Plenty just stick with the Financial Independence without getting into Retiring Early. But the latter does imply that you withdraw yourself from work, at least from being a sole contributor to a business you don’t own.
I don't think a 30 year old can 'retire'. From a specific field (e.g. professional football)? Sure.
In general? Money isn't the thing that makes successful people work.
It's really hard to spend 50 years on pure leisure. I can't think of any examples.
Honey, you ain't getting out enough.
People retire while they can still meaningfully work all the time, really weird to say otherwise.
Some people love working, some love not working. Shrug.
Retirement doesn't really have to mean pure leisure, lots of people do meaningful unpaid work in retirement.
I don't consider myself 'retired' despite not having a 9-5. It evokes pipe and slippers imagery to me.
Coming out of retirement is a not-extremely-rare thing; I don't think retirement implies finality, though it might arguably imply the absence of an expected financial need to return.
It assumes the front-loading of work punctuated with either long periods, or a complete (final) period, of mostly nothing.
Imagine a theoretical person that inherits 10 million dollars. If they never take a full-time job and instead just do the odd thing here and there, paid, unpaid, doesn't really matter, are they retired?
If you're a contractor and sometimes work and sometimes don't, are you continually coming into and going out of retirement?
No, they are probably just a capitalist, but part of the social support structure of capitalism is the fetishization of work and the fact that you don't talk about the non-laboring ruling class, just a spectrum of success of workers, some of whom have earned retirement through their work.
> If you're a contractor and sometimes work and sometimes don't, are you continually coming into and going out of retirement?
I would say no, if your expectation when you leave is that you will need to comenback to maintain your lifestyle.
If you occasionally take a job for self-fulfillment, maybe.
I like to talk about them all the time. ;) Though I think we're seeing eye to eye here.
Different groups see "work" in such different ways that I think the terminology of stuff like 'retirement' doesn't transfer well.
Some people cannot see a life without work. Others do it for toys. Others do it as a status game.
Others don't really do it at all. I guess you could call that the 'leisure class'.
A theoretical human who has no need for food - are they fasting?