A Retirement Question Hidden in Dumas

After reading The Count of Monte Cristo and beginning The Three Musketeers, I found myself thinking about a familiar retirement question: once we no longer need a paycheck, what do we do with our time? Dumas’s characters live in a very different world, yet that distance makes the question easier to see.

D’Artagnan and his companions are constantly occupied—with friendship, duty, danger, and ambition—without resembling modern salaried employees. The Count of Monte Cristo, once wealthy, does not devote himself to maximizing the next return. He travels, learns, pursues his plans, and helps the Morrel family. Wealth gives him command of his schedule more than it gives him a bigger shopping list. Their worlds are fictional and aristocratic, of course; their circumstances are not a template for a modern household budget.

What is the extra year for?

Today, stocks, bonds, rental property, and retirement accounts can replace some of the income once supplied by inherited land or annuities. Financial independence can let a person stop working for a paycheck without stopping useful work. Research, writing, volunteering, family care, and even the same profession can continue when the reason is interest rather than financial necessity. Continuing a beloved career is also a good use of that freedom.

We still need a number: property tax must be paid, and a family needs a way to handle illness or a long life. But after those needs are covered, the next dollar may buy less satisfaction than the first. It may also cost a year in which we could have traveled slowly, explored a question nobody pays us to study, or been present for someone we love.

Fiction cannot calculate a safe withdrawal rate. It can remind us why we are calculating one. The freedom that wealth brings is not the freedom to do nothing; it is the ability to choose what deserves our attention. As the account balance grows, that choice about time may become more valuable than another increase in the balance.