Retirement

Stuff. The world is full of it. The United States has 50,000 mini-storage facilities comprising 2.5 billion square feet of rental space. We pay money to store stuff we don’t need nor often see. I say enough is truly enough!

Introduction by Chip Conley: The beginning of my 2013 sojourn working with Airbnb was almost simultaneous to when a middle class Baby Boomer couple from Seattle, Debbie and Michael Campbell, chose to go out on the road for what has now been seven years of adventure.

What if the world is meant to take a Gap Year? Sounds better than forced retirement, right? First off, let’s acknowledge that many of us are working even harder from home, whether it’s due to the industry we’re in or the difficult fate our companies are facing.

The genesis of the Modern Elder Academy comes from my close friends Ben and Vanessa, who spent the holidays with us in my new Baja home three years ago. They stayed longer than the rest of us and then wrote to see if they could stay an extra week.

In the era of Coronavirus, this post may seem ill-timed, but I wrote it a couple months ago and I do deeply believe that travel is the secret to a long life. It also takes courage to travel. One of my favorite travel writers Paul Theroux agrees as he outlines in this BBC piece about his sojourn through Mexico.

“We all have an identifiable, though largely unconscious and unexamined, relationship with money that shapes our experience of life and our deepest feelings of ourselves and others. Whether you count your change in dollars, yen, rupees, or drachmas, money is one of the central, linchpin issues in all of our lives...

Our language defines our reality. As we enter a new decade, here are a few words or phrases that carry too much 20th century cultural baggage. It might be time to let them go!

My husband and I took a gap year at age 62, forty-four years after our respective parents forbade us from taking a timeout before starting university. The goal was to reinvent ourselves. We were determined to resist the tyranny of the three-stage life (learn, earn, retire). Our children were grown and launched. Why not, we thought?

Forget about retirement! Consider reinspirement. Based upon my past three years, mostly in Mexico, I heartily recommend an international destination as a new habitat for re-inspiration. It allows you to start fresh with a beginner’s mind, learn a new culture and a new language. Maybe even save some money. Here are my top ten spots for you to consider:

A friend in his mid-40s recently lost his Silicon Valley job. He felt like he was being put out to pasture like a lame horse, which immediately wounded his pride and put him into a confidence crisis. He’s not alone. More and more people are seeing their futures put out to past-ure. The question is: what to do?