Retirement is a Myth, and it can be Boring!

I know most people will disagree with what I’m about to say.

I never thought I would write this 5 years ago, I would have straight away rejected this idea. I always tried to prove that “Retirement must be THE goal in life”, above every other goal.

But then, I experienced it…

It was mid of 2019.

I started shutting down every business unit where my time was directly involved

Online courses
Live sessions
Consulting projects
Agency services
Creating and publishing YouTube videos
Newsletters and blog content production.

Even though they were profitable, they were very time-demanding (my personal time).

I only kept those businesses that my team would manage themselves.

Interestingly, this was over 60-70% of my business that was generating passive income without my direct time involvement (Hint: affiliate marketing & long term advertising contracts). This segment of my business funded the piece of farmland I bought in 2018 to retire.

I started to live my dream life. It was amazing, almost like living a second life in a video game.

I was ecstatic!

So I threw myself into my new life at the farm.

I’d pack my lunch and head to the farm, working alongside the laborers. It was a different kind of fulfillment, a slower pace.

I feel connection with the concept of permaculture farm that is different from organic farming. Organic means – no pesticides or chemicals while in permaculture we do not change the existing farm eco setup. No disturbance to soil, land structure, birds and animals around. It’t not about maximising organic product but to maximise harmony around the farm. We made friendship with the insects, allowed birds to eat a portion of grains and grew multiple crops together in a single field.

Beautiful concept, isn’t it?

But it wasn’t easy.

Preparing land for organic produce is difficult. Especially the land previously treated with fertilizers. The soil demands more of it.

The knowledge from books and YouTube didn’t work either, because every situation on the farm was different. I needed to experiment.

I have always loved doing experiments in my businesses, so I enjoyed doing experiments here too.

For example: When we first grew potatoes, we could only get the yield equal to the amount of seeds we sowed. 10-15 kgs potatoes for 10-15 kgs of seeds that we sowed.

The following year, I did some experiments and grew the potato yield by 1.7x.

So was the challenge of growing big sized onions using organic ways.

Over time, I did many such experiments and applied different strategies to understand and figure out what works.

It was fun!

But experiments in business and farming didn’t work the same way.

In business, whatever decisions I made, I could see the results within 2-3 months. I had room to improvise and try again.

In farming, any mistakes I made could only be fixed in the next season, that is after one complete year.

I even learned beekeeping (multiplied from 5 boxes to 15 boxes along with 20kg honey), raising chickens (witnessing their entire lifecycle from hatching to death), and raising newborn puppies to fully grown dogs for the first time.

I even had a bull for plowing.

This was the exact dream-life that I always wanted. No worries about money and living peacefully in nature.

I was traveling when there was nothing to do at the farm.

I traveled solo within India and outside, just to chill or meet friends. I traveled 2-3 times per year with my family.

And also traveled with friends – boys only trip.

I traveled whenever I wanted and wherever I wanted. There are multiple crazy stories about my instant travel plans that I am keeping for another post.

Back to the farming life.

In 3-4 years time, I set up and automated everything at the farm. The workers learnt how to run the organic farm without my direction.

And shit!! I had nothing to do.

I even got bored of traveling.

During this time, I watched & read our ancient Indian content and got deeper in Bhagwad Geeta. There, I learnt about the unique perspective on life, karma and after-life that our heroes and ideals had.

They viewed their work as worship, as a form of duty. Their work was their karma. They did not postpone leisure to distant future.

I watched TV show Vikings, I noticed a similar theme. They follow nordic Gods and their vision of the afterlife resembled the life they were living. They wished to enjoy the fighting in Valhalla, what they were doing here.

I began questioning the kind of boring retirement life that I was living.

I wondered:

Where did the concept of retirement come from?
How the world is capitalising the retirement theme.

The idea came from the west & pushed into the Indian system through government jobs. Otherwise who was worried about retirement when there was a big family to take care of you in the old age.

We live in nuclear family structures now. So we are afraid of survival after 60 years. Banks are selling us low yield retirement products.

For some people like me, retirement means living a grand life, world tours, endless days of chilling and doing nothing.

So naturally people like me think, “Why wait until 60? Why not retire at 40?”

I really loved this idea, Financial Freedom and Retire Early (FIRE), and I worked really hard through my 30s to achieve this goal.

And I achieved it by the time I was 38.

But I had no clue that I would start feeling lost and empty after reaching this stage.

I started asking myself a lot of questions about retirement:

How was I passing time?
How could I use it more productively?

I tried to revive the CashOverflow blog back to its glory but I couldn’t think of anything that is worth writing or teaching. Whatever I knew about personal finance I had already written.

What can a person teach you who is not doing anything throughout the day. I did not find the motivation to work on CashOverflow with the same enthusiasm that I worked with earlier.

I know personal finance is a profitable niche. But money wasn’t the main motivation to revive the blog. I love to make money but I needed something bigger to get motivated to work hard again.

The question was finding meaning to life, my purpose and karma.

I come from a business family. Our community is known as – Baniya, people who are doing business from ages. My karma is to grow a business – with sincerity.

Business skills are received as a gift to our Baniya community. So, I must use this gift – aim to solving tough problems – build useful products – serve people with meaningful services – and scale my business to 100x.

And I would learn how to build scalable businesses that won’t depend on my time, eventually.

Pardeep’s meetups with other people at networking events

I began seeing it as a challenge.

A game. The results—winning or losing, didn’t matter anymore.

The point was to get excited to wake up everyday and have fun along the way of growing business.

This was the moment I understood what my life was meant to be about—creating businesses, solving problems, and fulfilling my purpose.

A life without purpose wasn’t for me, so I returned to work.

I spent my time and money trying out totally new businesses that I never did —eCommerce, export-import, D2C, anything that would excite me, but that did not work out.

I also dealt with a few service businesses, which left me thinking about the challenge of scaling a service business. I asked myself, “Is it even possible to scale a service business to $100M without becoming the bottleneck of the operations?”

Gradually, this idea started to play like music in my head, something I wanted to solve. And at one point, it pulled me in.

I wanted to enjoy the process of building something again, the work itself.

Retirement, as we think, is a myth! We assume that retiring from work will make us feel powerful and happy.

But that is not the truth.

You may feel absolutely lost and empty.

I have seen people who retire often get into bad company, drugs and other sorts of addictions. They lose their way and make bad decisions because they don’t have a purpose driving them.
Sushil Kumar, who won 5 Crores from KBC, is one of several such examples.

Thankfully, I did not go down that path.

I worked hard, retired, got bored, found my purpose and came back to enjoy work again.

I realized that financial independence is a must, but it is not a substitute for work that’s fulfilling, something that gives us a sense of purpose.

The aim should NOT be FIRE – Financial Independence Retire Early

The aim should be Fi SLLE – Financial Independence & Start Living Life Early

Retirement without purpose makes no sense. In our Indian culture, there was never a concept of retirement.

Retirement is a made-up term by the West to capitalize on our fears and insecurities.

In ancient times, farmers farmed, warriors fought, blacksmith welded, and so on. Everyone engaged in the work they had expertise in. They treated their work as worship, and for a good reason.

You can still see shopkeepers worshiping their shopping counter and a rickshaw wala worshiping his rickshaw in the morning. It’s an inherent part of our culture.