We Need Something to Show Up For

Maybe what we truly need is not to work forever, but to participate in life forever.

During China’s National Day holiday, I went home and found myself thinking about something I had never really considered before:

What keeps a person connected to life as they grow older?

My father is in his eighties. As the world becomes increasingly digital, he has clearly begun to fall behind. 

Tasks that younger people take for granted can require patience, repeated learning, and sometimes help.

Watching him, I realized that the problem may not simply be that older people struggle with technology.

There may be something deeper:

What happens when a person gradually loses work, responsibilities, and social roles?

Does their connection to the outside world slowly disappear as well?

And for the first time, I started thinking seriously about my own future.

Why Do We Need Something to Wait for Us?

When we are young, we rarely realize how much structure work gives us.

Work gives us income, of course. But it also quietly organizes our lives.

• A time to start.
• A time to finish.
• Meetings to attend.
• Reports to submit.
• Projects with deadlines.
• A paycheck that arrives on a certain day.

Even weekends and holidays serve a purpose: they tell us when we are allowed to stop.

Work is not only a career.

It is also a structure for time.

It makes Monday different from Friday. It makes today different from tomorrow.

Then retirement arrives, and much of that structure disappears.

• No one tells you when to get up.
• No one is waiting for your report.
• There is no project deadline.
• Nothing has to be finished today.

If you have enough money to live comfortably, retirement may seem like the ultimate form of freedom.

But I have started to wonder:

Is having nothing you have to do really the end of freedom—or the beginning of a different kind of emptiness?

Thought About My ACCA Exams

I remember studying for my ACCA exams.

Without an exam date, I could have postponed studying indefinitely.

I would study a little today, get busy tomorrow, rest when I was tired, and tell myself I would catch up later.

There was no real endpoint.

But once I registered for an exam, everything changed.

Suddenly, there was a date.

I began counting backward.

• How many months were left?
• How many chapters did I need to finish?
• What did I need to accomplish this week?

As the exam approached, the pressure increased. But so did my focus.

Then the exam was over, and there was an equally obvious sense of relief.

Looking back, I realize that the exam did more than test what I had learned.

It gave my time a rhythm.

Preparation. Pressure. Examination. Relief.

Then another cycle could begin.

It was almost like an invisible clock giving time a sense of measurement.

Have We Overestimated Self-Discipline?

We often tell ourselves:

• I need to be more disciplined.
• I need to write every week.
• I need to exercise every day.
• I need to keep learning.

But when everything depends entirely on our own willpower, these things are surprisingly easy to postpone.

If I tell myself:

“I will write two articles every week.”

I can skip today.

Then tomorrow.

Then next week.

But if a writing group tells me:

“Two articles are due by Friday,”

the situation changes immediately.

Not because I suddenly became more disciplined.

But because:

I handed part of my discipline over to an external system.

This has changed the way I think about self-discipline.

Real self-discipline may not mean becoming so strong that you never need outside pressure.

It may mean recognizing your own weaknesses and deliberately creating an environment that helps you overcome them.

Mature self-discipline is not about removing every constraint. It is about choosing the right constraints.

【The more self-disciplined you are, the more free you will be】

Why the Stock Market Feels Like a Lifelong Participation System

This is one reason I have come to see investing as something that can remain meaningful throughout life.

Not because the stock market always makes you money.

Quite the opposite.

The market constantly reminds you that your thinking is being tested by reality.

• The market opens.
• How did yesterday's judgment hold up?
• What happened to the company you studied?
• Why did the market react this way?
• Where might your thinking have been wrong?
• Then the market closes.
• You review.

You learn.

You begin again the next day.

In that sense, the market feels like an exam that never truly ends.

And it has a surprisingly clear rhythm:

Participate on weekdays. Rest on weekends. Pause on holidays.

As long as you remain engaged, it can accompany you for decades.

You don't have to retire from participation.

You simply change the way you participate.

【A Day Trader's Resonance: From the 50 Crashes of an 88-Year-Old Master, I Understood Investment and Life】

A Modeling Team Works the Same Way

I once thought about a modeling team I had seen.

There may be younger people and people in their sixties or seventies practicing together.

• They practice walking.
• They practice posture.
• They practice formations.

Why?

Because there is a performance coming.

That performance becomes an external point in time.

And suddenly, today's practice has meaning.

Even repeating the same movement ten times makes sense because everyone knows:

Someone is waiting for you to show up on stage.

