Many people accept work as the main goal of planning for adulthood. They set alarms, schedule meetings, and learn to sound interested in tasks that will quietly put them off for the next week. Others participate in this arrangement with much less conviction. They show up, do what’s necessary, and spend the remaining hours mentally decorating the beach house they’ll never get.
These people are good at their job, which is a disaster. Competence is a trap. They answer emails with due diligence, attend meetings without falling asleep, and have learned what facial expression communicates “I’m listening and I care about the quarterly forecast.” Meanwhile, their inner monologue is just one long, uninterrupted cry.
A retirement appeal comes from a period that does not require a status review. There are no performance updates. There are no emergency requests just because someone else failed to plan. Just days that happen like house cats: slowly, for no reason, they don’t answer to anyone.
These four stars will be successful for a second time. Their Out of Office is permanent.
Taurus
Spiritually, you closed in 2019, Taurus, or your body keeps coming up because the debts are real and despite the motivation. You will work harder on things you can touch, taste, or sit on. You won’t do anything about “delegation” or “teamwork” or whatever LinkedIn phrase your boss just discussed with his life coach.
Your retirement is a detailed recovery plan. The sofa has been selected. You know which bakery to judge by using subpar butter. Six hours a week are allotted to perfecting sourdough because kneading dough is meditative and you’ll be better at it than Carol, and Carol will know about it every single Thursday at book club.
The problem is that he’s annoyingly talented, so people keep assigning him things. One more “let’s turn” and you commit to a full cottage dream. The second retirement hits, you get chickens. You name yourself with expenses you no longer have. He develops the perfect personality in precious tomatoes. And you’ll never again pretend that “urgent” means anything.
Libra
The task itself is easy for you, Libra. The emotional labor surrounding the job is what kills you. The real job is to control everyone else’s feelings about the job, including your own feelings about managing their feelings, which has created a feedback loop that you can escape by faking your death and moving to Portugal.
He spent years smoothing out tensions in meetings that didn’t need to happen. He laughed at Dale’s jokes about his football team. He wrote 47 emails all saying “this is the third time I’ve told you this” in a language that won’t make it out. Business diplomacy lies on the 12-point Calibri.
Retirement means you can stop making friends as a career skill. No more Slack threads where everyone is weird and you have to smooth it over. There’s no more pretending you don’t have a strong opinion about living room style when you have a dissertation-length idea about living room style. You can just be there. In silence. In a place with good lighting and no one asking if you “have a second” for something that will take 45 minutes and ruin your afternoon.
The retirement dream is a life where the biggest conflict is whether the farmer’s market is worth the push. Where you can rearrange the furniture for three hours because the energy feels wrong and no one asks what you are doing. When collaboration is a word you only see on LinkedIn posts from former colleagues who have died inside.
Leo
Hard work has never been a problem, Leo. You can work. You have worked. You will probably work again. The problem is the current setup, where you do work to get someone else’s low opinion while taking on debt and you get a cost of living adjustment that doesn’t even cover living expenses.
You are built for the center stage. You have a presence. You have thoughts. You’ve spent 30 years developing this personality and it’s not like you can develop a process that no one really follows. To be mediocre is to neglect your life’s work. You have ideas about napkin presentations that people should write down.
Retirement appeals because it removes the embarrassing part of having to explain your existence through productivity metrics. You don’t want to stop doing things. You want to stop doing things that don’t suit you. You want your time back so you can spend it on projects that have some dignity attached to them. Maybe you’ll learn pottery. Maybe you will take up painting. Maybe you’ll finally make fresh pasta like you saw in that Nancy Meyers movie and feel like you’re important.
The goal is simple: stop working for people who think “thank you for the flexibility” instead of the promotion. Stop pretending that the weekly all-hands meeting is anything other than an hour of your life that you’ll never get back. Start living as a person of inherent value and no need to show off with Zoom.
Pisces
Pisces, you have been using smoke since about the second week of labor. The only thing preventing the full collapse of the supply closet is everyone’s delusional thinking that they are “doing it right.” You are not doing well at all. You have been separating yourself from the boarding papers.
You absorb the frequency of emotions like a sponge made of nerves. Every Slack ping feels like a personal attack. All meetings may be by email. All emails will be empty. He was built to look at the water and have a big, unstructured feeling about the universe. You weren’t built for fluorescent lights and something called “synchronization.”
Retirement means recovery of the nervous system. It means waking up without an alarm and spending three hours checking how you feel, which may be bad, and that’s okay because you have time to sleep on it. The “warning” and “engagement” functionality can stop at the end. Your natural state is “drift” and “unclear” and when you retire that is called “presence.”
The plan is to clean up, go to a place with good water, pick up a cat that seems depressed, and never again attend a meeting where someone says “let’s park that place.” You don’t avoid work. You’re avoiding the part where you pretend the modern workplace makes sense when it clearly, clearly isn’t, and you’re tired of being the only one who seems to notice.
