A few days ago, I was sitting with my mom talking about life when she said to me, “You know that you can start taking full Social Security next January.” I looked at her with a blank stare and thought for a moment before saying, “Huh?”
My career choice and dismal attempts at financial planning coupled with failed personal relationships in my life, have left little in the form of retirement savings and then, after more unfortunate life-changing situations, what I did manage to accumulate has slowly trickled away. I am doing fine, and this is not a story of a life spent irresponsibly or unhappily. If it is about anything at all it is about the success, failure, perseverance, tenacity, ambition, stress, and success, while blindly, and with some naivety, of an artist following a dream. This is about someone who threw away a lot of materialism to live a meaningful life as an artist.
I have proven that it is certainly possible to make a living as an artist. There’s money to be made in commercial installations, art shows or teaching, but I am not going to lie, it takes a lot of work, most of it foreign to those who have an artist’s mind. An artist, to be commercially successful, needs to be a businessperson as well as a creative. To be a commercially successful artist they need to fill a lot of different shoes and most of them have nothing to do with art. Much of it has to do with spending an inordinate amount of time on the Internet, advertising, marketing, and promoting their business. All this combined is typically not well embraced by those who have that artist’s mind. I have been able to find my way through it all, but if I had my way, I would not do any of it.
As for being an artist, I have done well making a living strictly from my work over the last twenty years. As for being a businessperson, I have been adequate.
I don’t want to sound cliché about time passing too quickly, but I think that when someone is living a life that they love it is easy to just ignore the passage of time. I have not thought a lot about my age or even the concept of retirement or what I would do when the time comes. Retirement to me, in the past, has meant that you work until you are 65 when you are finally able to call your time your own. You buy a motorhome, spend your Summers at a cool place and Winters at a warm place with the one you love. Perhaps pursue a hobby that you haven’t had time for and hope that you haven’t sacrificed your health to your career. If you are lucky, you spend time bouncing grandbabies on your knee and growing old surrounded by family.
After all of the challenges I have experienced that ensured the typical retirement dream would not be practical, I decided to simplify my life and live doing what I want to do. I felt as if I had sacrificed my happiness to a system that I failed in and did not want to try again at that point in my life. Since then, I have tried to design a life that I could live until I die. With this attitude in hand, I have not thought much about the years passing. I have not thought of myself being at retirement age. I have tackled a few medical situations but have emerged healthy enough to keep going and none shook my ability, ambition, or my denial of the passing of time.
And so, after my mom reminded me of my age, and hers at the same time, I have been thinking about what my retirement will be like and I have concluded that not much will change. I will still be living my less than luxurious but comfortable lifestyle. I will still be the artist that I have been over the last twenty years. I will still do everything that I have been doing except worry less about how to pay the monthly bills. I can finally fire the businessperson I am forced to be and be an artist completely undistracted. When I really stop to think about it, I have been retired for the last twenty years.
