Last week, Marissa got up at 4:30am and drove two and a half hours away to support her brother Martin. He and his wife were adopting Terrence, their son, and the family wanted to be there in court when it happened.

What she didn't know was how long it would take.

She ended up sitting in that courtroom for almost three hours.

For most of you, three hours in a courthouse probably sounds like cruel and unusual punishment. For Marissa, who proudly says we have not spent a lot of time in court, it was something else.

She watched half a dozen divorces.
She watched people change their names.
She watched a lawsuit that has been dragging on for seven years.

And in between cases, while the room reset for the next thing, she heard a conversation she couldn't stop thinking about.

A small huddle of lawyers was standing off to the side. One was in his 40s. One was in his 50s. And one was in his 80s.

They were talking about retirement plans.

The 80 year old looked at the others and said, "My retirement plan is death."

When Marissa told me that on our walk after dinner, I actually stopped in the road.

Because I think that's my retirement plan too. I had just never thought to word it that way.

My dad's hands

I grew up on a farm in Cookeville, Tennessee.

My dad's passion was farming, and it still is. He'll be on a tractor until he physically can't climb up on one anymore. When it comes to the farm, his retirement plan has always been death, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

But farming a small family operation didn't pay the bills when I was a kid. So he took a job at the post office. So did my mom.

My dad spent 30 years there. My mom about 25.

Same actions every day. Grab the mail, put it in the box. Grab the mail, put it in the box. Thousands of times a week, every week, for decades. Both of them eventually had to have surgery on their hands. The repetitive motion broke them.

Here's the part I keep chewing on. My dad already had the work he'd never want to retire from. It was the farm. He just couldn't afford to spend his life on it, so he spent 30 years on a job that was the exact opposite. He did the thing he didn't love so my siblings and I would have a shot at the thing we did. That's what a man does, he used to tell me. I have nothing but respect for it.

But his deal and mine are not the same deal. His generation could work one job, in one place, for 30 years, and trust that retirement was the reward waiting at the end. Show up enough days, the company takes care of you, you go home and rest.

That deal is mostly gone now.

The bet nobody calls risky

We have a friend who did everything right. Aced high school, aced college, med school, became a doctor delivering babies. It was the only thing she'd ever wanted to do. She'd found her retirement-plan-is-death work before she even turned 30.

Then she found out she struggled to have children of her own, and the one thing she'd never wanted to retire from became the one place that broke her heart.

That terrifies me more than any RV breakdown ever has. She did everything right, and by every metric we usually use she should be set, and she's miserable.

Here's the hot take I keep landing on, even though I know it sounds wrong:

Working one job for 30 years isn't the safe path anymore. It might be the riskiest bet you can make.

You're betting on your health holding up. On the industry not changing. On AI not eating your role. On your identity surviving the day you finally retire.

That's a lot of bets stacked on top of each other. And almost nobody calls it risky.

Marissa's different room

Marissa knows this from the inside.

She got great grades, got into nursing school, became a nurse. She was a nurse for 10 years. When somebody asked her what she did, she said, "I'm a nurse." That was the answer. That was her.

When we shifted to RV life, she kept picking up shifts at the local hospital between trips. It kept her tethered to who she'd always been. But about three years in, we decided to drive to Alaska. The route meant being gone more than six months, and she couldn't keep her shifts.

That was the real moment. Not selling the house. Not buying the rig. The day she had to stop saying "I'm a nurse" was the hardest day of our RV life.

I told her something it took both of us a long time to believe. Marissa, you're not just a nurse. You're someone who cares about people. You're someone who works well under pressure. You're someone who's good on her feet. Those things are who you are. The job was just the room you happened to use them in.

She still has her license. She could go back. But today she pours those same things into our family, into people we meet on the road, into people on the internet wrestling with the same shift she wrestled with.

Same Marissa. Different room.

The work she'd never want to retire from didn't disappear when she stopped being a nurse. She just had to quit confusing it with the title.

What I'm sitting with

I'm not telling you to quit your job. I'm not telling you to go buy an RV. I'm 46 years old and I'm still figuring this out for myself. We're saving 30+ percent of our income most years and putting it into things that pay us back later, because I'm not naive about needing money.

But I'd rather watch a sunset right now than wait until I'm 65 to earn the right to watch one.

If somebody at the next family gathering asks you what you do, you've got your answer ready. Real estate agent. Teacher. Nurse. Postal worker. Lawyer.

But what if they asked who you are?

What lights you up? What injustice in the world actually makes you furious? What would you still want to be doing at 80 years old, standing in a courthouse hallway, talking shop with people half your age?

Back at the courthouse

Terrence's adoption did go through, by the way. He's officially Martin and Bianca's son now, even though he was already their son in every way that mattered. The papers just made it official.

And somewhere on the way out of that building, I picture that 80 year old lawyer heading back to his desk for the next case. Still in it. Still passionate. Still doing the work he'd choose if you gave him every other option in the world.

His retirement plan is death.

I'm starting to think mine might be too.

Until next time, see you down the road!
- Nathan

P.S. If that "who are you" question stirred something up, hit reply and tell me what came up. The replies are honestly the best part of my week, and a lot of them end up shaping where I take this newsletter next.