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There's no category for "I believe that the notion of 'lifetime employment until age 65, upon which you get to enjoy the life you've saved up for if you still have the health for it' is outdated, and choose to take my retirement in chunks of a year or two interspersed by periods of productive, lucrative work." One of the side effects of moving to a fluid labor market is that you can basically get a job whenever you want. Moreover, you're forced to, and you're forced to stay up-to-date with market conditions so you can get a new job at any time. If you have to make this bargain anyway, who's to say that those jobs need to be contiguous? Why not take a job paying $90K for two years, live as if you had a job paying $60K, and then take a year off to travel? My wife and I both did variants of this (her: bond trader => Peace Corps, me: financial software => startup => Google => startup), but we took our downtime in socially sanctioned, labeled ways and so don't fit into the "retired" statistics. But what about, say, the friend of mine who interned on a salmon fishing boat, took a job in economic consulting, did a multi-year sex tour of Southeast Asia, and now runs a hedge fund there? Or the friend of mine who runs a profitable SaaS remotely and is now doing Hacker Paradise, traveling the world? Where do they fit into the employment statistics? "Retired" is a lot better descriptor than "disabled" or "staying at home". The numbers in the BLS report were on the order of 1-2%; I could easily believe that 1-2% of 20-24 year olds are doing gap years, or have software businesses that generate passive income, or have worked for a year or two at a lucrative profession and now saved up enough to travel the world. |