Retirement Doesn't Start With Money. It Starts With Imagination.

I was listening to a sermon online the other day while working (this is music for most people, I do podcast and sermons), to one of my favourite preachers, because the title of the message caught my attention. About halfway through the message he got to the verse where God looks at the whole earth and declares it corrupt – violent, and every imagination of the human heart evil, continually. Heavy stuff. But it was the aside that stopped me, not the verse itself, which honestly, I have heard many times.

He talked briefly about that word, “imagination” and noted that he will come back and unpack it. Imagination. Not fantasy, not daydream. This was not his main message so he just spoke a few sentences on it and moved on. “We create societies and cultures out of what we imagine things should and could be like,” he said, “and then we go to work trying to make them according to what we imagine.”

This was the part that jumped at me and got me thinking.

Because it is not just true of civilisations. It is true of life. Before I renovated this flat, I had to imagine what I wanted the rooms to look like. Before I put money into an index fund, I had to imagine (usually via an Excel worksheet) the portfolio it can potentially grow into. Before any decision that shapes a life, there is (always?) an earlier, quieter decision – what did I let myself picture as possible.

Retirement runs on exactly this mechanism, and most of us probably never notice it happening.

Ask anyone approaching retirement whether they have "planned" for it, and most will say yes, in the sense that they have a number in a spreadsheet, or a rough date circled somewhere. But ask them to actually describe a Tuesday in that life – what time they wake up, what they do with their body that day, who they see, what worries them, what they are proud of – and the picture usually goes blurry fast. We have a financial projection. We rarely have an imagination.

This is not merely semantics. A projection is something you calculate. An imagination is something you build toward. You cannot aim at a blur.

I think this is true across every pillar this newsletter keeps circling back to. Health – do I actually have a picture of what my body is doing at seventy, or have I just assumed "hopefully fine" and left it there. Fitness – is there an image in my head of the kind of movement I want to still be capable of, or is exercise just something I do because I am supposed to, with no destination attached. Finances – do I know what a comfortable month actually looks like in specific terms, or only that "enough" is a bigger number than I currently have. Lifestyle – have I pictured who I am spending my days with once work stops supplying the people, or am I trusting that will sort itself out.

None of those are financial questions, well – not really. They are imagination questions first. The financial planning, the exercise routine, the health checkups – those are just the construction crew. They cannot start pouring concrete until someone has drawn the plan.

Imagining well is not the same as imagining easily. It takes real effort to picture a specific, textured version of a life you have not lived yet, especially one twenty or thirty years out. It is far easier to let the picture stay vague, because vague pictures cannot disappoint you and cannot be criticised. A blurry retirement never fails to meet expectations. On the other hand, it also never gets built.

I do not think I am short on imagination, if I am honest with myself. I have pictures – health, fitness, money, the shape of my days – for most of these areas already. What I am short on, more often than I would like to admit, is the second half of that sermon line. We imagine, and then we go to work trying to make it happen. The imagining part I have mostly done. The going to work part is where the gap actually lives, and it does not close itself just because the picture exists.

That gap is quiet, which is what makes it dangerous. Nobody announces the day they stopped building toward the picture and started merely holding it. There is no single decision that closes the door on a retirement you once imagined clearly. It happens in small increments – the workout skipped because today was not the day, the saving deferred because this month was tight, the difficult conversation about where you will actually live postponed because there is, technically, still time. It is always the little foxes that spoil the vine. Each one is defensible alone. Stacked over years, they are how a clear picture quietly becomes a wish.

That is the uncomfortable honesty in this. It is not that most of us have never imagined our retirement. It is that we let the imagining stand in for the doing, and quietly hope the two are the same thing. They are not. One is a sketch. The other is decades of small, unglamorous choices that either match the sketch or slowly drift away from it.

So the question that sermon left me with is not really about civilisations or corruption at all, even though that is where it came from. It is smaller and more personal than that. If the world we build reflects the world we first imagined, what exactly am I imagining for the next chapter of mine – and has any of today's effort actually gone toward building it, or just toward picturing it again.

If the life you eventually build always traces back to what you first let yourself imagine, what version of your retirement have you actually pictured in detail – and what has today's effort done to bring it closer, rather than just picture it again?

👉 Hit reply and share your thoughts – I’d love to hear what’s resonating with you.

☕ If today's sermon got you thinking about the gap between imagining your retirement and building it, consider buying L-Plate Retiree a coffee on Ko-fi and keep these reflections coming.