Apolo­gies to Dirty Harry for butcher­ing the quote for the title. But it wouldn’t make sense otherwise.

Long story short: my part­ner and I sold our house, licensed our busi­ness to some­one else, and moved to Poland. The cost of liv­ing is low here and we don’t really have to work. The lifestyle is amaz­ing and we love it.

There’s a dif­fi­culty in using the word “retired”. I tend to use “semi-retired” but that term has many of the same prob­lems. Basi­cally, a 34 year old say­ing they are retired is going to cause one of a num­ber of responses in most peo­ple. Some think we’re lazy or have no ambi­tion. Oth­ers are sus­pi­cious and think it’s some kind of (prob­a­bly crim­i­nal) rort of the sys­tem that requires every­one to work for the man doing a job they hate from 8am to 6pm, until the day they drop dead of exhaus­tion. Some are sure we’ll squan­der all our sav­ings and/or get sick of liv­ing in these here for­eign parts and come back to Aus­tralia, tails between our col­lec­tive legs.

A few peo­ple get it. At least one cou­ple we know are in the process of fol­low­ing suit.

A hell of a lot of peo­ple say “You’re so lucky to be able to do that”. That’s the one that gets me.

Let me explain why. Luck has noth­ing to do with it. Luck rarely has any­thing to do with any­thing. If you win the lot­tery you are lucky, but you did go out and invest in a ticket which is prob­a­bly more than what the per­son com­plain­ing that you’re lucky and they’re not did. If you find $50 on the ground you’re lucky, but you also had your eyes open and were pay­ing atten­tion to your sur­round­ings. What enabled us to retire early enough to still enjoy our lives was a) work­ing hard, b) work­ing smart, and c) not want­ing what every­one else seems to want from life, or at least think they have to want.

Let’s start with the first one, work­ing hard. 34 might be young to retire but I’m not a spring chicken by any means. I slogged my arse off for four years at uni, then seven years work­ing ridicu­lously hard for some­one else, then five years build­ing our own busi­ness.  I’m not say­ing we didn’t have fun along the way — but it def­i­nitely was very hard work.

Sec­ondly, work­ing smart. Work­ing hard is what peo­ple used to do in the coal mines. Work­ing hard on some­thing that will not fur­ther your goals, what­ever they may be, is point­less. My dad says that lazi­ness is what dri­ves bril­liance in pro­gram­mers, but I don’t think it’s lim­ited just to pro­gram­mers. Peo­ple who can’t abide doing some­thing the bor­ing, time-consuming way will find a bet­ter, smarter way to do that thing and spend their time on some­thing else.  Or they’ll out­source it. Tim Fer­riss’ book The 4-Hour Work­week cov­ers a lot of this.

The last bit is the trick­i­est one to explain. Hon­est to the fly­ing spaghetti mon­ster, I don’t actu­ally want a four bed­room two bath­room house in the sub­urbs, an SUV in the garage and 2.5 chil­dren. I’m sure some peo­ple want that, but I’m forced to wan­der if they actu­ally really do want that or if it was just lim­ited imag­i­na­tion that caused them to go along with the flow. I want to live some­where with life — which the sub­urbs def­i­nitely do not have — and I want to lis­ten to music and learn every sin­gle thing about it and read every book ever writ­ten and write long rants like this one and spend all my money on geek toys, records and hand­made jew­ellery from Etsy. I want to drink beer and do tequila shots with my friends and even when I’m 80 I want to still fol­low my favourite bands around the sum­mer fes­ti­vals. I want to travel to almost every coun­try I can think of.

I feel like this is all now pos­si­ble. All it took was a lit­tle lat­eral thinking.

But def­i­nitely no luck.