The stock market, an exam, a job, a writing group, a modeling team—they seem completely unrelated.

But underneath, they share something important:

They provide an external structure that gives people a reason to keep showing up.

I Also Thought About a Retired Relative

After retirement, one of my relatives was asked by his former workplace to help collect membership dues.

At the time, I found it slightly amusing.

Why would someone take such a small task so seriously after retirement?

But he kept careful records.

• He had a notebook.
• He tracked every payment.
• He calculated the numbers and reported them properly.

Looking back, I see it differently.

Maybe the important thing was never the money.

It was that someone still needed him.

Someone had given him a responsibility.

He had something to take care of.

• There was a deadline.
• There was a report.

And he still belonged to a system.

The task was small.

But it gave him a reason to remain connected to the world around him.

Maybe What We Really Fear Is Not Growing Old, but Becoming Disconnected

I used to think the most frightening part of aging was physical decline.

Now I wonder if there is another kind of aging that is much less visible:

Gradually losing our connection to the outside world.

• No work.
• No responsibilities.
• No one waiting.
• No deadlines.
• No feedback.
• No place you have to be.

Life becomes eating, walking, watching television, sleeping—and repeating the same routine tomorrow.

Someone may be only fifty and already be living a kind of retired life.

And the opposite can also be true.

An eighty-year-old may have something to do every week, a responsibility every month, people waiting for them, and an interest that keeps them learning.

Their body may be aging.

But their life is still moving forward.

So perhaps:

Getting older and becoming old are not exactly the same thing.

Young People Can Lose Their Sense of Participation Too

This made me think about something even bigger.

We often assume that the emptiness of retirement is an old person's problem.

But many young people may be losing their sense of participation much earlier.

They spend hours consuming information.

• Watching videos.
• Scrolling.
• Liking.
• Commenting.
• Following other people's lives.

They may be incredibly busy all day.

Yet at night, they may still wonder:

What did I actually create today?

• There is no work waiting for them.
• No long-term project.
• No meaningful result someone depends on.
• No external world that truly requires their participation.

In that sense, a young person who spends all day consuming the world can be surprisingly similar to a retired person who has lost all structure.

The difference is age.

The underlying problem may be the same:

One is consuming life rather than participating in it.

Maybe We Don't Actually Need to Escape All Constraints

When we are young, we often think freedom means that nobody gets to tell us what to do.

As we grow older, we tell ourselves that we need to become more self-disciplined.

But perhaps there is a third element we underestimate:

external constraints.

• Freedom helps us choose our direction.
• Self-discipline helps us take action.
• External structure keeps us from postponing everything indefinitely.

And being needed gives the whole process meaning.

So perhaps the ideal life is not one in which we eliminate every constraint.

It is one in which:

We deliberately choose the constraints that are worth having.

• A job worth committing to.
• A subject worth learning.
• A writing group worth showing up for.
• A team worth practicing with.
• An investment system worth studying.
• A community that values our contribution.

Even something as simple as a place we go every week.

These things may look like obligations.

But they may also be the framework that holds our lives together.

We May Not Need to Work Forever. We May Need to Participate Forever.

I am beginning to think that we need to rethink the word retirement.

Retirement can mean leaving a job.

But why should it mean leaving participation?

A person can stop working and still learn, create, invest, write, exercise, travel, teach, volunteer, build communities, or explore something completely new.

They can slow down.

But slowing down is not the same as stopping.

【Retirement Is a Transition, Not an Exit From Life】

Perhaps the more important questions are:

• What is still waiting for me?
• Who still needs me?
• What is there left for me to learn?
• What is worth doing well?

If an eighty-year-old can still say,

“I need to finish this by Friday,”

then perhaps, despite their age,

they are still fully in the flow of time.

Maybe one form of healthy aging is not simply extending the years of our bodies.

Maybe it is extending the years in which we remain connected to the world.

• Our bodies will age.
• Our pace will slow.
• Our careers will end.

But participation can continue.

Throughout life, we may need some kind of external structure:

Someone waiting for us.
Something waiting to be completed.
A deadline that keeps us moving.
A result that gives us feedback.

And somewhere between freedom, self-discipline, and external structure, we can find our own rhythm.

Because perhaps what we truly need is not a life without constraints.

It is:

the freedom to choose a life worth being constrained by.

And perhaps that is one of the most meaningful forms of lifelong participation.