Is it too soon to think about retirement?
I was born in 1987. Which means that somewhere out there, the 8X generation — anyone born in Vietnam in the 1980s — already has people sliding past forty, and the eldest of us, the ones born in 1980, are close enough to fifty to feel its breath on the back of their necks. As a child, the word “retirement” conjured a very specific old man in my head: gray hair, a woven basket on his arm at the morning market, a game of chess in the afternoon shade, the evening news murmuring in the background. And now, without quite noticing the years slip by, the same people who once hummed Backstreet Boys and Boyzone under their breath, who fed coins into four-button and six-button arcade machines, who wrote to each other in purple ink and typed out love notes on Nokia keypads — we are the ones sitting around now, asking each other, half-joking, half-not: how much money do you think it takes to finally stop? Time has a way of humbling a person so gently you almost don’t notice you’ve been humbled at all.
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