Mini-Retirements

Author CMK on June 4th, 2008

Tim Ferriss has posted an interview about the concept of Mini-Retirements. In case you haven’t read it, Ferriss authors the inspiring and wildly outside the box, “The 4 Hour Workweek.” He debunks the myth that success is measured by spending 40 hours or more anchored to a job and challenges the convential wisdom of what wealth is, moving from material possession to experience. While Ferriss is almost too smart for the rest of us, his ideas have a lot to offer.

One such idea is “mini-retirements”. He argues against the idea that we should work for 40 years with two weeks vactaion (if that) a year, and then take twenty years of retirement when we’re too old to enjoy it. He suggests taking mini-retirements along the way. Again, his approach come across oversimplified at times, but read the article and see what you can glean from it.

Personally, I think mini-retirements have a connection to the Jewish ideas of Sabbath and Jubilee. In the Hebrew text, God instructs his people to take every seventh year off, allowing the land to rest and the poor to eat from what grows naturally. After 7 Sabbath years, they would declare a year of Jubilee which was even more extensive, involving the return of all property to its original owners.

Regardless of how you do it, we were not built to work eight hours a day for fifty weeks a year. We need to build into our lives times of silence and retreat. We need to see the world before our eyesight fades and our feet hurt. Let’s work to develop new ideas of productivity and success which create a sustainable existence for ourselves and our planet.

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