identity, purpose — all of that is true. But work can also become a way of deferring the harder question of what your life is actually for.
The sixties are often the decade in which people are most capable of making a genuine transition – being physically well enough to take on something new, professionally experienced enough to bring real value to whatever they turn towards and not yet pressed by the health constraints that tend to arrive in their seventies.
Staying in work through that decade because it feels safer, or because purpose seems hard to imagine without it, is a reasonable choice. But it should be a conscious one, not a default.
So, what does readiness actually looks like? It rarely announces itself clearly. But I’ve noticed certain patterns.
There’s often a quiet shift in where your attention goes. Work becomes more familiar than energising. You find yourself more curious about what else might be possible than about the next project or promotion. The weekend starts to feel more real than the week.
There’s also, sometimes, a creeping sense that you are maintaining rather than growing, doing the job well, but not being changed by it anymore. These are not reasons to leave immediately. But they are worth noticing.
Equally, the people who struggle most with retirement are usually those who have invested everything in their working identity and built very little outside it. For them, the question isn’t whether to retire; it’s whether they have begun to construct a life that doesn’t depend entirely on the job.
What I’ve come to believe after years of this work is that retirement is less a decision than a process, ideally one that begins years before the actual leaving. Not a formal plan, necessarily. But a gradual expansion: interests developed, connections made outside work, time spent exploring what gives meaning when the diary isn’t full.
The people who retire well are rarely those who hit a financial threshold and stopped. They are those who had already, quietly, begun to live differently. So: when is the right time to retire?
When work is no longer the only thing holding your life together. When you have a sense — not certainty, but a sense — of what you are moving towards, not just what you are leaving. And ideally, while you still have the physical vitality to make the most of what comes next.
Be careful not to keep waiting while the years that give you the most options quietly pass.
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