I see a lot of rhetoric from various MGTOW about how they're going to retire at 40 or otherwise retire early. This is a fine goal, but I couldn't imagine being retired for long without getting bored and ultimately stumbling into a new activity/hobby which -incidentally- generates an income. In a sense, my life is at least partially my labor and my labor is a part of my identity. I say this in spite of an awareness of disposability concerns surrounding male labor. If it were the case that I was a manual-laborer, clerk, etc. I may come to associate my work with 'junk experiences' and develop a strong desire for escape from the monotony through retirement. The main distinction is that my work involves a low quantity of disposable 'junk' experiences relative to the 'quality' experiences that overlap with my interests/actualization goals.

My feeling is that an excessive desire for retirement is symptomatic of an unhealthy relationship between the individual and his labor. If the worker cherished his craft as an expression of his identity or if he was able to align his interests/actualization goals with something that incidentally earns an income, he would not likely yearn for retirement.

For me, the ideal scenario is that a man not have his 'craft' co-opted by social or biological imperatives such that he not develop an inauthentic or 'junk' labor identity that works against his sense of fulfilment/actualization. In the general case, this means ignoring maladaptive (potentially lucrative) arrangements that work against this ideal identity and seeking growth opportunities irrespective of other factors like compensation.

Once this ideal identity has been realized, a MGTOW may do well to seek out contract work and parlay this experience into entrepreneurship; alternatively, he may choose to broker his skills at a premium over a limited number of contracts every year and enjoy ample free time to further pursue his interests. When you arrive at this ideal professional form, retirement becomes less relevant as you can earn more than enough to live comfortably off of by reproducing and adapting prior work over a quasi-stressful few months per year (doing the kind of stuff you would pursue on your own without compensation anyway). There is also a tendency to spend excessively on novel experiences and toys as opposed to accumulating tons of money in a savings/retirement account. Anxiety over scarcity evaporates and life becomes more about the experience itself rather than the number value you can assign to your various accounts.

What does the rest of r/MGTOW think of this idea of a 'healthy/authentic' labor identity? What about this idea of a definite retirement vs working a limited number of contracts over the course of one's life?