I Finally Have My Work-Life Balance: Why Should I Retire Now?

I Finally Have My Work-Life Balance: Why Should I Retire Now?

Before you panic, this isn’t a major feminist rant about the inequity of the division of domestic labour between working couples. It’s only a minor rant, and it links directly to the question: why should I retire?

As a working mom back in the 90s and into the 21st century, I thought work-life balance was something that mostly men had.

I doubt my husband, or many husbands, would see it that way. He says he “had to” focus solely on his career. I’d say, “he got to.”

I would never, ever suggest that he didn’t work hard, or that it didn’t take a toll on him. He worked all the time. He travelled constantly. No doubt it was demanding and exhausting.

But somebody had to keep the rest of our lives from descending into complete chaos; for years I managed our home life around his career.

I had a career too.

A fairly demanding and exhausting one, as it happened.

But there were kids, aging parents, a house with a yard, blah, blah, blah. All those ordinary life things that don’t particularly care whether you’ve got an important meeting tomorrow morning. Someone had to deal with it.

And that familiar refrain that plays in every working mother’s head: work-life balance, work-life balance!

For many of us, work-life balance was just some mystical equation. “Balance,” for us, equated to the day when our husbands’ careers stopped dictating quite so much of ours.

Eventually, that day arrived.

The kids? Basically independent and mostly out of the house.

There were no longer aging parents who needed my help. I mean that from a purely pragmatic perspective. Yes, there’s the love and the grief, but caregiving for the sick and elderly is also a burden that is primarily carried by women. So with the passing of parents and grandparents, that work was no longer part of my daily life either.

And for perhaps the first time in my adult life, I was free to be completely selfish about my career.

Not pretend-selfish.

Not the modern, therapeutic, you need to prioritize yourself version of selfish.

I mean morally selfish.

My career mattered to me, and I was finally in a position to let it matter without apology.

And holy shit, was I having a good time.

It Took Me Decades to Get Here

By then, I was Fire Chief.

I’d made it to the top among my peers and was serving as president of the Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs.

I loved my job.

I loved the people I worked with.

Well, not the politics.

But otherwise?

I loved it.

I liked having somewhere to go in the morning where what I knew was useful.

I had experience, authority, competence, and enough control over my life to actually enjoy all the things I’d spent decades working toward.

I’d finally achieved work-life balance. Home got easier, and the job got more enjoyable.

I’d always assumed that if I ever achieved work-life balance, the improvement would happen on the life side of the equation.

Less work. More time. More freedom. More life.

I don’t think it ever occurred to me that the work side might get better.

But it did.

I had spent decades trying to make enough room for life around work. Then life finally made enough room for me to really enjoy my work.

And then, wouldn’t you know it…this coincided with when I was supposed to retire.

Excellent. When Are You Leaving?

The strange thing is, nobody seemed particularly interested in whether I wanted to retire.

The important questions weren’t about the desire to retire, they were only ever the big financial ones.

Could I afford it?

When should I take my pension?

How much would I need?

Was the mortgage paid off?

Would the money last?

All perfectly sensible questions.

But once the answer to the big one—Can you afford to retire?—became yes, the next question seemed to be:

Excellent. When are you leaving?

Except I had another question.

Why?

Why would I leave just when work had finally become such a good fit in my life?

The conventional wisdom seemed to be: why would you stay?

And, to be fair, I didn’t see any of this quite so clearly at the time. It wasn’t until after I’d left, decompressed, and had some distance from the job that I started wondering whether I’d gotten work-life balance backwards.

I’d spent years waiting for balance to arrive.

Had I been so busy looking for it on the life side of the equation that I missed what had happened on the work side?

Maybe.

That’s not quite the same thing as regretting retirement.

But it does make me wish I’d asked myself a better question before I retired.

Maybe Retirement Isn’t the Prize for Surviving Work

That’s the assumption buried underneath a lot of retirement culture: that work is something we’re all waiting to escape.

Work bad.

Retirement good.

Except human beings are inconvenient.

Some of us like working.

Some of us like parts of working.

Some of us hate our jobs but love our colleagues.

Some of us could happily abandon the meetings but dearly miss being useful.

Some of us have spent decades acquiring expertise and aren’t particularly eager to stop using it.

And some of us may finally have reached the stage of life where work fits.

For many years, too many things needed to fit into the same life.

Career.

Marriage.

Children.

Parents.

House.

Responsibilities.

Other people’s schedules.

Other people’s needs.

Then some of those demands receded.

And instead of work becoming the last horrible obligation standing between me and freedom, something unexpected happened.

Work got better.

There was finally room for it.

Maybe that’s the part of work-life balance we don’t talk about enough.

We tend to assume that achieving balance means somehow making the life side better. More time. More freedom. Fewer demands from work.

But the equation can apparently change from either side.

Sometimes life makes enough room for work to get better too.

And that’s a rather inconvenient thing to discover just as everyone starts asking when you’re going to retire.

Maybe “Can I Retire?” Is Only Half the Question

Once you can afford to retire, retirement becomes a choice rather than an economic inevitability.

And choices require reasons.

Maybe your reason is freedom.

Maybe it’s travel.

Maybe it’s grandchildren.

Maybe it’s health.

Maybe you’re exhausted.

Maybe you’ve got other things you’re desperate to do.

Maybe work no longer deserves the time it takes from you.

Those all sound like perfectly good reasons.

But if the only reason is, “because I’m 65 and I have enough money,” it isn’t quite the same kind of reason.

That’s eligibility.

Not necessarily desire.

And perhaps one of the privileges of being financially ready is that you finally get to ask the question nobody bothered putting into the retirement calculator:

I can retire. But why the fuck would I?

If you’ve got a good answer, terrific.

If you don’t?

Maybe that’s something you should know before somebody orders the retirement cake.

Related Reading

If you enjoy following ordinary observations that turn into bigger questions, you might also like:

• To Telic or Not to Telic: Why Retirement Feels Psychologically Strange
  If you’ve been working toward retirement as a goal for years, this explores what happens when reaching the goal doesn’t automatically answer what comes next.
• Boredom in Retirement: What If Boredom Isn’t the Problem?
  If you miss the challenge, competence, and growth that work once provided, this explores whether boredom might be telling you something more useful than simply finding something to do.
• The Pygmalion Effect and the New Reality of Retirement Expectations
  If work still makes you feel useful, challenged, and expected, this explores something retirement culture rarely talks about: what happens when those expectations suddenly disappear.

• Women, paid work and caregiving — Moen, Robison & Fields (1994), Journal of Gerontology. This is an older but very useful life-course study examining women’s paid employment alongside informal caregiving. It found caregiving remained common regardless of whether women were employed.
• Job satisfaction approaching retirement — Henning et al. (2024), European Journal of Ageing. This one is particularly interesting because it complicates rather than conveniently proves your story. Using longitudinal German data from 2,595 people, the researchers found job satisfaction declined slightly as retirement approached, especially in the final years—but the average decline was very small, and there was substantial individual variation. The paper also notes previous evidence that older workers are often more satisfied at work than younger workers.